Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Posted Dec 6, 2018 19:26 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
Parent article: Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

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.