Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium [LWN.net]

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 6, 2018 18:41 UTC (Thu) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link] (13 responses)

So much for standards. W3C can now just publish the de facto: "all Web standards are defined by their reference implementation, which is Chromium git head."

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 6, 2018 18:46 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (9 responses)

Mozilla Firefox has a even more important role to play to make sure

a) They provide an alternative implementation of these standards given that they now are the only major browser left with one that is not WebKit based ultimately
b) They do so without requiring users to sacrifice features or performance

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 6, 2018 19:20 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

Mozilla needs to do some introspection (and firing) after its marketing department's latest brain damaged move this week, or we may end up on a one-browser web sooner rather than later.

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 6, 2018 23:51 UTC (Thu) by TheGopher (subscriber, #59256) [Link] (2 responses)

Could you elaborate? You made me curious.

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 7, 2018 7:11 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

They sent a spam email out directly to addresses people used for the browser-sync function, advertising some concert in the US. My honeypot address didn't receive it this time around, but I've heard other people who already clicked every opt-out weren't so lucky.

If it wasn't so close to the 1-year anniversary of the last time they abused trust to spam their users (mass pushing *an addon* to advertise some US TV show) I'd have probably let it slide.

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 7, 2018 16:26 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

It's bonkers. If Moz laid off their marketing department (or just told them to stay the hell away from FF), it seems like there's a decent chance their numbers would turn around. How many own-goals can they score?

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 6, 2018 20:43 UTC (Thu) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link] (3 responses)

> they now are the only major browser left with one that is not WebKit based ultimately

How much do the chromium-based and non-chromium based webkit browsers share these days?

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 7, 2018 1:33 UTC (Fri) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (2 responses)

WebCore, the rendering engine, and also WTF, the web template framework, were identical five and a half years ago. Of course things have diverged massively in that time, and Chromium has reformatted all the code and moved it all around, but there is unmistakable common heritage.

Chromium is undeniably in better shape due to the multiple order of magnitude difference in manpower, but WebKit is still actively developed, strategically supports new standards, and can render most pages well. WebKit remains by far the better option for embedding because, unlike Chromium and Gecko, WebKit provides a system library with stable API and ABI.

If you're concerned about monoculture, support WebKit by using a WebKit-powered browser like Epiphany and reporting bugs. (Alternately, support Mozilla by using Firefox.) Or even contribute if you have the time and inclination: it's open source, after all, and it's quite a shame that there's almost zero developer community outside the developers from Apple, Igalia (my employer, we are hiring), and Sony's PlayStation team.

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 7, 2018 15:00 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (1 responses)

> If you're concerned about monoculture, support WebKit by using a WebKit-powered browser like Epiphany and reporting bugs. (Alternately, support Mozilla by using Firefox.)

I'm putting in a plug for Basilisk, based on Goanna. I've been using it for about three months now with no real problems. One caveat: it's considered beta, so I wouldn't recommend it for financial transactions.

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 11, 2018 12:28 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If it's based on pre-Servo Firefox presumably it has not very much in the way of sandboxing either.

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 7, 2018 16:00 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I've always used Firefox as my main desktop browser, and I've now switched on my mobile devices also. A Web monoculture with Google essentially controlling everything is not good.

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 10, 2018 14:32 UTC (Mon) by metan (subscriber, #74107) [Link] (2 responses)

Funny thing is that Firefox apparently borrowed sandboxing code directly from chrome, I've even got some error messages that contained "chromium" string when I started Firefox in terminal. Which makes me wonder if browsers really became so complex that there is really only one company left on the planet that can fully develop one.

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 10, 2018 14:43 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

We've certainly come a long way from Tim Berners-Lee's original idea that it should be possible to write either a web browser or a web server in an afternoon (or possibly weekend, I don't quite remember).

Monoculture ahoy!

Posted Dec 17, 2018 4:03 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

The Firefox sandboxing code has evolved quite far from the original Chromium import.

Even Google didn't develop Chromium from scratch of course. They started with Webkit and forked it later.

It's not clear there's ANY company left on the planet that could "fully develop one" from scratch. Which is a problem.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 6, 2018 18:46 UTC (Thu) by osma (subscriber, #6912) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh wow. After so many years of web developers hunting down IE bugs, Microsoft is finally giving up on browser engine development. Not that Chromium and Firefox are perfect, but this should ease the pain quite a lot.

I found a bit more information here:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125238/microsoft-chr...

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 7, 2018 1:43 UTC (Fri) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

Finally the DOJ can rest

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 6, 2018 19:26 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (18 responses)

For the health of the web ecosystem I would have preferred they team up with Mozilla instead of Chromium, but I understand why they didn't as that would leave them in the same basic position of needing to enhance Firefox to host Electron apps instead of needing to enhance Edge, it would be the same work either way and integrating Chromium is the path of least resistance.

As someone else said that basically makes Chromium _the_ reference implementation of the web and the "standards" are even more of an afterthought. Where that leaves Firefox is at the complete mercy of whatever patron (Google) wants to keep them on life support to make it look like there is a competitive, standards based marketplace for browsers, when there is not. Mozilla has been trying desperately to diversify their support but that chance to be truly independent seems further and further remote.

This could be great for Electron app developers though, to make them a first-class citizen on Windows with a shared runtime, and that might also be useful for GNOME Web (Ephiphany). Its funny how much of the modern world was tried by Mozilla (eg. xul-runner vs Electron) but they were just too early and weren't able to get the traction they needed.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 7, 2018 1:51 UTC (Fri) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (7 responses)

Chromium was already the reference implementation of the web. Firefox's market share is too low to matter anymore (it only looks significant if you exclude mobile devices), as was Edge's. The legacy abandoned Internet Explorer actually has better market share to this day than Edge does. A shame, because Edge is a beautiful browser and a genuine pleasure to use when I use my father's Windows laptop, but I suppose it will still be a prettier wrapper around Chromium....

As one of the developers of Epiphany, why do you think this might possibly be good for it? Trying to compete with the existing Chrome monoculture is no longer fun, and that monoculture just became a tad bit stronger.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 7, 2018 21:54 UTC (Fri) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (5 responses)

I did not realize firefox's market share had fallen quite so much. Still works great for me, though, at home, and at work. It's built-in json pretty-fier always has me telling ppl to "open that in Firefox". The developer tools seem equivalent-enough to Chrome.

Of course, I was happy with it back when it was just "Mozilla", and remember how fast it got when it became "Phoenix". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 7, 2018 22:26 UTC (Fri) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (4 responses)

Firefox's market share still look OK (not good, but OK, like ~10%) if you consider only desktop. Sadly, it's not a competitor on phones and overall market share is down to ~5%. For comparison, Chromium is hovering around ~65% and only trending further upwards....

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 7, 2018 22:52 UTC (Fri) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link]

Those mobile numbers sadly don't reflect the fact that Firefox has an edge there over Chrome: easy ad-blocking without ridiculous proxy server contortions.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 8, 2018 7:10 UTC (Sat) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that iOS essentially only allows third party "browsers" to be Safari wrappers.

Do they still set their own User-Agent? Or is "Firefox" counted as MobileSafari on these devices? (Apologies: my iOS knowledge is about 9 years old...)

And even if they don't -- why would you use Firefox on iOS if you can't use all the extensions that a real Firefox version can?

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 28, 2018 13:17 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

For Firefox Sync, or for the better UI, for example.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 28, 2018 15:09 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I used an iPhone for a few months this year[1] and I would have wished for basically any other browser than the stock one. However, I wasn't getting an Apple ID, so I was stuck with it. There were very few things that were tempting about the thing and half of those have been fixed with Android Pie. The fixed one is the battery saver behavior (it is now restored after unplugging power even if at 100%). The other is more up to hardware manufacturers in that the iPhone had a better vibrate motor, but the Pixel 3's is at least better than previous Android phones if not as good as iPhone's. Pretty much everything else was bad to awful in my experience and I can see how the app store gets away with so many for-pay apps that do what I'd expect the base apps to just support.

[1]My previous phone was busted and I was waiting for the Pixel 3 to be released. An iPhone 5C was all they had at the mobile store I was at (not even a flip phone).

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 17, 2018 4:11 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

That's a bit too much of an all-or-nothing view.

Firefox still matters to the extent that Web developers test in Firefox and fix bugs that affect only Firefox users --- and a lot still do. And Safari is still very important of course.

Furthermore, this is not just an issue of raw market share numbers but also of culture. "We only need it to work in IE, er, Chromium" is a meme as much as a business decision. So best not to run around asserting we have a monoculture.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 10, 2018 9:52 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (9 responses)

Add to that, that Mozilla has been slavishly following Google decisions for years, without bothering to nurture any form of independent community or ecosystem.

If they want to have any form of solid independent userbase they need to actually care about other things that cloud giant websites (all the uncool stuff users need that has other applications than watching youtube), they need to take a stance on issues like video codecs and DRM, they need to deliver a browser that protect their users from web and cloud abuses (user data slurpers, trackers, and other antifeatures), they need to care about third-parties that try to embed their web engine in other apps.

If their only compass is “do what Google says is good for the Internet, years late and with new bugs” who is going to care about them? What Google says is good for the Internet is good for Google first, second, and third. With sometimes a few nice side-effects for others to help pass the pill.

Mozilla is rich, astoundingly rich by free software standards, and they've been squandering this money for years on pretty much everything except making Firefox a great browser.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 10, 2018 10:55 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (6 responses)

> they've been squandering this money for years on pretty much everything except making Firefox a great browser.

I disagree. What about all the work on the performances? On the Quantum project? On the Servo engine? The Firefox's performances were drastically improved during the last 2-3 years.

Case in point : 2 years ago I created an entry in the bugzilla because I was impacted by a severe slowness when using the search function on my webpage.
Link : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330375

At the time here is what I saw when I compared Chrome and Firefox :

Chrome 55.0.2883.87 (on Ubuntu 16.04) : 4 seconds
Firefox 50.1.0 (on Ubuntu 16.04) : 22 seconds

Now, 2 years later, my bug report is closed because code was pushed into Firefox to solve this performance problem.
When I do the same search on my webpage :

Chromium 71.0.3578.80-1 (on Arch Linux) : 4 seconds
Firefox 63.0.3-1 (on Arch Linux) : 0 second

Instant result on Firefox instead of the same performance than 2 years ago for Chrome!!!

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 10, 2018 20:35 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (3 responses)

While Quantum is nice it's basically a "fix the performance gap with Chrome" effort. So while implementation is fresh and performant, it does not showcase any vision for the browser other than "do the same things as Google, years later".

A browser needs to be performant to stay relevant, but that is not sufficient to shape the web future. It also needs to help people solve new problems. Mozilla is not helping anyone solve new problems today, it is solving the problems Google already decided to tackle (usually successfully) in Chrome.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 11, 2018 12:42 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

While Quantum is nice it's basically a "fix the performance gap with Chrome" effort. So while implementation is fresh and performant, it does not showcase any vision for the browser other than "do the same things as Google, years later".

"Write the browser in a better language than C" seems like a vision to me, particularly when they wrote the better language too.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 12, 2018 10:47 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

It's a dev vision, it's not a web vision.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 14, 2018 11:28 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

Andecdote: Firefox is faster than Chrome when I'm browsing huge HTML files generated by Robot Framework test runs.

(There's some javascript for opening/closing report nodes. They work instantly in Firefox, and take several seconds in Chromium.)

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 11, 2018 8:34 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

How about making user-friendly changes, which would drastically separate them from chrome?

Let users easily resize badly laid out pages.
Let users easily fix broken low-contrast designs.
Let users stop carousels (these are on the way out finally) or autoplay videos.

There are so many easy wins, but Firefox is not pursuing them.

Heck Firefox/Mozilla *never* addressed the single most popular ever ticket in bugzilla, the request to use external editors for textareas and similar. In fact, they killed the sane solutions for this that grew up in the extensions space.

There's a lot of room to make a better browser for users, and they aren't really trying.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 11, 2018 10:57 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> Let users easily resize badly laid out pages.
> Let users easily fix broken low-contrast designs.

Isn't that basically what Reader View does? (https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/reader-view/)

> Let users stop [...] autoplay videos.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1222694#answe... says Firefox 63 has new preferences to disable autoplay, and soon they should have proper UI for it.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 17, 2018 4:29 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

It's nonsense to say that Mozilla "slavishly follows Google". For example:

Mozilla fought Google's proprietary PNaCl (+Pepper) for years, eventually defeating Google and forcing them to adopt Webassembly (which is an evolution of Mozilla's asm.js and much more standards-friendly).

Mozilla took a stance against H.264, unlike Google, but users didn't care, so they had to cave on it after a few years. They contributed a ton of work to AV1 and Opus which are winning the war for free video and audio codecs respectively. Users don't care about DRM either but Mozilla has an easy off-switch for DRM, and a privacy-friendly sandboxed DRM implementation that even downstream Firefox derivatives can use.

Mozilla resisted Google's non-standardized WebP for a long time but is probably going to have to cave on that, because Web developers and users don't care.

Mozilla has resisted supporting the non-standard WebSQL for a long time (and saved themselves a nasty remote code execution bug thanks to that), even though Google and Apple both support it. Not sure if they'll be able to keep resisting it.

Firefox has built-in blocking of tracking scripts that you can easily enable in preferences (Tracking Protection). Firefox nightly blocks third-party cookies. Mozilla is working on blocking more stuff by default.

Faced with the thread of Google taking over the Web, some people choose to focus their complaints on how Mozilla isn't doing everything exactly the way they think it should be done. These armchair generals of course have incompatible ideas about what Mozilla should be doing.

> they've been squandering this money for years on pretty much everything except making Firefox a great browser.

Even during the FirefoxOS era, where this complaint had most merit, Mozilla spent more than $100M a year on making Firefox a great browser.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 22, 2018 5:26 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

> Mozilla resisted Google's non-standardized WebP for a long time but is probably going to have to cave on that, because Web developers and users don't care.

We do care, the length of bug 18574 and the years of campaigning around it leaves no room for doubt there.

But as demonstrated in that bug, Mozilla would rather lead third-party library devs on a death march over 64KB of download size than allow independent open formats to exist on the web.

We don't care much for abusive relationships.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 6, 2018 21:15 UTC (Thu) by mangix (guest, #126006) [Link]

Uhhhh isn't it early for April fool's?

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 6, 2018 21:17 UTC (Thu) by kjp (guest, #39639) [Link]

$10 says they fork it within two years.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 6, 2018 22:40 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

Mozilla's response: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/12/06/goodbye-edge/

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Jan 31, 2019 8:56 UTC (Thu) by mviina (guest, #130071) [Link]

Thanks for sharing, good read.

The important question

Posted Dec 7, 2018 2:55 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Will it run ActiveX? ;-)

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 7, 2018 4:23 UTC (Fri) by kenshoen (guest, #121595) [Link] (1 responses)

Isn't it already based on Blink?

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 8, 2018 14:57 UTC (Sat) by Florin65 (guest, #129108) [Link]

I know Google is a major sponsor for Firefox.
Chrome browser might be a good a "uber alles" browser but this have some risks (a unique attacking platform, for example). And of course the Google control/collecting the user data activity too. An "ungoogled-chromium" like browser will better serve this purpose (see the Arch AUR ungoogled-chromium package).

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 8, 2018 23:11 UTC (Sat) by dumjabidehli (guest, #129113) [Link] (4 responses)

Mozilla is a corrupt subsidiary of the evil Google-plex monopoly that must face the Sherman Anti-Trust Act soon. Firefox has so many backdoors to "phone home" to their servers and Google as well that it cannot be trusted.

The W3C is also corrupt and has created a totally broken WWW of Ajax hell and DRM spyware. Yes, the W3C takes lots of payoff cash from Microsoft and the other evil tech monsters. Microsoft uses the "OSS" claim as another lie to market their spyware browser.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 9, 2018 12:35 UTC (Sun) by LightDot (guest, #73140) [Link] (2 responses)

Do you have any factual sources for these claims?

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 9, 2018 15:31 UTC (Sun) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Guest user with very recent user number.

Did not link to any such factual sources in their initial post.

Blames "Ajax hell" on the W3C rather than on the programmers who embedded Javascript interpreters in web browsers, as if they think that the browser developers at the time Javascript was introduced would have given a damn whether the W3C approved such things or not.

I think it's safe enough to assume they don't that asking is a waste of breath :)

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 9, 2018 18:35 UTC (Sun) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

I think they confused firefox with chrome. Radio Yerevan style.

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 11, 2018 21:02 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Take this in the context of my existing mixed opinions of them: I'm more inclined to trust Mozilla in spite of all they've done than a rando leaping out of the shadows to breathlessly soapbox with implied scare quotes around every word. You're just adding noise.