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Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

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Re: Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

#71

Post by wayneftw »

There is a lot of Mozilla brigading on these articles, so I think it's important to point out that they're in a very small minority. The vast majority of developers have already voted with their feet on this and the results are in: People don't want Firefox. We want Chrome.

Furthermore, practically nobody is wringing their hands over having a possible "mono-culture" and neither should they be. That's just another Mozilla party line. Every consulting firm I've worked for in the past decade has pretty much ignored Firefox and lived happily with that decision.

Re: Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

#72

Post by javagram »

realusername wrote: post #30
ygra wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromium has been designed to be embedded in other applications. Gecko, as far as I've heard, is a clusterfuck to get working in anything but Firefox.

There's plenty of community forks of Firefox, if a few devs can maintain a fork on their free time, Microsoft has for sure the resources to deal with it.

I don’t think forks are the issue.

MSHTML and EdgeHTML are also used as embedded components in non-browser windows software. (E.g. you can write UWP applications powered by JavaScript and rendering UI using EdgeHTML). Gecko supposedly doesn’t work well for embedding in that context.

Re: Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

#73

Post by kerng »

realusername wrote: post #55
lowercased wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a chat with an MS guy who had some insight on this issue. There was some internal discussion about it, but there were 2 issues re: firefox which led them against it (and they're somewhat related). Firstly, I'm paraphrasing here, but FF isn't as much a business as it is a religion (re: privacy). You can read a lot in to that, but I understood the gist of what they were getting at. Secondly, somewhat relatedly, b…

> Secondly, somewhat relatedly, but consider FF's primary funding/revenue: it's Google I don't get that one because Chromium IS Google, it's not even a primary funding, there's just no separation between the two. They just handed the web business directly to their competitors, no matter how they try to spin it. At least with Firefox, MS could still have influenced the web, with Chromium, there's just no way, they are…

With Chromium they have much stronger cards. It already starts- they are decoupling Chromium from Google services and leverage the core. They are adding features missing in Chromium. Many if these changes Google will have to consider also or look like they dont have their consumers interest at heart and lose share.

Certainly a brilliant move by Microsoft, since 0 money is made by the browser itself it really doesn't matter to them.

Re: Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

#75

Post by lugg »

Vinnl wrote: post #45
gnode wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even Mozilla like Gecko though, hence their effort to replace it with Servo, and for the time-being to replace components of Gecko with stable Servo components in Firefox (the Quantum project).

They're not actively planning to replace Gecko with Servo, but rather to incorporate improvements from Servo into Gecko.

It's a strangler pattern.

They're going to replace gecko piece by piece until it's all servo.

I'm not sure why people are saying they like or don't like gecko. It's just old tech and they're replacing it from the ground up but doing it in a sustainable way.

In the end servo will be dropped and gecko will just be gecko newer version.

Re: Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

#76

Post by fxfan »

aboutruby wrote: post #24
stefan_ wrote: post #3

Disabled "Ad blocking", turned on PlayReady DRM. Bring on the new webbrowsing experience.

Chrome has a built-in ad blocker that blocks the ads Google finds too disruptive for the users: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chromes-built-in-ad-blo...

I'm betting none of those would be an 'Ad by google' in which case this is very unethical (I'm pro adblocking but google is targeting competitors)

Re: Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

#77

Post by classichasclass »

magicalhippo wrote: post #57
skrebbel wrote: post #14

I'm still sad they didn't partner with Firefox instead. It would suit the strategy of The New Microsoft very well to ensure competition in the browser market, and making an Firefox-based Edge plus a Firefox-based Electron clone would've been an amazing way to do that. They've shown competence in embracing, extending, and contributing back to OSS (eg they were instrumental in Nodejs getting to its amazing cross platfo…

How easy is it to embed the Firefox core though? I know several projects embedding Chromium, such as Steam for example. Haven't seen anyone doing the same with the Firefox core.

TenFourFox dev. It's not.

Mozilla used to support embedding, and this is what largely powered Camino and K-Meleon back in the day (embedding Gecko within a native widget toolkit), but disabled this in 4.0 due to maintenance concerns in the service of making it a brave new XULRunner world.

Virtually all of the remaining Firefox and Mozilla derivatives are still essentially XULRunner applications even though XULRunner itself has gone by the wayside. Also do note that many on the list someone else posted are actually forks. TenFourFox, for example, is a heavily modified Firefox 45; Waterfox, Pale Moon and the UXP project are based on Firefox 52. Even K-Meleon today is XUL-based.

Re: Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

#78

Post by treis »

lowercased wrote: post #51
skrebbel wrote: post #14

I'm still sad they didn't partner with Firefox instead. It would suit the strategy of The New Microsoft very well to ensure competition in the browser market, and making an Firefox-based Edge plus a Firefox-based Electron clone would've been an amazing way to do that. They've shown competence in embracing, extending, and contributing back to OSS (eg they were instrumental in Nodejs getting to its amazing cross platfo…

I had a chat with an MS guy who had some insight on this issue. There was some internal discussion about it, but there were 2 issues re: firefox which led them against it (and they're somewhat related). Firstly, I'm paraphrasing here, but FF isn't as much a business as it is a religion (re: privacy). You can read a lot in to that, but I understood the gist of what they were getting at. Secondly, somewhat relatedly, b…

I think that's reading too much into it. They're ditching Edge/IE because they lost the browser wars. Switching to Firefox, who did worse than Edge/IE in that war doesn't make sense. You're just trading one loser for a worse loser.

Re: Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

#79

Post by hsivonen »

l2dy wrote: post #18
nicoburns wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The license is probably a big reason. Firefox is GPL, so Microsoft wouldn't be able to add any proprietary components to it.

> Firefox source code is free software, with most of it being released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 2.0. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox , it's released under MPL. But sure it's more restrictive than most code in Chromium.

The most restrictive license in both Firefox and Chromium is LGPL. In Firefox, the LGPL bits are carefully walled off in one .so/.dylib/.dll. In Chromium, the most core KHTML bits are LGPL.

As for whether there's a lot of MPL or a lot of BSD code probably doesn't have much practical effect for compliance. In order to comply, it's easier to publish all the code than to try to do the minimum for each component on a per-license basis.

Re: Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

#80

Post by hsivonen »

ygra wrote: post #22
realusername wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it as well, what's the strategy behind that? They just reinforce Google's dominance so one of their main competitor just becomes stronger.

Chromium has been designed to be embedded in other applications. Gecko, as far as I've heard, is a clusterfuck to get working in anything but Firefox.

WebKit was designed to be embedded. Chromium not really despite the CEF and Qt efforts.
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