Thank you, Chris

I use DDG almost exclusively and I haven't noticed the difference.

If having Google as the default search is so important, couldn't they just make it the default without the deal?

Okay, I'll bite.

Having two implementations of a browser engine is a good thing. Without competing implementations, we're writing Chrome apps, not web apps. The important difference there is that monopolies are self-sustaining and that competition prevents Google from exercising complete control over the Web without some other player having a say in it.

I think you might realize this, although your GitHub post was inflammatory and showed little understanding of why monocultures are a bad thing. Unfortunately, while I'm not intimately familiar with either codebase, I don't think it's an economically viable solution to pick and choose Chromium or Blink components to integrate into Gecko. Skia (for example) is sufficiently decoupled from Blink (having been written before Chrome was released) that it's more efficient to include it instead of rewriting a custom graphics library for Firefox. The same is not true of most parts of Chromium.

> Open source is about mutualising working force, creating together synergies and about NOT duplicating efforts and reinventing the wheel.

I don't think this is a standard way of looking at open source. Reinventing the wheel is not what Firefox is doing; it's been around longer than Chrome has! Competition fosters innovation.

> I am not asking mozilla to drop everything, to jump on the chromium ship, to improve it through beautiful collaboration, to bring the best strengths of gecko to chromium for the benefit of everybody and to maintain a soft fork of chromium to apply patch where mozilla disagree with some political choices. Sadly I am not asking for such a collaboration as I believe that mozilla is not ready for that even if it is the rational choice for a greater good (user experience).

You and most people on HN seem to have differing opinions as to the "greater good". A "beautiful collaboration" is a solid concept, but all it would do would be to allow Google to exercise more control over the Web.

> Does this means that mozilla has to continue duplicating each feature in gecko? That the feature gap between blink and gecko will continue to increase until webmasters decide it's too much and ask FF users to install a browser that supports modern web standards? And once it happen, the decades of works put into gekco will be useless for ever?

You seem to see a much larger gap between Chrome and Firefox than the rest of us do. Do you have some examples of "modern web standards" that Firefox can't implement?

Your idea of the "missing features" in Firefox needs some actual evidence before I can take your argument seriously.

"Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality. "

Sadly I agree. I use DDG almost exclusively but when ever I use "!g" I often get better results there.

Using chance to comment, even though I like Firefox a lot and writing this comment from Firefox, I am switching to Chrome in Android.

Every time when I need to pay something web sites redirect me to my bank site, which has good mobile app, Firefox doesn't open necessary app, which forces me to log in again and again from browser, Chrome opens banking app, where I already have all things set up.

This is one example of how Firefox Android is annoying, please fix, or keep losing 90% of your market share, because people on mobile want this simple feature by default.

Mozilla, please oh please have Firefox Sync support Multi-account containers. I have way too many settings and redirects configured with MAC and Cookie Auto-Delete to work with MAC that I dread having to switch to another computer.