Microsoft developer says Mozilla should join the Chromium project instead of building...

Greg S

Posts: 1,607   +442
Bottom line: As Firefox continues to lose users to Chromium-based browsers, Mozilla faces an arduous journey ahead to keep the project alive. A Microsoft developer is calling on Mozilla to admit defeat and join Google on the Chromium project.

After it was discovered that Microsoft is replacing Edge with a Chromium-based web browser, many mixed opinions have surfaced. Some have rejoiced that Microsoft might finally have a browser that works as intended, while others have been pointing out that a monopoly on browser engines by Google might not be such a good thing.

Mozilla came out with very strong words against Microsoft's decision, condemning the action. Firefox was at one point a very competitive browser, but other browsers making use of the Chromium backend have far superseded its market share. With now limited use, Firefox is a large project to support for a limited number of end users.

Microsoft developer Kenneth Auchenberg has gone as far as saying that Mozilla should just give in and ditch Gecko Quantum in favor of Chromium. In a tweet posted by the Microsoft developer, he bashes Mozilla saying "if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than five percent?"

While there is good reason to want competition between browsers, maybe Auchenberg has the right idea. Mozilla itself even admits that the road ahead is going to be bumpy. Websites will have even less incentive to bother making changes just to ensure Firefox users do not encounter problems.

Mozilla alludes to the fact that Internet Explorer was once the dominant browser in the early 2000s. This time around, it could be Google's Chromium engine that is the dominant and ubiquitous presence found on everybody's electronic devices. Competing against Google is unquestionably difficult, especially when all of the other major players in the market are supporting them.

It may be possible for Mozilla to keep Firefox alive for quite some time, but life support only lasts so long when developers and community members start leaving for competing products.

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Microsoft was sitting on single-digit market share for years before finally succumbed. And now they are preaching?

And a healthy competition is always a good thing. Google's monopoly can bring all kinds of trouble, from AD nightmare, to reduced browser quality.We already see how they bury YouTube in AD-s, and who's to say there won't be a paid version of Chrome?
 
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"As Firefox continues to lose users to Chromium-based browsers, Mozilla faces an arduous journey ahead to keep the project alive. A Microsoft developer is calling on Mozilla to admit defeat and join Google on the Chromium project. "

Sounds more like a paid infomercial by MS & Google than a serious Techspot "article". The real advantage of competing engines is that the focus is on standards compliance ("Acid Tests"). Shrink that down to a single-engine monopoly and it starts to become more about the leading product and how easily it can be "Embraced, Extended and everything else Extinguished". Even the article's author admits that with "Websites will have even less incentive to bother making changes just to ensure Firefox users do not encounter problems." aka 'web-sites should become more lazy and not bother to meet HTML / CSS standards'...

Oh wait, I see now why MS is so eager to bring back IE6's development model (and why Google (an advertising company) would be delighted if the only place you could get extensions for the only web browser in existence is the Google Play Store which coincidentally would then start more aggressively blocking and locking out 'unauthorized' non-Store hosted ad-blocking extensions...) Yup, absolutely no "obvious self interest" there...
 
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Lol by the end of the year, Firefox with WebRender is very likely to be twice as fast as Chrome. Mozilla’s even recently created a modern, fast, multithreaded programming language to rewrite their entire browser in. Why would Mozilla want to switch to something worse??

If there’s no alternative to Chromium, there will only be a minimum amount of work put into to maintaining Chromium (which is kinda what’s happening now tbh). I don’t want a stale browser, tyvm.
 
I'd say...Mozilla, don't loose your identity like Opera has and soon Edge. I've used chrome/opera/maxthon/etc that are like 90% the same just another name and theme slapped over it. I've used alot of browsers and always came back to firefox because it has better compatibility with older sites, saves passwords for them, more options to diagnose/do whatever you want to it, and since they updated the engine to use a multicore CPU it's actually lightning fast, and always used less RAM than it's couterparts (this is not the issue but it adds up). It takes less than a second to start, and around the same to load almost any site that I use daily. One thing that annoys me is that sometime loses the video streaming from YT for example, and I have to reload.
 
Masses move so slowly since some years ago I tried Chrome's one the first stable releases and I actually went and recommended it for many, because it was blazing fast and Firefox was rather slow. Reception was negative and now many don't even consider anything else. Today there are no hinderances other than those questionable web standards when using Firefox, which in my experience have never been a problem in basic use. The very last update 65 speeded up the performance even more and settings menu got better. Customization features are unmatched.

Edge is also good. It's interface is cleverly designed to suit both tablet and mouse users. It is sleak without unnecessities and it performs very well. It is well integrated to Windows ecosystem and easy to get going with if you use Windows. Microsoft should absolutely not abandon their great work so far just because popularity of Edge haven't caught up yet. They have amazing base there.

It would be a major disaster if these two players either one or both succumb to Chromium. Only one web standard owned by a company chasing profit is never good. Web standards will neglet freedom of programming and how web should look and work will be controlled. In the comments was briefly mentioned the Google's Play market that can be used in monetizing the platform and if some add ons or whatever stuff goes beyond a pay wall, you the very browser user will pay for that.

I'm not sure if it's about Chromium too much, most likely not, but Opera and similiar browsers that adobted Chromium look and work all just the same now and it is completely pointless to use anything else than Chrome if you like Chromium for whatever reason. I doubt they are lazy or anything like that, but maybe Google is making customization difficult to maintain between updates on Chromium or something. Hard to say but all I see are clone browsers without personality.

Keep the web free and innovation and development on going by saying no to Chromium!
 
I don't understand the hate on Chromium. Google Chrome? Yes, I can understand the hate on that but Chromium? Chromium is open source!!! If you don't like it, change it. If you don't like Google Chrome go to Vivaldi which is basically Google Chrome without Google but on steroids.
 
I don't understand the hate on Chromium. Google Chrome? Yes, I can understand the hate on that but Chromium? Chromium is open source!!! If you don't like it, change it. If you don't like Google Chrome go to Vivaldi which is basically Google Chrome without Google but on steroids.

You are right chrome is probably a lot worse if we knew what all is in it. however there is lot of google stuff in chromium, like google pay as example. it is still google product under google control. all chromium based browser just build on top google and don't remove the google.

firefox is for the people not the profits . they don't need huge market shares to be justified like a microsoft does. they doing it for the peoples and many peoples do appreciate. especially in a time where google is taking over the internets.
 
Microsoft, just because you FAILED at making a good browser, doesn't mean we need to. We're not going to give up on our users.
 
Why anybody in their right mind would listen to the sh!t that comes out of Redmond these days, is completely beyond me.
 
I don't particularly care for Google as a company, but Chrome is a damn solid browser. I've tried Firefox for years and years and continue to try it, but it continues to crash for me. FF just doesn't work well in my experience. I totally get the idea of having competition but the lack of a standard resulting in incompatibilities has always been an annoyance.
 
Microsoft chump gets viciously ratioed on Twitter for advocating a Chrome monopoly, and TechSpot somehow gulps it down completely unquestioningly
 
From time to time, I try other browsers, just to see if I'm not missing something, and I always discover that I'm missing something, and that something is Firefox, and I always come back to Firefox, within a few minutes to a few hours. It's been like that for years and years and ...

I must admit it has a special place in my heart.
 
I don't believe Micro$lop should tell FF Mozilla what to do since M$ merely copies or buys its rivals and lack real development power and knowledge. M$ might be much better at selling, but FF makes a better browser than Edge/ IE / whatever they are going to call their crappy browser now.....
 
So a M$ dev rants to another corporation how to make together the new IE6 V2.
Let the new browsers become Credge/Crie but we also need Crox. We already have Cropera.
 
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