Mozilla will never spend its money wisely. Mozilla is run mostly by fools who have no hope of reducing Google's influence on Chromium design (like the Flock standard proposal and Manifest v3)....
Mozilla working on Chromium would help it spend its money more wisely.
Mozilla in the Chromium project could push for it to be less dominated by Google.
Mozilla will never spend its money wisely. Mozilla is run mostly by fools who have no hope of reducing Google's influence on Chromium design (like the Flock standard proposal and Manifest v3). Mozilla running a separate browser engine automatically gives them a say in browser standards. If they moved to Chromium, they'd be "swimming upstream" just to add Manifest v2 support against the sea of Google-centric Chromium updates.
Mozilla switching to Chromium is truly the darkest browser timeline I can imagine in the near future. I dearly hope we don't give even more control of open web standards to a known-corrupt trillion dollar megacorporation.
Yeah, it doesn't seem to me like the author was thinking very clearly. He clearly establishes that Firefox has advantages and Chromium is controlled by Google, then wants to put Firefox design...
Yeah, it doesn't seem to me like the author was thinking very clearly. He clearly establishes that Firefox has advantages and Chromium is controlled by Google, then wants to put Firefox design effectively under Google's control for a handful of coulds and mights? Makes no sense to me.
Does it really seem like that? Does it seem that any of the other chromium browsers are able to put a mark on chromium development like that? Does Microsoft even manage to do something remotely...
Does it really seem like that? Does it seem that any of the other chromium browsers are able to put a mark on chromium development like that? Does Microsoft even manage to do something remotely like that with Edge?
If Brave, Mozilla, Opera, and Vivaldi could agree on a foundational fork of Chromium to use (before adding their own customizations) it could limit the influence of Google within Chromium....
If Brave, Mozilla, Opera, and Vivaldi could agree on a foundational fork of Chromium to use (before adding their own customizations) it could limit the influence of Google within Chromium. Individually they don't have enough market share to move the needle. I don't think Firefox as an independent browser really has that anymore. Most of the sites I work on have less than 2% of traffic from Firefox.
I don't see how anyone could even attempt to limit the influence of Google within Chromium. There is no democracy. It's Google's browser. If I create a project on GitHub, I might accept...
I don't see how anyone could even attempt to limit the influence of Google within Chromium. There is no democracy. It's Google's browser. If I create a project on GitHub, I might accept contributions, but I'd still be in control of the project. If someone forks Chromium, there would be another browser with 0.2 % market share and that's it. Even if someone could take over Chromium development, Google could just fork it and 90 % of users would (be forced to) switch to Google's fork.
They can limit the influence by making a fork that could be more popular (or at least popular enough to create changes). Google cannot stop them from making their own independent fork. Firefox...
They can limit the influence by making a fork that could be more popular (or at least popular enough to create changes). Google cannot stop them from making their own independent fork.
Firefox itself was a essentially a fork of Netscape Navigator if I remember my history correctly.
Wasn't Chromium originally a fork of of WebKit which was a fork of KHTML?
So a group of people banding together around a fork of Chromium could certainly lead to change. It's happened before.
Close but not quite. Firefox’s roots extend back to Mozilla Suite, also known as Netscape 6, which was a from scratch rewrite based around the then-new Gecko engine. Firefox (originally known as...
Firefox itself was a essentially a fork of Netscape Navigator if I remember my history correctly.
Wasn't Chromium originally a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KHTML?
Close but not quite.
Firefox’s roots extend back to Mozilla Suite, also known as Netscape 6, which was a from scratch rewrite based around the then-new Gecko engine. Firefox (originally known as Phoenix and Firebird) came into existence out of a desire for a faster, highly streamlined Gecko-based alternative to Mozilla Suite/Netscape which eschewed its integrated utilities (mail, web editor, IRC client, etc) and was focused solely on web browsing.
WebKit began life as KHTML but as I understand, ended up being a near total rewrite. Blink, the engine used in Chromium, was forked from WebKit over architectural disagreements (Google wanted more functionality shifted out of WebKit and into Chromium while Apple wanted the framework to remain all-inclusive for easier use by third party apps).
So a group of people banding together around a fork of Chromium could certainly lead to change. It's happened before.
It’s technically possible, but improbable unless another organization starts spending as much on their browser/engine projects as Google does on Chromium/Blink.
Yeah, but I don't see how anyone can make a browser more popular. Google can tell their users that Gmail works best with Chrome (and make sure that's true). They can gear Chrome towards the ad...
They can limit the influence by making a fork that could be more popular
Yeah, but I don't see how anyone can make a browser more popular. Google can tell their users that Gmail works best with Chrome (and make sure that's true). They can gear Chrome towards the ad industry, making it more likely that any random website works better with Chrome. They can invest billions in building a brand so that Chrome feels better than all the alternatives, even if it isn't. They can influence web standards to make them more complex and geared towards how Chrome compared to other browsers, wasting scarce development resources of other browsers.
Basically, they can do everything they have been doing since they first announced Chrome. Why would they stop if there's another alternative or fork?
I wonder if Firefox would have been more successful if they'd made the Firefox engine easier for knockoff browsers to adopt. Chromium has several successful browsers (Edge, Vivaldi, Arc) and I...
I wonder if Firefox would have been more successful if they'd made the Firefox engine easier for knockoff browsers to adopt. Chromium has several successful browsers (Edge, Vivaldi, Arc) and I think that contributes to Chrome's success. It's weird that Google (a very proprietary, monopolistic company) contributes to other browsers more effectively than Mozilla does.
Firefox already was more successful. For a long time in the early 2000s Firefox captured about a third of the browser market share. And for what it’s worth, there are already a ton of Firefox...
Firefox already was more successful. For a long time in the early 2000s Firefox captured about a third of the browser market share.
And for what it’s worth, there are already a ton of Firefox forks and reskins, however none of them have gained critical mass.
I don't see Microsoft trying to do anything particularly different as far as web standards are concerned. But that doesn't prove anything either way. They could maintain a fork if they wanted to....
I don't see Microsoft trying to do anything particularly different as far as web standards are concerned. But that doesn't prove anything either way. They could maintain a fork if they wanted to.
(Looking at canIuse, there are some minor differences.)
That only goes so far, unfortunately. Sometimes it’s not individual features that can be easily flipped off that are the point of disagreement. Take continued support of MV2 extensions, for...
That only goes so far, unfortunately. Sometimes it’s not individual features that can be easily flipped off that are the point of disagreement.
Take continued support of MV2 extensions, for example. Mainline Chromium/Chrome does not provide this, and so any Chromium-based browsers that want to provide that have to maintain a set of patches for it, alongside patches for anything else they want to keep/change/add. Over time as mainline Chromium diverges, the more the burden of maintenance for those patches grows, eventually outstripping the resources of the browser developer.
This is why so many Chromium-based browsers for the most part stick to surface-level changes that are easy to maintain and features that are easily bolted on, which limits the level of influence they can exert over Chrome/Chromium. The only way to change this is for one of these Chromium derivatives to employ an engineering force on par with that of Google’s, which isn’t really practical.
How hard it is to maintain patches depends on what they are and on the relationship with upstream. This is difficult to predict, because it depends on politics. It's technically possible to agree...
How hard it is to maintain patches depends on what they are and on the relationship with upstream. This is difficult to predict, because it depends on politics. It's technically possible to agree on extension points.
Yup. When you put it this way, I wonder if instead of getting Rust we would have just gotten a very different version of like, Go. The world is better for both, and probably only exist because...
Yup. When you put it this way, I wonder if instead of getting Rust we would have just gotten a very different version of like, Go. The world is better for both, and probably only exist because they weren't part of the same entity.
What exactly would be the value proposition of a Chromium-based Firefox? I'm a Firefox loyalist because I don't want to support a browser monoculture. If Firefox switched to Chromium, I would no...
What exactly would be the value proposition of a Chromium-based Firefox? I'm a Firefox loyalist because I don't want to support a browser monoculture. If Firefox switched to Chromium, I would no longer have any reason to stick with Firefox.
Different ideas about privacy. A Chromium-based Firefox would have its own password manager and syncing, would likely support ad-blocking better, and wouldn't be as cautious as Google about...
Different ideas about privacy. A Chromium-based Firefox would have its own password manager and syncing, would likely support ad-blocking better, and wouldn't be as cautious as Google about retiring third-party cookies. They could just do it (like Safari did and Firefox already does).
But if you don't mind syncing all your browser settings through your Google account then I suppose that wouldn't matter.
A far less reasonable take than I would usually expect from Tom. Google's dominance has not really been chipped away at much like he suggests. Almost every other browser is Chromium-based. And...
A far less reasonable take than I would usually expect from Tom. Google's dominance has not really been chipped away at much like he suggests. Almost every other browser is Chromium-based. And Chromium is strongly influenced by Google's decisions. Google's ubiquity on the web, not just in browser, but also search, has overall made the web a worse place. They need to be fought against, not joined.
I'm also confused when people say there are websites Mozilla doesn't support. This has only happened to me I think once in the past year (it was a passkey flow, which itself is a newer technology...
I'm also confused when people say there are websites Mozilla doesn't support. This has only happened to me I think once in the past year (it was a passkey flow, which itself is a newer technology most people probably don't even know). I believe this is happening, I'm just not sure what kinds of websites these are.
In all those years, there have been times when a particular site doesn’t work and I had to open another browser. I’m used to it and the occasional instance doesn’t bother me. But lately, it’s become much more frequent. Almost daily. ... And some site designers juts don’t see enough Firefox users to add it to the compatibility list alongside Chrome and Safari.
I can't speak to the professional design or FE standards here. And I can understand not testing for Firefox compatibility. But the only websites I've seen that can be justifiably incompatible are very complex ones like Figma. Everything else just looks like a bloated version of the websites we had before. What exactly are people designing that's breaking, I wonder?
I've pretty much never encountered a website that doesn't support Firefox in my daily browsing -- I assume it's pretty variable based on what websites you're visiting. Whenever I've personally had...
I've pretty much never encountered a website that doesn't support Firefox in my daily browsing -- I assume it's pretty variable based on what websites you're visiting. Whenever I've personally had a problem that seems like that in Firefox it ends up being an extension causing the issue.
The ones I deal with are mostly Google products - Google meet audio quality becomes progressively more garbled as a call goes on (in a way that doesn't happen in the web clients for zoom or teams,...
The ones I deal with are mostly Google products - Google meet audio quality becomes progressively more garbled as a call goes on (in a way that doesn't happen in the web clients for zoom or teams, despite the web client being the only supporter platform for meet and hidden in the other two), and YouTube has more video stalls on load or playing the wrong video entirely.
In recent memory the other examples I can think of are an indie RPG company selling books on their own website, and a former employers app which did support Firefox but only because I supported firefox (because I was more used to the dev tools). Would often get other Devs testing in chrome only so would find features broken in Firefox from time to time, usually for dumb reasons.
Sounds like the same argument people made when IE was leading the market. 'sure activeX is awful but it's popular so we should stop using other browsers.'
Sounds like the same argument people made when IE was leading the market. 'sure activeX is awful but it's popular so we should stop using other browsers.'
I am glad to see someone thinking outside the box and proposing big changes. Mozilla needs to change something or they're going to vanish completely into irrelevance. That said, I don't think this...
I am glad to see someone thinking outside the box and proposing big changes. Mozilla needs to change something or they're going to vanish completely into irrelevance.
That said, I don't think this proposal would actually make anything better. Mozilla needs two things: money and market share. I don't think this helps with either of those problems.
A lot of people might switch to Firefox if it didn’t have the compatibility.
I really don't think this is the problem. Firefox's compatibility is fine. Firefox's problem is the market dynamics that push people toward one browser or another. Firefox isn't the default anywhere, and Mozilla can't use the world's most popular website to nudge people toward Firefox.
Maybe the forthcoming antitrust judgment against Google will force them to make people choose a browser. That's the only real hope I can see for Mozilla. Unfortunately that same judgement also has a good chance of killing their primary income stream, i.e. their deal with Google. So I'm afraid it's not looking good.
Mozilla will never spend its money wisely. Mozilla is run mostly by fools who have no hope of reducing Google's influence on Chromium design (like the Flock standard proposal and Manifest v3). Mozilla running a separate browser engine automatically gives them a say in browser standards. If they moved to Chromium, they'd be "swimming upstream" just to add Manifest v2 support against the sea of Google-centric Chromium updates.
Mozilla switching to Chromium is truly the darkest browser timeline I can imagine in the near future. I dearly hope we don't give even more control of open web standards to a known-corrupt trillion dollar megacorporation.
Yeah, it doesn't seem to me like the author was thinking very clearly. He clearly establishes that Firefox has advantages and Chromium is controlled by Google, then wants to put Firefox design effectively under Google's control for a handful of coulds and mights? Makes no sense to me.
It seems like they could maintain influence over browser standards by disabling any new features they don’t like?
Does it really seem like that? Does it seem that any of the other chromium browsers are able to put a mark on chromium development like that? Does Microsoft even manage to do something remotely like that with Edge?
If Brave, Mozilla, Opera, and Vivaldi could agree on a foundational fork of Chromium to use (before adding their own customizations) it could limit the influence of Google within Chromium. Individually they don't have enough market share to move the needle. I don't think Firefox as an independent browser really has that anymore. Most of the sites I work on have less than 2% of traffic from Firefox.
I don't see how anyone could even attempt to limit the influence of Google within Chromium. There is no democracy. It's Google's browser. If I create a project on GitHub, I might accept contributions, but I'd still be in control of the project. If someone forks Chromium, there would be another browser with 0.2 % market share and that's it. Even if someone could take over Chromium development, Google could just fork it and 90 % of users would (be forced to) switch to Google's fork.
They can limit the influence by making a fork that could be more popular (or at least popular enough to create changes). Google cannot stop them from making their own independent fork.
Firefox itself was a essentially a fork of Netscape Navigator if I remember my history correctly.
Wasn't Chromium originally a fork of of WebKit which was a fork of KHTML?
So a group of people banding together around a fork of Chromium could certainly lead to change. It's happened before.
Close but not quite.
Firefox’s roots extend back to Mozilla Suite, also known as Netscape 6, which was a from scratch rewrite based around the then-new Gecko engine. Firefox (originally known as Phoenix and Firebird) came into existence out of a desire for a faster, highly streamlined Gecko-based alternative to Mozilla Suite/Netscape which eschewed its integrated utilities (mail, web editor, IRC client, etc) and was focused solely on web browsing.
WebKit began life as KHTML but as I understand, ended up being a near total rewrite. Blink, the engine used in Chromium, was forked from WebKit over architectural disagreements (Google wanted more functionality shifted out of WebKit and into Chromium while Apple wanted the framework to remain all-inclusive for easier use by third party apps).
It’s technically possible, but improbable unless another organization starts spending as much on their browser/engine projects as Google does on Chromium/Blink.
Yeah, but I don't see how anyone can make a browser more popular. Google can tell their users that Gmail works best with Chrome (and make sure that's true). They can gear Chrome towards the ad industry, making it more likely that any random website works better with Chrome. They can invest billions in building a brand so that Chrome feels better than all the alternatives, even if it isn't. They can influence web standards to make them more complex and geared towards how Chrome compared to other browsers, wasting scarce development resources of other browsers.
Basically, they can do everything they have been doing since they first announced Chrome. Why would they stop if there's another alternative or fork?
A lot of this is also true for Internet Explorer historically. It’s gone now.
Naturally. And Chrome will be gone too at some point. But not because Mozilla, Brave, and Opera tried to steer it from the back seat.
Because Microsoft had moved on to extinguish and chrome was better than Microsoft at executing the embrace and extend phases.
I wonder if Firefox would have been more successful if they'd made the Firefox engine easier for knockoff browsers to adopt. Chromium has several successful browsers (Edge, Vivaldi, Arc) and I think that contributes to Chrome's success. It's weird that Google (a very proprietary, monopolistic company) contributes to other browsers more effectively than Mozilla does.
Firefox already was more successful. For a long time in the early 2000s Firefox captured about a third of the browser market share.
And for what it’s worth, there are already a ton of Firefox forks and reskins, however none of them have gained critical mass.
I don't see Microsoft trying to do anything particularly different as far as web standards are concerned. But that doesn't prove anything either way. They could maintain a fork if they wanted to.
(Looking at canIuse, there are some minor differences.)
That only goes so far, unfortunately. Sometimes it’s not individual features that can be easily flipped off that are the point of disagreement.
Take continued support of MV2 extensions, for example. Mainline Chromium/Chrome does not provide this, and so any Chromium-based browsers that want to provide that have to maintain a set of patches for it, alongside patches for anything else they want to keep/change/add. Over time as mainline Chromium diverges, the more the burden of maintenance for those patches grows, eventually outstripping the resources of the browser developer.
This is why so many Chromium-based browsers for the most part stick to surface-level changes that are easy to maintain and features that are easily bolted on, which limits the level of influence they can exert over Chrome/Chromium. The only way to change this is for one of these Chromium derivatives to employ an engineering force on par with that of Google’s, which isn’t really practical.
How hard it is to maintain patches depends on what they are and on the relationship with upstream. This is difficult to predict, because it depends on politics. It's technically possible to agree on extension points.
Yup. When you put it this way, I wonder if instead of getting Rust we would have just gotten a very different version of like, Go. The world is better for both, and probably only exist because they weren't part of the same entity.
Dart and Carbon are also from Google. It’s a big company.
What exactly would be the value proposition of a Chromium-based Firefox? I'm a Firefox loyalist because I don't want to support a browser monoculture. If Firefox switched to Chromium, I would no longer have any reason to stick with Firefox.
Different ideas about privacy. A Chromium-based Firefox would have its own password manager and syncing, would likely support ad-blocking better, and wouldn't be as cautious as Google about retiring third-party cookies. They could just do it (like Safari did and Firefox already does).
But if you don't mind syncing all your browser settings through your Google account then I suppose that wouldn't matter.
A far less reasonable take than I would usually expect from Tom. Google's dominance has not really been chipped away at much like he suggests. Almost every other browser is Chromium-based. And Chromium is strongly influenced by Google's decisions. Google's ubiquity on the web, not just in browser, but also search, has overall made the web a worse place. They need to be fought against, not joined.
I'm also confused when people say there are websites Mozilla doesn't support. This has only happened to me I think once in the past year (it was a passkey flow, which itself is a newer technology most people probably don't even know). I believe this is happening, I'm just not sure what kinds of websites these are.
I can't speak to the professional design or FE standards here. And I can understand not testing for Firefox compatibility. But the only websites I've seen that can be justifiably incompatible are very complex ones like Figma. Everything else just looks like a bloated version of the websites we had before. What exactly are people designing that's breaking, I wonder?
I've pretty much never encountered a website that doesn't support Firefox in my daily browsing -- I assume it's pretty variable based on what websites you're visiting. Whenever I've personally had a problem that seems like that in Firefox it ends up being an extension causing the issue.
The ones I deal with are mostly Google products - Google meet audio quality becomes progressively more garbled as a call goes on (in a way that doesn't happen in the web clients for zoom or teams, despite the web client being the only supporter platform for meet and hidden in the other two), and YouTube has more video stalls on load or playing the wrong video entirely.
In recent memory the other examples I can think of are an indie RPG company selling books on their own website, and a former employers app which did support Firefox but only because I supported firefox (because I was more used to the dev tools). Would often get other Devs testing in chrome only so would find features broken in Firefox from time to time, usually for dumb reasons.
Sounds like the same argument people made when IE was leading the market. 'sure activeX is awful but it's popular so we should stop using other browsers.'
I am glad to see someone thinking outside the box and proposing big changes. Mozilla needs to change something or they're going to vanish completely into irrelevance.
That said, I don't think this proposal would actually make anything better. Mozilla needs two things: money and market share. I don't think this helps with either of those problems.
I really don't think this is the problem. Firefox's compatibility is fine. Firefox's problem is the market dynamics that push people toward one browser or another. Firefox isn't the default anywhere, and Mozilla can't use the world's most popular website to nudge people toward Firefox.
Maybe the forthcoming antitrust judgment against Google will force them to make people choose a browser. That's the only real hope I can see for Mozilla. Unfortunately that same judgement also has a good chance of killing their primary income stream, i.e. their deal with Google. So I'm afraid it's not looking good.
Tom is an idiot, as is anyone who's in favour of the ever-approaching monopolization and centralisation of the internet.