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Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?
Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?
Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?
Having one browser engine dominate the web is not a good thing. If there was ever a terrible zero day found everyone would be in trouble.
Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
Fireforks
Liarfox: Even more corporate shitfuckery and deception.
Firefux: Porn optimised browser.
endless possibilities.....
Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.
Consider our current situation:
- The spec is largely influenced by the same big tech companies that develop the engines
- Major engines (Blink, WebKit, Gecko) are all open source
- Significant engineering resources are dedicated to maintaining compatibility
What's the actual benefit of this redundancy? In other domains, we often consolidate around reference implementations. While I understand the historical and theoretical arguments for implementation diversity (preventing monoculture, fostering innovation, avoiding vendor lock-in), I wonder if these benefits still outweigh the costs in 2025.
I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on whether maintaining multiple engines is still the optimal approach for the web ecosystem, or if we're just perpetuating technical debt from an earlier era.
It is an indictment on the state of the web that regardless of Mozilla's missteps, Firefox remains the best choice for a secure, open-source web browser that isn't another chromium reskin.
Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not doing much worse than chromium browsers
Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?
Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.
To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.
Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto standards — Dart, and AMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.
Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/
And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having one browser engine dominate the web is not a good thing. If there was ever a terrible zero day found everyone would be in trouble.
Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec? I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own spec, but what is the purpose of having N different implementation of the same spec with their own idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway. Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having one browser engine dominate the web is not a good thing. If there was ever a terrible zero day found everyone would be in trouble.
Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec? I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own spec, but what is the purpose of having N different implementation of the same spec with their own idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway. Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..