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Comment by kwanbix | Hacker News Reader

I really love Firefox. I even organized events for them on my home country, so don't get me wrong, wouldn't it be best for the web/devs that they switched to chrome's engine? They can still implement whatever changes to privacy and their changes just like MS does, and devs will only have to target one engine. Or am I missing something? Please discuss it if you agree or disagree, do not downvote. Thanks.

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Monoculture in software rarely goes well. Right now Safari and Firefox exist to push back on Google completely controlling the fate of the web. You do not want Google to have the same unquestioned power Microsoft did in the IE6 era.

But that wouldn't be the same. Everybody can work on the engine. Worst case, if google wants to take over, the others can push their own version of the engine, compatible whenever they feel like, and different otherwise. IE was different because was totally closed and only MS could add features.

What do you mean if Google want to take over? They control Chromium now. And maintaining a fork is harder than you think. Even harder when the fork maintainers have different agendas. Even harder when the upstream maintainers are hostile.

Look at Manifest V3. Microsoft said the harm to extensions would be acceptable. Opera hedged and echoed Google's FUD about the removed APIs. Brave acknowledged the problem, recommended their integrated blocker, said they would support MV2 until Google removed the code, and declined to promise more. Vivaldi said similar.

Chromium is open source, so unless google closes it, in which case you can continue from the pre-close corde, you can maintain a fork without the parts that you don't like. I imagine it has to be much simpler than to maintain a full engine that is sadly almost irrelvant with 2.88%. Chrome (65%) + Edge (5.5%) + Opera (2.6%) have almost 75%. Again, I was a huge suporter of Firefox/Mozilla, but I think they didn't know how to fight chrome.

> wouldn't it be best for the web/devs that they switched to chrome's engine?

Why would that be best? I don't think the problem with Firefox is the engine (anymore), I think it's the design choices Mozilla continues to make.

If Firefox switched to the chromium engine, then why would I bother to continue to use it? Surely it would be better to switch to one of the "privacy-oriented" Chromium-based browsers that have been around for a long time now.

I would prefer it if Mozilla continued is great rust rewrite, and innovate the core technologies. Just adopting Chrome's crumbs will mean giving up control and voice in stearing the web technologies.

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