
Microsoft Dev Implores Mozilla to Surrender and Bring Firefox to Chromium - mepian
https://hothardware.com/news/microsoft-dev-implores-mozilla-surrender-bring-firefox-chromium
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59nadir
This isn't newsworthy at all; it's just a guy expressing his personal opinion
and he happens to be employed at Microsoft.

My opinion: No, of course we shouldn't have only one browser base to work
with.

Even more opinion: Chrome's extensions are consistently worse than FF's (can
you even get a decent vim extension like we had with vimperator and does it
even have tab groups + tab containers?) and FF quantum seems faster to me than
any Chrome I've run.

~~~
gralx
> can you even get a decent vim extension like we had with vimperator

Just FYI, Qutebrowser[1] is a wonderful Vim-like chromium browser inspired by
vimperator, VimFX, and the like. It is not extensible, unfortunately, and the
web's worst websites will break its functionality. But it has Adblock built-
in, and running in Firejail[2] it's about as secure as a browser can be.

[1] [https://qutebrowser.org](https://qutebrowser.org)

[2] [https://firejail.wordpress.com/](https://firejail.wordpress.com/)

~~~
59nadir
I used to use qutebrowser, actually, because I (obviously) found the vim
integration to be best in breed. I still had to use both Chrome and Firefox to
fill the gaps, though, and for working on our own pages.

Currently I use Tridactyl for FF, which is decent. There are some annoyances
and it seems to me to have some performance issues (using it on BitBucket's
pages seems to be particularly bad sometimes...?) but it's good enough and
certainly better than I've had in Chrome.

On top of that, my qutebrowser usage had to be complemented because of the
other extensions like tab containers and tab groups. I use tab containers for
when I want to sandbox certain tabs into their own little bubbles which is
particularly useful for work (logging in on two completely separate sessions
alongside eachother, for example).

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zecg
Yeah, screw that:
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897&desc=2#c23)

~~~
slowmovintarget
This, exactly. If Firefox went Chromium, Ad-Blocking would be dead (because
Google isn't going to move away from this, I think).

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miohtama
Firefox is doing amazing work with Servo browser engine and its modern multi
CPU architecture. Some more patience and they will give other browsers (speed)
run for their money.

At least tech wise. It is hard to compete in market share with Google's
internal Chrome promotion on google.com.

Not surprised if EU will intervene in some point on Chrome choke push.

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ubersoldat2k7
Who is this guy & why should Mozilla (or anyone as a matter of fact) listen to
him? Like being a "Microsoft Dev" puts you on an ivory tower. Remember, a
"Microsoft Dev" gave us clippy and Access.

~~~
AstralStorm
Access is a fine tool for a limited purpose that got hacked to be how and
bloated.

But Clippy can die, alongside Cortana, Siri, Alexa and Bixby. When your junk
is outperformed by a text keyword search, something is very wrong.

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dvfjsdhgfv
Firefox is one of the last bastions of free Internet. If they "surrender",
Google will be free to make arbitrary decisions about practically every aspect
of the web, and will be able to follow through no matter how loud people
oppose, only because most people and organizations surrendered already and
transferred partial control over different aspects of their personal and work
life to one corporation.

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kozak
An open standard is not _really_ an open standard if it doesn't have at least
two independent implementations.

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mirimir
> "Thought: It's time for Mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory
> tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really _cared_ about the
> web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe
> that's used by less than 5 percent?," Auchenberg wrote.

Damn. This is like some dude arguing that Washington should have surrendered
after losing Philadelphia and Germantown. I mean, winter in Valley Forge?

Which is not to say that there's any hope, in this case.

~~~
AstralStorm
I'd add Microsoft should also immediately drop and uninstall IE and Edge. Same
logic. :)

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discopicante
I am less convinced by the same argument used when IE was the dominate
browser: that consolidating browser rendering / JS engines is at odds with
innovation and freedom.

IE was closed source and proprietary; Chromium is open source and not
proprietary. IE was closely integrated with Windows; Chromium is OS agnostic.
IE developer tools were completely insufficient or even non-existent; Chromium
developer tools are accepted as setting the bar / standard.

Note that I am not advocating for Firefox to adopt Chromium, only that the
common argument against that decision seems tired and outdated.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Everything you said should come with the caveat _for now_. There's no reason
that Google couldn't take the tack that Android, ChromeOS, etc. require
Chrome. Chromium could also be closed off with no warning like nearly every
product Google has shut down without warning. As soon as it stops being
economically efficient, or Google just plain decides to move on.

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fetbaffe
Bad idea. This would probably lessen innovation & freedom.

You could make this argument for any piece of software, then you realize that
each software solves a different problem, including technically &
philosophically.

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AndrewDucker
Definitely not.

I want more than one multiplatform browser. And I am delighted with Firefox.

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swiley
Wow.

Chromium and chrome are pretty user hostile and are continuing to get worse.
Chromium is also (IMO) significantly more difficult to compile than Firefox.
In addition to all that Firefox is honestly more performant than chromium.
It’s not the fastest browser but chrome/chromium are just so slow.

I wonder if Microsoft just wants one company to be in charge of the web and
they really don’t care who. Do open standards really bother them that much?

~~~
toyg
_> Chromium is also (IMO) significantly more difficult to compile than
Firefox._

That's a terrifying thought. I remember a time when FF was widely considered
the worst open browser to build and embed, which is why Apple went with KHTML
when creating WebKit.

If things got so bad on the Chromium side, I wonder if it's time for Mozilla
to put some effort again in making Gecko easily-embeddable...?

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Yoric
It's in progress :)

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julienfr112
Come on micro$oft, I just started to love you again with visual studio code
and dotnet core and everything, and now, you show that in fact, you don't get
it !!!

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ionised
No thanks.

