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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

So, would Mozilla folks write these posts if Opera were to announce switching to Gecko?

I would (saying that, I havent even written about the switch to webkit), but it would be similarly disappointing (albeit understandable).

I think a lot of people project some war between browser vendors that doesnt reflect reality. Only speaking for myself (as a Mozilla employee) but I want what I believe to be the best for the web, not for Gecko / Mozilla (luckily Mozillas entire goal is to do the best for the web, so we have joint interests)

Google wants what's best for Google, Apple wants what's best for Apple and Microsoft wants what's best for Microsoft. Since all three are grasping multi-national capitalist corporations with a fiduciary duty to shareholders, that's to be expected.

Since "Mozilla is a proudly non-profit organization dedicated to keeping the power of the Web in people’s hands" then it is able to do things differently.

However, users are basically self-interested and short sighted (basically "how fast does a tab load") so just being morally superior isn't a win ;-)

Exactly, being morally superior gets you no where, and being morally inferior doesn't hurt you either. You said yourself that users only care about "how fast a tab loads." Well, if Google ships a browser that's terrible, people will switch to something else. That's why competition still exists! Firefox was in a position to dominate the desktop browser market, but then Chrome came alone and ate their lunch! There's nothing stopping Mozilla from regaining that market share, but they're going to have to ship a better browser!

Let's not forget that Google, unlike Mozilla, is able to tell over a billion users "Download a faster, better browser now"

Yes, that counts, but in the end it's also the performance of the actual browser that counts and keeps people as users.

except chrome was really faster than Firefox when it came out. i think most early adopters will figure out if Google was lying about it being faster.

Not sure if you're being tongue-in-cheek, but Mozilla doesn't have any moral superiority over Google, Apple, or Microsoft. At the end of the day, we're talking about individuals here.

Partly tongue in cheek. However, we know that Google, Apple and Microsoft will do what is best for their companies, however they dress it up. Mozilla, being non-profit, does have a better ideological foundation for doing what is best for the web.

Of course, it does come down to individuals in the end, and open source has pointless turf-wars, so nothing is guaranteed....

If everyone were switching to Gecko, that would be horrible for the web - it would be a monoculture.

If just Opera switched to it, that would be bad - loss of one implementation is almost always bad - but it would at least maintain some non-WebKit market share in mobile. So less bad but still quite bad.

So yes, I am guessing that Mozilla folks would say it would be negative (I would).

I really think they would if it was commonly suggested that everyone switch to Gecko! :P

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