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Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

Chromium isn’t written by just 1 entity, Microsoft intel samsung have all made major contributions - and anyone can hard fork it if they want to. I know most others here disagree but we do need standardization in this modern web world and chromium is just that.

Even if we don’t like it, the reality is what it is. Firefox is dead (about the same market share as ‘samsung internet’ these days). It would be best if we worked to make these web standards (chromium) bend to our collective will (like brave or Microsoft) rather than chasing pipe dreams of a Firefox return.

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Firefox market share is dying because of this mentality that is killing it. Self-fuffiling prophecy.

The standardization is in the standard, not the implementation. You do not need everyone to use the same implementation in order to have standardization: that just allows the implementer to bend the standard to his will.

No. Firefox has been dying for, what, a decade now (losing market share since 2013)? The only people using Firefox are the people who care about Firefox as a product and a competitor, which is (in the grand scheme of things), almost nobody. Everybody else left, often with decent enough reason. Google recommended Chrome, Chrome was faster for a long time, Firefox stagnated and put ads and sponsorships everywhere, and wasn't better in almost any respect for a normal user than Chrome.

Almost everything everyone accuses Mozilla of and uses as their reasons for leaving is far worse in a Chrome ecosystem. It boggles my mind how people can complain about X and then jump to chrome where X is just as bad or worse.

Ah... no? Firefox, before Quantum, was slower than Chrome, had worse battery life than Chrome, and (on a Mac) was way louder than Chrome. And by the time they mostly fixed these problems, there was basically no reason to use Firefox other than it wasn't Chrome - which, other than to a developer, is not a selling point to the masses.

Many mobile users have a phone with an internet icon that opens in chrome. As mobile rises firefox share declines.

... and crashed all the time, which is how they lost me. I care, I tried.

They shot themselves in the foot every 6 months for 10 years.

FF is inferior product and seems to waste the last money on things completely unrelated projects. Sooner or later it's a dead product or they start using chromium/webkit and go for the Brave/Vivaldi model.

Nobody cares about privacy. People use Firefox as a porn browser.

I use firefox mainly because it feels less creepy than chrome and works great with uBlock Origin.

How many users does a browser need to break even? 4% of a billion is still 40 million

That depends on how the browser makes money.

No, Firefox didn’t die because a few of us devs stopped using it and standardized around chromium. They died because chrome has outperformed them on speed and efficiency for a decade+ (I still can’t run FF on my Mac without my fans whirring to life). Not to mention things completely outside their control like chromes marketing budget.

I’m not trying to place tons of judgement on Mozilla though - just saying we all need to face the reality rather than living in denialism.

Yes.

While I was the first to jump ship, when Chrome got released, I really tried to like Firefox in the last ten years, but in the end Mozilla failed on so many fronts, that they lost me to Brave.

> I still can’t run FF on my Mac without my fans whirring to life

I haven't seen this behavior on a Mac since Firefox Quantum was released, FWIW. It's what got me to switch back to Firefox in the first place. (Sidebery and a few other nice extensions have helped keep me there.)

I didn’t use Firefox pre-quantum so I’ve only seen this behavior post quantum. I last gave Firefox a try about a year ago and while the fans weren’t as bad the battery life/power consumption just wasn’t comparable to safari or chrome based browsers

It isn't comparable to Safari for sure, but with similar tabs open, for me, Firefox and Chrome have similar (if not better for Firefox) heat/fan behavior. Leaving a Gmail tab open is cursed in both, though.

I would use Safari on a Mac if there was a decent way to sync browser history, etc. to Firefox on Windows, but--welp.

Firefox market share is dying because for the longest time it was slower than Chromium. These days in my personal experience, it's mostly on-par but there's not a whole lot of compelling reasons to use it.

I get the privacy angle, but I'm searching Google anyway. They have all my email since 2004, my photos since 2007. My phone is Android. Switching to Firefox alone makes a minimal impact on my overall privacy footprint and causes some websites to load slower.

In ye olden days you could make the argument that it was more customizable than Chrome, but since the shift to WebExtensions that differentiator is gone. What's wild is that they didn't think of the top 10 power user features (like Tree Style Tabs) and attempt native support for them, they just kneecapped extensions without offering an alternative.

I'm sure that die hard fans of any failing company said the same thing. Further proof that Firefox fans mentality is more akin to a cult than actual technical merits.

Also Firefox's market share is dying because of its built-in privacy tools blocking trackers by increasing opt-in and the conflict of interest that the largest analytics firm (Google) is also the largest advertising networks/firm (Google) and relies on some of the most ubiquitous trackers (Google) and owns the biggest competing browser (Chrome).

I believe that Firefox's market share is greatly under-reported and Firefox's dying at least somewhat over-exaggerated. But then all the headlines get to people and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in that way too that all the people that feel some pressure to abandon a "dying" ship only because everyone keeps telling them to.

> its built-in privacy tools blocking trackers ... Firefox's market share is greatly under-reported

Firefox doesn't block Google Analytics or other standard analytics providers by default: https://www.jefftk.com/p/firefox-does-not-block-analytics-by...

>> its built-in privacy tools blocking trackers *by increasing opt-in*

Enhanced Tracking Protection is one-click to turn on, and suggested as an option on first startup on a fresh install (modulo A/B tests and whatnot) and is a setting that syncs across your devices if you do turn it on just once. Anecdotally, most people I know still using Firefox as daily driver also have Enhanced Tracking Protection on. Enhanced Tracking Protection does block Google Analytics and other standard analytics providers. (So much so that some ad companies have started to treat Firefox as an "ad blocker" by default and have increasingly harsh warnings that sites are not supported in Firefox due to "ad blocker". ETP blocks zero ads, just trackers.)

> we do need standardization in this modern web world and chromium is just that.

Yes, we need standardisation - that means we need multiple browser engines. You can't have a standardised web with a single browser engine. That's the whole point of standards.

Generally speaking, the W3C will only move a standard into the recommendation track if two competing implementations have been demonstrated.

If Chromium was the only browser engine around we wouldn't have web standards: we'd have Chromium features.

> and anyone can hard fork it if they want to

Chromium is so large that it cannot be meaningfully forked by anyone but the most well funded enterprises... Even M$ track chromium as upstream. There are no true chromium forks, they are all derivatives that track chromium - it's too much to maintain.

The problem is not merely a chromium monoculture and chromium specific historic implementation complexities, but the difficulty involved in building and maintaining a complete, modern and compliant web browser.

The same can be said about Firefox, or any larger project. Yet people still do it and some people generate their own Linux distros using LFS. Just because it isn't painstakingly easy to build like a Go app, doesn't mean that it isn't possible or isn't done. Searching Google will find a lot of people forking Chromium and adding their own changes.

LFS is not comparable, you can make your own opinionated choices and so it's feasible to have a small scale linux distro. The web is not like that, there's a massive non-optional spec you must implement for your browser to be minimally useful.. and even once you get there it takes a lot of people to merely maintain that level of completeness and compliance.

The state of web browsers is more comparable to derivative distros like Debian based or red hat based etc. They don't hard fork, they track upstream with a bunch of changes continually rebased on top.

> Searching Google will find a lot of people forking Chromium and adding their own changes.

Those aren't hard forks, they are derivatives, you wont see those people continually extending it with new features from W3, fixing zero days and improving implementations... they are the "debian based" in my analogy.

> The state of web browsers is more comparable to derivative distros like Debian based or red hat based etc. They don't hard fork, they track upstream with a bunch of changes continually rebased on top.

Isn't that Brave is doing here? There is NetSurf and others but the spec is complex because of standards committees, not because of Chromium.

Yes, brave is not a "hard fork" in the sense that it tracks upstream rather than diverged from it at some point in time.

The difference is that they can try and add and remove bits on each rebase, but ultimately it's beholden to the long term choices of the chromium project. Substantially diverging while tracking upstream incurs too much work on each rebase; Abandoning upstream to accommodate substantial divergence also incurs too much work due to taking on independent maintenance that increases the more the projects diverge... so as I said no one with substantial resources and a good reason would attempt to hard fork chromium.

Hard forking isn't a practical consideration unless the organization in question is willing to build a team that can rival Google's Blink/Chrome team, which is a ridiculously tall order. Microsoft is capable of doing that but I don't think they want to.

> which is a ridiculously tall order

And yet a ton of people here think there should be lots of people building lots of completely separate browser engines… that is certainly more difficult

To the point though - I think the threat of hard forking does something in and of itself to the chromium maintainers

The main issue with hard forking is keeping up with Google's unrelenting firehose of changes, many of which have serious security implications, which is going to become more and more difficult as the fork diverges. Maintaining an original web engine is certainly no simple task, but it's more reasonable than having to deal with the output of a much larger and more well-funded team.

WC3 creates the standards and it’s up to the browsers to implement them.

That ceased being true a long time ago. Ever since the formation of WHATWG in 2004 the browser vendors have been the ones creating the standards.

> WC3 creates the standards and it’s up to the browsers to implement them.

That was mostly true until they came out with XHTML2, then the browser vendors were, like, “LOL, no, that’s not happening, here's what we’re going to do”, and thus was born WHATWG and the HTML Living Standard.

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