
To defend the free web, save Mozilla - Rondom
https://psyq123.wordpress.com/2015/11/26/to-defend-the-free-web-you-must-save-mozilla/
======
AsyncAwait
Firefox is not the only thing that Mozilla does that is worth supporting.
Their Mozilla Research projects, like Daala, Rust and Servo, are really neat
and I believe deserve support, so I don't want Mozilla to go away. It is
however true that some strange decisions were made in the past year, like the
forced pocket integration as well as stopping the development of Persona
before it was even ready etc., but they do work on interesting stuff
nonetheless and are often the only major player in W3C to be on the right side
of many issues, so I still think that they deserve my donations and hopefully
yours too - nothing good would come from Mozilla failing.

~~~
reddotX
i like mozilla but they are more concerned about bringing firefox to black
boxes like iphone than open platforms like Ubuntu Phone

~~~
drakenot
If I were in charge of project priorities at Mozilla I would make that same
decision all day long. The potential user impact for capturing even a small
percentage of iOS users would dwarf the total number of Ubuntu Phone users.
I'm not saying I would be against working on an app for Ubuntu Phone, but if
resources were constrained and I had to make a choice, it would be an easy
decision for me.

------
tshtf
> I think it’s a good idea to donate money to Mozilla to reduce the dependence
> on Yahoo

This is a fool's errand. Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million:
[https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-
US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...](https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-
US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf)

The sum total of the proposed public donations to Mozilla will be off by an
order of magnitude or two. And there's no reason to believe that public
donations will change Mozilla's bizarre course of actions such as forced
Pocket integration, or lack of any U2F support.

~~~
byuu
> Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million

It's amazing that there's such a massive amount of money even for having ~10%
market share and declining.

Given how many people are clamoring for something like what Firefox _used_ to
be, you'd really think someone would step in to make a really first-rate
browser. One could even be forgiven for using existing engines (Webkit, Blink,
V8, etc), so long as the UI were exceptional. Instead, all of the Webkit
frontends are barely usable at all (Midori, Vivaldi, etc.)

The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling.

~~~
mahouse
>The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling.

A browser is just the most complicated piece of software that there is.

~~~
byuu
The rendering backend and Javascript portion, absolutely. The total lines of
code for all of Firefox (Gecko, Spidermonkey, etc) rivals the Linux kernel.

But I fail to see why we can't have a full-featured browser front-end that
uses Webkit, V8, etc as libraries. We have a lot of these projects, but they
are always very spartan on feature-set, portability, extensibility, etc. It's
almost always a team of 1-5 hobbyists, instead of a serious team of full-time
employees. At $30m per 1% of the market, there's a whole lot of money to be
made.

Just make it look like a native app on each major OS (Windows, OSX, Linux,
BSD), let me move all the toolbar buttons around, let me put my tabs where I
want them, let me load my ad blocker and script injector, don't spy on me,
don't pack it full of adware, and I'm a happy camper.

~~~
pcwalton
There have been companies that tried to commercialize rebranded Chromium:
RockMelt comes to mind. They did not succeed.

The reason, to my mind, is simple: unless your underlying technology is
better, there's little reason why users should choose your fork over the
engine's official skin, which is always going to have better integration, will
be first to get new features, gets security updates first, etc.

------
filmgirlcw
Unpopular opinion, but why should it be the community's burden to save a
company that takes in over $300m in revenue (and apparently spends every bit
of it) each year and, let's be real, hasn't managed to keep up or evolve along
with the web? Why is it up to us to save them if they haven't really tried to
save themselves?

I love Mozilla -- as a concept -- and I want to live in a world where Mozilla
and its products still exist. But I can't remember the last time I used
Firefox. And yes, it's partially because I'm a Mac user, but it's also because
I can't choose ideals over a superior product.

That Mozilla languished on the desktop is sad, but almost understandable. IE
languished too. (Microsoft was smart enough to replace it, even if the
replacement did come years after it should have), but to languish on mobile is
just inexcusable.

Firefox Phone was a project that could have worked for certain markets for a
very brief period of time, but they had to know they started too late and were
going after an ever-shrinking market when they started.

Sure, it would have been great for HTML5 to win over apps. It didn't happen.
It's likely never going to happen (not until the next mobile paradigm shift
happens anyway).

But instead of focusing on building the ultimate browser -- desktop or mobile
-- I don't know what Mozilla did. I really don't.

But now they are struggling. And it puts the good work they do in jeopardy.
And that's sad. But since when is it my responsibility (or yours) to subsidize
a company with a $300m annual run rate who can't help itself. A company with
very opaque goals and no roadmap.

I'm all for saving Mozilla but it needs to show me it wants to be saved.

~~~
rewqfdsa
Google wasn't fighting fair. To allow the Chrome team to run free
advertisements on the world's most popular website and to allow them to
install their browser by default on the world's most popular mobile operating
system, well, it's jus dirty. You could advertise IE6 that way and get
significant adoption.

~~~
artifaxx
I agree that being the default is an unfair advantage, but there is a grey
zone for sure. Most applications we use have defaults of some sort, so what
cutoff should we use to determine the unfair ones consistently?

------
r3bl
I really try my best to stick with Mozilla, but their changes in the last year
or two have been more then dissatisfying. Like the author said, they have
added completely unnecessary things and reduced the customization ability in a
several occurrences.

I have written a rant about Mozilla a couple of months ago that I still think
is relevant: [https://blog.r3bl.me/en/mozilla-
dissatisfaction/](https://blog.r3bl.me/en/mozilla-dissatisfaction/)

Although I'm all up for supporting free and open source software, the
situation with Mozilla has became shady enough that I just want to move away
from it. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to go. Midori is still not completely
usable, I just can't convince myself to switch to Chrome or Chromium because I
genuinely feel uncomfortable using them, IE/Edge are only available on Windows
so they're practically useless to me, Firefox forks are really nothing
groundbreaking, Vivaldi is not open source...

~~~
heinrich5991
From your rant: Mozilla doesn't actually make money from integrating Pocket
with Firefox.

~~~
listic
This is the most unbelievable and I heard it before: when an open source
software starts including proprietary bloatware like that, one might think
there is money involved...

~~~
chimeracoder
> including proprietary bloatware like that

No matter how many times it's disproven, this meme just never ends, does it?

The Pocket client code is free and open source, just like Firefox itself[0].
_If_ the user uses the Pocket feature, that code makes HTTP requests to
another server, which runs a mixture of FOSS and proprietary code. If the user
does not use the Pocket feature, it does not.

Remember that we are talking about a web browser, the primary function of
which is to do exactly that: make HTTP requests to another server that may be
running proprietary code[1].

[0] Pocket's client is arguably _more_ free than Firefox is, if we look at the
fact that Iceweasel is distributed with the Pocket logo included whereas
Debian cannot include the Firefox logo for its patched builds.

[1] Unless you only use your browser for accessing
[http://fsf.org](http://fsf.org), but at that point you're probably using Lynx
or Seamonkey anyway.

~~~
developer1
There's a reason nobody believe there is no money exchanging hands: if there
is no profit for Mozilla in including Pocket, then there is no explanation as
to why it is included. It's useless bloatware. I could "understand" if Mozilla
was selling us out and being paid to do this. If they are not, nobody is
benefiting, and it should be removed.

Even if there is no actual money being funnelled to Mozilla itself, that does
not mean there isn't a financial kickback behind the scenes to upper
executives that is not on the books, or other incentives not being handed over
in cold cash.

Just because the Mozilla Foundation itself is a non-profit, does not mean that
the people at the top of the food chain are not the same scummy types you find
in any for-profit corporation.

~~~
pcwalton
> that does not mean there isn't a financial kickback behind the scenes to
> upper executives that is not on the books

This is a very serious accusation to make, especially without tangible (as
opposed to circumstantial) evidence.

~~~
developer1
Have you ever worked closely with upper management? I have personally worked
with 3 CTO's at medium-to-large companies who have taken advantage of external
relationships with partners to _personally_ profit. I mean cash and benefits
deposited in their individual hands, not the company's coffers. It's amazing
how far executives in power will go to pad their pockets with extra dollars.
Perhaps more incredible is how much you observe when you gain the trust of
such people - I've never really understood why I find myself in a position to
see these events taking place.

So yes, my personal observations over the years have made me extremely
critical of any "business deal" wherein there is supposedly no "deal".

~~~
FooBarWidget
That just means that those 3 examples made you cynical. It doesn't mean that
ALL upper management is corrupted.

And as others pointed our, their financial statements are public.

------
sam_lowry_
I heared from several Mozilla volunteers that it's not anymore the geek-
friendly organisation it once was, but a corporate behemoth run by men in
suits.

After they pushed out Brendan Eich, there's no hope for change. Rest in peace,
Mozilla.

~~~
necessity
I thought about donating once, but not after that and all the other employee
harassment and sjw bigotry.

~~~
yedava
The fact that Mozilla seems to rile opponents of social justice makes me think
of donating to them.

~~~
BlackAura
Agreed. They annoy all the types of people that I'd much rather not work with,
and I honestly believe that Mozilla is better off without them. I don't care
how irreplaceable they think they are. Nobody's irreplaceable, and there is
plenty of talent and skill out there that isn't associated with such noxious
people.

Mozilla's hardly alone here. Plenty of other open source communities are like
that. It's just they get the most flak, for some reason.

------
codingdave
Didn't Mozilla just drop their contract with Google, saying they no longer
needed that revenue? So their dependence on Yahoo was a deliberate and recent
choice.

While I'm not arguing the ideal of an non-corporate support model, I am
curious how it only took a few days to go from "We don't need the revenue" to
"Save Mozilla."

~~~
nnethercote
Firefox's deal with Yahoo (or any other search engine) is only valuable so
long as Firefox has lots of users. And Firefox's market share has been
dropping for years now. That's what the author is worried about.

~~~
e15ctr0n
If the global desktop share of Firefox fell from 31.64% in January 2010 to
16.53% in February 2015,[1] it represents a loss of 3.7% per year (15.11% / 49
months * 12 months / year). In theory, Firefox should reach zero market share
in 3.7 years from now, just before the Yahoo deal runs out.[2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#StatCounter_.28July_2008_to_present.29)

[2] [https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/yahoo-and-mozilla-
for...](https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/yahoo-and-mozilla-form-
strategic-partnership/)

~~~
ehsanu1
A linear rate is not very realistic here. Exponential decay would be better,
but still probably completely useless as a predictive tool.

------
Sephr
> Google will be a dominator and gatekeeper to the browser extension market
> [...] for Vivaldi and other browsers that implement the Chrome extension
> system and use the Chrome extension repository exclusively. This means
> Google alone decides which extensions get published.

This is completely untrue. _Vivaldi is deciding_ what extensions get published
by intentionally limiting themselves to Google's extension repository. There
is literally nothing stopping Vivaldi from hosting their own extension
repository for extensions that don't make it to Google's Chrome Web Store.
They can also choose to support both repositories, so users can have access to
extensions they already use in CWS, in addition to any extensions from
Vivaldi's repository.

The article also states that V8 "has a real community behind it, with less
control from Google" as if Blink is more strictly controlled by Google. This
is false.

V8 and Blink governance are exactly the same. If you want to participate in
the community, both projects have public mailing lists where anyone is allowed
to put forward rational feedback and ideas regarding functionality and policy.
Yes, the final word comes from Google, but there is no governance imbalance
between the two projects as implied by this article.

~~~
icebraining
I don't think it's untrue, maybe we're just reading it differently. The author
isn't saying that Vivaldi is forced to limit themselves to Google's
repository, only that _because_ they chose to do so, Google does effectively
have that control, and so Vivaldi et all aren't real alternatives.

------
mehrdada
Please note that Mozilla did not resist DRM in Web standards but they spent
money on things like FirefoxOS that clearly wouldn't get anywhere. I am quite
unsure if they are aligned enough with the free web ideals. I do not think
more donations will change anything. At this point, the purpose of Mozilla is
unclear to me. They basically make a substandard browser and follow industry
hypes doing random things.

~~~
icebraining
_Please note that Mozilla did not resist DRM in Web standards_

While they eventually gave up, they did resist it, and where the last of the
major browsers to implement EME. They also provide an EME-free version of
Firefox.

~~~
mehrdada
_" You had one job"_

------
necessity
We must "fight browser monoculture" by making Firefox the dominant browser
instead of Chrome? Firefox would become "independent" if it became dependent
on donations? This guy later on stresses that we must have free software
engines, that we can't have Google owning most of the market. But Blink is
licensed under GPL and BSD... So is Chromium IIRC.

>Currently Mozilla Firefox is a genuinely free browser, but it might not exist
for long if main sponsor Yahoo! pulls the plug on their sponsorship and
Mozilla can’t find a way to finance its development

There will always be a search company interested in being the default of the
browser with the second largest market share.

~~~
coldtea
> _This guy later on stresses that we must have free software engines, that we
> can 't have Google owning most of the market. But Blink is licensed under
> GPL and BSD... So is Chromium IIRC._

This doesn't mean much. Being open source is just the first required step.
What teams/community contributes to a project matters too regarding it not
being controlled by a single company.

If Google engineers stopped working on Blink tomorrow it wouldn't turn into
some magically organic open source community project. That would take hard
work, and tons of volunteers, and might not even happen.

------
patrickfl
I agree we all most stick together and support Mozilla, even if it is as
something as simple as using it as our default browser. I've been a Mozilla
(Netscape, etc) user since 1998 or whenever the first version came out, and
I've always been a fan of what they stand for. Yes they've made a few
mistakes, but nothing that can't be easily forgivable.

------
vjvj
> "...with pages that only work properly in Google Chrome or its derivatives."

This is already well underway. Facebook's advertiser power tools will only
work with Chrome.

------
johncolanduoni
I'm not a fan of another monopoly in the browser space, but the situation is
quite different this time around. The largest being that Chrome is a branded
version of Chromium, an open source project. The author is right that creating
a browser from scratch is a often prohibitive amount of work at this point,
but if Google stops allowing innovation or directs it in selfish ways in
Chrome/Chromium, all that work is not suddenly lost to competitors. If pages
only work in Chromium derivatives, then build your competing browser by
refactoring Chromium. If all of the web rendering engines worked off branches
of the same open source code base, I don't think you'd see many people working
on the frontend crying, and nobody would be locked into a particular platform
like we were with IE.

That said, I'm more interested in Mozilla's work on Servo (and Rust in
general) than Firefox/Gecko. Looking at their roadmap[1], I was surprised at
how soon its milestones are. If they hold to that timetable we may be seeing
Firefox or a totally new browser steal first place before long, especially on
mobile.

[1]:
[https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap](https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap)

~~~
pcwalton
> If all of the web rendering engines worked off branches of the same open
> source code base, I don't think you'd see many people working on the
> frontend crying, and nobody would be locked into a particular platform like
> we were with IE.

> That said, I'm more interested in Mozilla's work on Servo (and Rust in
> general) than Firefox/Gecko.

These statements are contradictory. If you get what you want in your first
paragraph, Servo won't be _possible_ , _ever_.

~~~
johncolanduoni
The first not what I want, it's the future I think this article is actually
predicting (as opposed to IE round two), and I'm saying it won't be such a
crying shame.

Also not "possible ever" is pretty hyperbolic, considering the lock-in when IE
had a monopoly was far stronger than it would be if Chrome/Blink got a
monopoly. At the worst we'd have a permissively licensed reference
implementation, which is a lot better than trying to be compatible with a
closed source blob like IE.

~~~
pcwalton
Closed versus open source isn't a big deal in terms of difficulty of reverse
engineering. It's relatively easy to figure out what IE does; Hixie even clean
room reverse engineered IE's entire HTML parsing algorithm back in the day.
Having to be bug-for-bug compatible with one engine with no sensible
specification is what causes the problems.

------
Silhouette
I am all for supporting an alternative browser to the corporation-driven
Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. Sadly, Firefox is no longer it.

I believe Mozilla has now become so totally disconnected from the values and
principles that made Firefox and the like attractive to a certain set of users
that it is beyond redemption.

I also believe Firefox is now so totally off the rails that it is probably
beyond saving. It appears to have fundamental architectural issues that have
limited development in some important areas, but instead of addressing those
in recent years, there has been a string of not-entirely-popular UI changes,
some high profile new features that it seems hardly anyone actually wants, and
a bad and worsening loss of both flexibility and stability particularly around
add-ons. This is not the browser I used to recommend, and it makes me sad.

I am now hoping that one of the forks, perhaps Pale Moon, will take over the
community-driven, open-culture mantle that Mozilla once wore. I am also hoping
that with Safari still running WebKit, Chrome now on Blink, and IE11 and Edge
doing their own thing, there will remain sufficient need for co-operation in
the browser community that we get back to something sensible in terms of
standardisation and portability within the next couple of years.

~~~
wila
Switched my main browser just last week from Firefox to Pale Moon and I
couldn't be happier. It is like before firefox got off the rails. Certainly
recommended.

------
lazyjones
I may be getting old, but why and how did we let web standards inflate to such
an extent that only large corporations or organizations are able to build a
competitive browser from scratch? There's so much money funneled into browser
development these days and the results aren't entirely satisfactory for end
users (DRM, security issues) and website developers alike, perhaps it's time
to start over with something less bloated.

~~~
Silhouette
For better or worse, the answer to your question is clear if you consider the
range of functionality that users now expect to be provided by any serious
browser.

Browsers a few years ago had to render a page using HTML and CSS, supported
some light scripting with JavaScript, allowed the inclusion of a small number
of different image formats (primarily JPEG, PNG, GIF), and delegated any more
serious interaction using plug-in technologies like Flash, Java, and ActiveX.

Browsers today have to render a page using somewhat larger versions of HTML
and CSS, provide a professional quality language runtime for a much larger
version of JS, implement a much wider selection of features and the APIs for
that JS to use them, render graphical and multimedia content in various
formats and allow that content to be generated or controlled in real time in
addition to rendering the earlier basic images, potentially support a much
wider range of functionality to adapt to different devices and interaction
methods, and do all of this orders of magnitude faster to keep up with modern
software architectures where a lot of the work is done client-side, and with a
much greater attack surface to protect from a security perspective.

Some of these changes are "only" quantitative. For example, although the specs
have evolved, the basic rules for rendering simple HTML and CSS haven't really
changed that much for a long time. Some of the changes are still substantial.
For example, introducing tools like flexbox has significant implications for
your layout algorithms that simply weren't there before. Some of the changes
are qualitative, like introducing entire new areas of functionality to support
off-line use or real-time client-server communications, or providing
production quality support for graphical presentation via canvas/SVG/WebGL and
multimedia audio/video players, which is essential if you are trying to kill
off any external plug-ins that would have been used for such things before.

~~~
pcwalton
> For example, introducing tools like flexbox has significant implications for
> your layout algorithms that simply weren't there before.

Not really. Flexbox fits in pretty straightforwardly once you have CSS 2.1.
Pagination and writing modes would be better examples.

~~~
Silhouette
I suppose it depends on how you interpret "substantial". I think flexbox,
where just the layout algorithm from the W3C WD runs to about six printed
pages, qualifies -- it might be quite systematic, but it's still a significant
chunk of work anyone implementing a new browser engine today would have to do
that someone implementing a browser engine a few years ago would not. As you
point out, it's also far from the only such change.

------
RightWingRabble
Mozilla deserves to die. That's how things work in the free marketplace.
Sometimes, organizations don't age well and they have to go away. They're
replaced by orgs that are more flexible and better able to address the gaps in
the current market. Mozilla's decline is by no means the herald of a Google
monoculture anymore than embedding IE in Windows was.

~~~
cwyers
I, uh, Yahoo is paying them enough to stay afloat right now. In what sense has
the market spoken here?

~~~
RightWingRabble
> In what sense has the market spoken here?

The fact the original article is a call to "save mozilla" isn't enough? Then
look at Firefox's market share.

------
schmichael
> prevent another decade of browser monoculture

Mobile is our protection against browser monoculture. Even if
Chrome/WebKit/Blink/whatever browsers make up the vast majority of mobile,
there's such huge variation between them and customizations added by OEMs that
- much to web developers chagrin - a monoculture seems like a blessing by
comparison.

There's also browsers in tons of devices like TVs, consoles, car dashboards,
etc that add a staggering amount of variability. (Not to mention embedded
browsers in other apps like Steam, anything based on Electron, etc)

The author misses the fact that desktop browsers aren't the most relevant web
browsers anymore, and there's tons of variability and competing stakeholders
even if Mozilla disappeared tomorrow.

Edit: Now if the assertion is that we need a _nonprofit_ competitor in the web
market, that's a compelling reason for Mozilla to exist (if it can stay
sufficiently independent from its commercial benefactors).

~~~
pcwalton
There's nowhere near as much variation among WebKits as between WebKit and
Gecko, or WebKit and Trident, or Trident and Gecko.

~~~
schmichael
That's a pro. Variation sucks. What you want is competing contributors and
stakeholders to ensure a single entity's interests don't win. I would argue
the massive WebKit/Chromium ecosystem has _lots_ of competing contributors.

~~~
pcwalton
> That's a pro. Variation sucks.

No, it doesn't. A browser engine monoculture means that a single engine's bugs
and quirks become the standard. As a result the Web platform gets worse, and
it becomes harder for new browser engines to enter the market.

For example: [http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/a-small-example-of-
value...](http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/a-small-example-of-value-of-
browser.html)

> What you want is competing contributors and stakeholders to ensure a single
> entity's interests don't win.

That is not the case in practice with either WebKit or Blink.

> I would argue the massive WebKit/Chromium ecosystem has lots of competing
> contributors.

Not really. There are two primary ones: Apple and Google. Both organizations
have essentially as close to absolute sway over their respective projects as
to what Web platform features they implement and how they choose to implement
them as to make no difference.

------
kryptiskt
They still haven't released a 64-bit Firefox for Windows. Compound that with
all tabs running in the same process and the demands of modern web and it's
easy to run out of memory in Firefox on Windows these days. Their neglect of
the vast majority of their users is baffling.

~~~
detaro
> _neglect of the vast majority of their users_

You are aware that both issues are being worked on?

Beta versions are available as 64-bit. Release 64bit builds are available on
ftp.mozilla.org, but not offered on the main download page yet because of
unresolved bugs.

> _Compound that with all tabs running in the same process_

That's something a lot of development effort is going into right now.
Available in the nightlies if you want to help test.

~~~
spooningtamarin
There's definitely something wrong if it's so hard to go to 64-bit. This has
been their problem for almost a decade.

~~~
pcwalton
It's not hard to go to 64 bit. It's hard to go to 64 bit without any
performance regressions.

(This holds for most performance-critical, memory-access-bound software.)

~~~
cwzwarich
Hasn't it been 64-bit on OS X and Linux for a while? Presumedly those releases
had acceptable performance, so what are the Windows-specific problems?

~~~
bzbarsky
A few relevant notes:

1) The OS X and Linux versions of Firefox have generally been slower than the
Windows version all along, even before switching to 64-bit. Largely because
gcc (and later clang/llvm on Mac) generated slower code at least for this
particular codebase than MSVC did. This is also why the Windows release
versions of Firefox are in fact compiled with MSVC, not gcc.

2) Most benchmarking done by the press is done on Windows, and most of the
users are on Windows. Performance regressions on Windows do in fact matter
more, both in terms of actual user experience and marketing/perception than
performance regressions on other platforms. I wish that were not so, but it
is.

~~~
zurn
Anyone have a link for a bugzilla tracking bug for win64/win32 performance
parity? I lucked out with a web search. It would be interesting to see what
kind of things are being done for this.

------
rewqfdsa
Mozilla died the day Eich left. That's the day it became clear that the
organized cared more about posturing than results.

------
hitlin37
i will admit i'm not expert on this, but i often see Google pretty much more
than ok with another browser as implementing new technolgies. It makes things
standardized if another broswer is implements newer technologies and not just
one implementation from major browser vendor.

------
datashovel
I think it's problematic to frame the question as whether or not someone can
"compete" with Google. I think the entire browser ecosystem could change for
the better if we built a "Meta browser". So the developer of the web page
chooses which engine they prefer for rendering their site. The user only
installs a single meta-browser, and if they don't currently have the preferred
engine (as noted by developer in HTTP Headers) the user is notified and has
the option to download and install that engine.

Here is a short blog post I wrote about this:

[https://medium.com/@datashovel/why-isn-t-there-a-meta-
browse...](https://medium.com/@datashovel/why-isn-t-there-a-meta-
browser-204997473c61#.85citda0j)

With a meta-browser developers don't have to worry about building a site for
all major browsers. They could write for a relatively unknown engine and as
long as the user has that engine installed it will work seamlessly when the
user navigates to that web page.

~~~
jdc
What if the web page's developer specifies an engine not available on your
platform (OS/hardware)?

~~~
datashovel
It would definitely need to be more elaborate than how I described it in my
original comment. But I imagine, for example, that could be solved with a list
of "preferred engines", which of course would probably fallback to a default
"user or system preferred" engine if none were available.

It's true it would become a small problem of its own (to try to figure out how
to build for just enough engines to make it possible to render correctly on
all computers) but I think that makes it possible for the entire ecosystem to
have many more browsers and for a lot more experimentation to take place.
Because the browser developer no longer has to worry about "Well, if I can't
get enough market share to matter to developers, then there's no real point
for me to build a rendering engine, since it will probably never be used".
Instead if there is even a small number of people interested in their work,
there can be a small community of developers who build for that engine, and it
will be used (or at least recommended) when a user visits their websites.

------
chris_wot
Really? We're talking about the folks who capitulated on EME and brought DRM
into their codebase. Very free!

~~~
hguant
It's hard to be a relevant web browser if your users can't watch Netflix.

~~~
sangnoir
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. They should either focus on
their core mission, or change it (to being relevant). Lack of
focus/compromizing core values is a shortcut to failure.

Saying "it's 1hard to be a relevant web browser if you can't X" is an excuse
that can be used to undo each and every point on Mozilla's Manifesto[1]

1\. [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/manifesto/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/)

~~~
chris_wot
It does seem that Mozilla can only be true to their stated values when it is
convenient to do so.

------
krapp
If the web can only remain free as long as Mozilla gets paid, then it's not
really free, is it?

I understand that people hate Microsoft and don't trust Google since their
logo appeared on a PRISM slide, but the premise of this article seems a bit
extortive.

"Nice freedoms you have there... be a real _shame_ if anything _happened_ to
them..." Nah.

