
Mozilla should give up on Firefox and go with Chromium too - mariushn
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-guy-mozilla-should-give-up-on-firefox-and-go-with-chromium-too/
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ordu
I believe that Mozilla is technologically superior to Google and Microsoft.
Mozilla managed to create a great community around firefox and rust, they keep
their development processes open and they are moving reasonably fast with a
steady pace without breaking things. Google and MS will not be able to keep up
with Mozilla, after the major parts of firefox will be reimplemented in rust.

The only thing Mozilla needs to break a dominance of Google and MS is a some
significant shift on the market of browsers, when abilities to adapt will be
more valuable than ability to ship a specific browser to all users of Windows
and Android. IT moves fast, so in decade or so a shift like that will happen
almost inevitable.

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stephenr
Not happy with Microsoft handing more control of the web to Google, he now
wants Mozilla to do the same.

If you're reading this Kenneth: Fuck you very much. You're a modern-era
collaborator, in the WW2 sense of the word. And yes, I mean that Google are
'the enemy' and you're doing active harm by working with them.

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Lowkeyloki
How unbelievably short-sighted. This is how you end up with the situation that
happened with Internet Explorer in the 90s most of the 2000s. (Of course, I'll
readily admit Chromium is far better than IE, but the comparison still holds.)

It's not in the best interest of the users or developers for there to be a
single web browser. Chromium is not the world wide web.

I've seen several articles like this lately and it surprises me that
developers aren't aware of the fields in which Mozilla is leading the charge.
WebAssembly, for example, is seeing a large portion of development coming from
Mozilla.

Is Mozilla perfect? Of course not. I could list probably a dozen mistakes and
missteps they've made just off the top of my head. But I'm not advocating for
everyone to switch to Firefox.

I simply prefer options and competition in the browser space. In fact, I wish
there were more meaningful browser alternatives out there instead of just a
bunch of different GUI wrappers around Chromium.

~~~
stephenr
> I'll readily admit Chromium is far better than IE

This is the part that's often forgotten. IE is how we got XHR. You could even
argue IE is how we got `box-sizing: border-box;` (which is essentially IE's
legacy box model).

IE was _once_ considered better than Netscape (the only real competitor at the
time).

~~~
Lowkeyloki
Not considering speed/efficiency, I don't recall scripting being the worst in
IE. (Although, alerting users to scripting errors with alert modals was pretty
unforgivable.)

My biggest gripe was the poor CSS support. And though it gave us the border-
box model, as you mentioned, it was legacy IE's normal box model, which didn't
comply to standards.

Which is the whole point. Because IE was the most popular browser by a
landslide for many years, developers would code specifically to deal with IE's
non-standard interpretations of web standards. It was a sad time. Either your
site looked like crap in IE or in everything else. Depending on the year or
era, that meant developers would make it look right in IE and shrug their
shoulders for everyone else since they were just playing the odds. But no
matter your outlook on which users you defer to, that's not a choice any
developer should have to make.

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kstenerud
The more we approach a monoculture, the more innovation stagnates. It was a
serious, possibly fatal blow already when Microsoft threw in the towel. If
safari and firefox were to follow suit, we'd enter a dark age.

~~~
verdverm
How do you compare this to the Unix vs Linux kernel?

~~~
N_trglctc_joe
It's not as though Linux is the only Unix in town. There's also MacOS and BSD.

edit: and probably a whole bunch of other Unixes (Unices?) that I don't know
about.

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mruts
Personally, I think FF and Gecko are superior to Chrome in most ways. Better
and more powerful add-ons, less memory usage, and faster performance. Before
quantum, FF kind of sucked, but now it’s amazing. Also I haven’t noticed many
situations in which a site doesn’t work under FF.

In regards to his arguments about fragmentation, you could just as easily
conclude that MS shouldn’t make Windows anymore. Also, monocultures are bad
for everyone: true innovation always occurs through fierce competition.

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srndh
With how much we depend on the web, we cannot just have one browser engine.
Plus firefox despite not having the fancy budget of Google & Microsoft, they
are delivering a kick ass product.

Plus with HTML5 & open standards, multiple engines MUST not be an issue at
all.

Ofcourse, I don't need to convince why monopoly is bad in this forum.

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TheOperator
Yes of course! Monopolies are so efficient! We should absolutely leave
ourselves no alternatives to one option!

How brain dead is microsoft collectively to not realise that we already faced
the perils of a browser monoculture and it was terrible?

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kerng
I think that was discussed already a couple of months ago. The tweet is from
January.

I think Mozilla is awesome and Firefox will one day win back the web.

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verdverm
I like to think about this like the Linux kernel. If everyone worked on the
same core, then the browser would be better and safer. My job when writing
client side code would be far simpler too!

~~~
stephenr
Except there are other kernels, and the world is better for it.

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black-tea
Why does it actually matter what Web browser most people use? In absolute
terms there are probably more Firefox users now than there ever were. Who
cares about the percentages?

In the early 2000s IE6 "dominated". I think we all agree that was awful, with
many websites out there only built for and tested with IE. We Firefox users
got through that. We'll get through this too.

~~~
stephenr
If developers rely on 'features' added just to Chromium, without any kind of
standards involved (i.e. imagine if Chrome said they're going to ship a Dart
VM in chromium) then users of every other browser are shit out of luck.

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mariushn
This makes sense to me. There are over 10,000 open bugs on Core and over
10,000 open bugs on Firefox, not to mention Dev tools and mobile versions.

If switching to Chromium, Mozilla could focus on

* standards

* Mozilla accounts integration instead of Google (including extensions store)

* important features such as enabling extensions on mobile

~~~
smt88
1) Standards are meaningless if there is effectively one rendering engine.

2) Why would Mozilla want to mimick Google’s account integrations? I switched
to FF and miss nothing about Google accounts.

3) Firefox extensions already work on Android. Do they not on iOS? FF and all
other browsers are just Safari on iOS due to Apple restrictions, so maybe
extension support is impossible.

~~~
mariushn
> 3) Firefox extensions already work on Android.

True. Chrome doesn't support extensions on mobile though, hence the proposal
that Mozilla could implement that.

~~~
smt88
So you're arguing that Mozilla should stop developing FF so that they can
improve an inferior, competing product?

That still makes no sense for either Mozilla or us. Just use FF on mobile.

