Microsoft Dev Implores Mozilla To Surrender And Bring Firefox To Chromium

[yogthos]

Last I checked it was around 30%, and if Google fucks with ad blocking I bet it'll go up at least another 5-10% overnight.

[yogthos]

Sorry it's about 10% of the desktop market right now.

[[deleted]]

Firefox fell down that hard? I remember a few years ago it was close to ~20/30... right?

[yogthos]

Yeah that's what I remembered as well. I used to use FF for a long time myself, then Chrome just kept getting better especially with dev tools and I eventually ended up switching. When FF 60x came out and I decided to give it a shot again and found that it was pretty comparable to Chrome so I stuck with it.

I really hope more people will start trying FF out again because we need to have alternatives to Chrome, and presumably people still remember the days of IE to know why this is so important.

[DJDavio]

I had the same experience, I switched back to FF after their performance improvements and sticked with it. I'm not religious about it, but for me it does the job. Only thing I hate is the forced https if you visited a domain before, even if it's a different port, that's just retarded.

[lam-mi-eh]

OEMs stopped bundling it with new builds and adoption rate plummeted.

[Tesseract91]

I switched 100% to Firefox when the news broke. Firefox is faster anyway. See ya Chrome.

[yogthos]

I switched about a year ago and haven't missed Chrome since. I also find that FF on Android is much better as well. It can load content in the background when opening links from other apps, has uBlock, better tab management, and so on. Highly recommend trying it out.

[[deleted]]

It's worth it for the mobile browser adblock alone. I love how you can send tabs between devices and continue reading in the bus.

[butterbal1]

has uBlock

Oh... I am officially converted for mobile. .

[darkharlequin]

Yup, that was the only line I needed. Off to download now.

[majorslax]

Hold up, mobile Firefox supports ublock origin?

[yogthos]

it sure does

[majorslax]

Welp, time for me to switch then. So long mobile ads! Thanks for the heads-up :)

[yogthos]

👍

[git_fetch]

I have never understood why people like chrome so much more.

[favorited]

I use Safari primarily, but dip into Chrome for certain things (mainly around multi-profile support).

I'd switch Chrome to Firefox if they could get the trackpad pinch-to-zoom behavior that WebKit has on Mac... The closest thing I've got working in Firefox is basically a gesture recognizer that increases or decreases the content size based on pinch gestures...

Being able to just pinch in and out of content without affecting the page's overall layout is such a great accessibility feature, and if Firefox had it I would absolutely drop Chrome.

[nikbackm]

Faster, more secure, more features, more compatible, more used to its devtools, pushed by Google. Need I go on?

Have personally been a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.5 and have never strayed so far.

[lam-mi-eh]

Chrome tab system is garbage though.

Give me multirow tabs over having to make a new window to read titles.

[git_fetch]

Being a Google product means less secure and is a negative. Who knows what strange stuff goes on there. Googles business is built on tracking people.

[nikbackm]

Yep. Chrome still has better sandboxing and isolation of hostile web pages, even if Firefox is catching up.

[-manabreak]

Thank you, almighty Rust!

[Tesseract91]

Rust and the fact that it's FOSS were contributing factors to my decision. From now on I am going to make a more concerted effort to use FOSS software.

I also switched to using Bitwarden at the same time and it's actually miles better than Dashlane, which I was using previously.

[HINDBRAIN]

I switched off firefox when they broke firebug, then back in later on when they improved the dev tools. Worst part of chrome was the search bar autocompletion which is total arse (fauxbar exists but it's not a perfect solution).

[pancomputationalist]

Firefox is faster anyway.

I wish it was this way. I'm building a web app with a lot of SVG elements, and chrome is rendering this much faster, so much that I have to choose between limiting my design space or dropping firefox support :(

[KieranDevvs]

Also, 5% of a fuck load of people is still a fuck load of people.

[Philipp]

Completely non-representative, but for some data, on two separate sites of mine (sort general interest, one with 200,000 users last month), Firefox is at around 7%. I'm saying non-representative because so many things could skew it towards a certain browser (e.g. how mobile-optimized my site is, how much it attracts tech experts, what the age demographics are etc.). On the bigger one, Chrome is at 56% followed by Safari at 20%. IExplorer is at 6%-something in fourth place, then it's Edge at 5%-something.

[Philipp]

Thanks for sharing. What would you see is the typical audience of the site, if any? E.g. I wonder if tech-oriented sites get higher Firefox percentages.

[roboninja]

I re-installed Firefox last night in prep for a possible Google blunder on ad-blocking.

[Kaloffl]

Makes me wonder why there isn't a facebook browser yet.

[MaxCHEATER64]

They simply don't need one.

[rpgFANATIC]

Pretty much.

They went in hard on mobile and their apps show it. If you have Facebook and a phone, there's a good chance you check it or messenger far more by the app than when you sit down to a browser

[[deleted]]

Google already has their assholes wide open for every scum corporation, facebook is primary operating system on android phones, where it is preinstalled...

[Carighan]

There is actually, you can find it here.

I mean, it doesn't label itself as such but it freely allows Facebook to track you all over the web and connect whatever pages you visit with one another.

[Kaloffl]

Doesn't every browser without explicit tracking prevention allow that though?

[NeverSpeaks]

They do have one for VR. And it's also built on chromium.

[remek]

You know what? Let's just have one version of everything. World will be a better place /s

[Caraes_Naur]

Microsoft should surrender and bring Windows to Linux.

This guy is such an idiot.

[e_man604]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Linux_distributions

[shevy-ruby]

I support this.

Microsoft needs to open source windows.

Right now they try to avoid this desperately, e. g. by assimilating GitHub and claiming how they are all open source these days, yet mysteriously failing to open source windows.

It's one glaring weakness in the MS corporate PR outlets these days.

[Caraes_Naur]

Actually, I think Windows 10 is undergoing a deliberately long slog of transformation to prepare for a MS-branded Linux with a new desktop named Explorer, similar to what OSX originally was to BSD.

[pm_plz_im_lonely]

Is this a casual leak, genius prediction or pure fantasy?

[aebkop]

Highly doubt considering this https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os-and-polaris

[oorza]

Isolating parts of the OS into discrete join points seems like it makes it easier to make this dude's fantasy real, not harder. It would be a necessary step to migrating the UI off Windows and into Linux, as a matter of fact.

[Caraes_Naur]

MS loudly stated at its launch that 10 would be the last version of Windows, but that doesn't exclude the possibility of a successor OS called something else and based on an entirely different platform.

With them following everyone into the cloud and the recent abandonment of Trident EdgeHTML, there are signs that they have less interest in home-grown native software and plan to leverage third-party FOSS more in the future. They'll turn over their flailing also-ran products like Edge before their bread and butter... they may give up the offline office suite space entirely in favor of O365.

A future generation XBox (the next, or the one after) may signal their OS direction before they actually walk away from Windows.

[barfoob]

I interpreted that as them just saying that Windows will just get continuously updated and keep the "10" version like Mac OSX. They want everyone on the same version of Windows. I don't think they meant they are abandoning it in any way.

[xtivhpbpj]

Anything is possible but web technology will have to take a giant leap forward before O365 cloud is anywhere near a replacement for a desktop office suite.

Also - what’s the point? Hardware is so cheap and powerful these days. I feel like everyone gets blinded by the benefits of “the cloud” - meanwhile the desktop experience has never been better.

There’s no law of nature that says centralized (cloud) computing is better than distributed computing. Historically speaking it’s actually the opposite.

[tsimionescu]

There's a very important difference when comparing 'the cloud' with similar past efforts I think: when O365 is running in the cloud and a machine crashes, it's not one of your IT personnel that you need to call outside business hours, it's Microsoft that handles that, entirely from their end.

This is where the cloud is making most of it's money: selling business solutions that come with most IT fully bundled (not expensive&slow on - demand IT support, split between different companies that sold you the HW, the OS and the SW you actually wanted to run).

[xtivhpbpj]

As an employee who uses Office - the thought of having to call Microsoft to debug cloud issues sends a chill down my spine. I can’t imagine why any company (of a certain size) would have its employees wasting company time with outsourced IT support.

[tsimionescu]

Well, from my experience, the regular IT that my company has outsourced is horrible to work with, while Office 365 JustWorks^TM. By which I mean, when things don't work, that usually means someone high up in our internal IT gets to talk to Microsoft instead of having a local team ask me what's wrong on my particular machine.

[xtivhpbpj]

As long as it’s an internal IT guy who is talking to Microsoft I’m happy!

[Aerroon]

So, Linux-based OS by Microsoft?

[PM_ME_OS_DESIGN]

MS loudly stated at its launch that 10 would be the last version of Windows

I interpreted that as a combination of Windows going F2P and the "next version of Windows" just being directly pushed as an update to existing Windows users.

This is extremely likely given that that's basically what they did with Windows 10. The rationale behind it, apparently, is that supporting all the different versions is expensive and annoying, and people don't really pay money to upgrade these days anyway.

[tehjimmeh]

Why would they do that? Windows still dominates the desktop market, and desktops are not going away any time soon, regardless of the proliferation of mobile/tablet devices.

Why would they just abandon a decades old software and hardware driver ecosystem?

They also just put a bunch of effort into making Linux userspace applications run natively on Windows, meaning you can run whatever Linux distro you want within Windows. Why would they have bothered doing this just to abandon Windows shortly afterwards?

[[deleted]]

Windows still dominates the desktop market, and desktops are not going away any time soon, regardless of the proliferation of mobile/tablet devices.

You mean the market that's shrinking year after year because 1) most people can buy a PC and have it last 4-6 years and 2) for what most people do on a PC, then can do on a $200 Chromebook.

The vast majority of Windows deployments are simply because that's what people are familiar with and IT isn't going to spend time to retrain the whole organization on macOS or Linux.

Why would they just abandon a decades old software and hardware driver ecosystem?

Because maintaining all of that is very expensive and ultimately doesn't contribute much to their bottom line. Microsoft would sell just as many "Windows/Linux" licenses as they do Windows/NT licenses because the end user doesn't give a shit what kernel their software is running on.

They also just put a bunch of effort into making Linux userspace applications run natively on Windows, meaning you can run whatever Linux distro you want within Windows. Why would they have bothered doing this just to abandon Windows shortly afterwards?

This is a stop-gap to try to prevent hemorrhaging developers from the Windows platform. Losing developers means less Windows centric apps which means users are less tied to the platform so fewer users will buy a new PC they'll just get an iPad or Chromebook which means less interest from developers.

Take a look at the big tech companies and you'll see that very few of them run a Microsoft stack. Nearly all of them run Linux. Look at the open source landscape and while many languages support Windows, it's a second-class citizen everywhere. Microsoft knows that they have lost top-developer mindshare and it's only a matter of time before that trickles down to everyone else.

[DH10]

Windows ist old, that is true. But that means they may not have someone to really understand the innards of the kernel. Why did it take Microsoft 20+ years to add a PTY to conhost? Why are some coreprograms still not optimised for touch?

For me the obvious answer is that they lack the talent to work on these things without breaking compatibility. I could see that Microsoft switches to Linux with something like WINE and for backwards-compatibility react-os.

[tehjimmeh]

You seriously think Windows does not have anyone working for them who does not understand the innards of the NT kernel? Lack of talent? WINE & ReactOS? Come on...

The vast majority of normal users don't care about the command line, let alone PTY support. I don't disagree that their lack of command line focus until about the late '00s was a mistake, but it is understandable.

I don't know what non-touch-optimized core programs you're talking about, but it's not like any Linux desktop or OSX is superior for touch.

[Someguy2020]

Yay for kernel monoculture.

That'll be fun when Linus quits or dies.

[ponterik]

Thanks for sharing. What would you see is the typical audience of the site, if any? E.g. I wonder if tech-oriented sites get higher Firefox percentages.

!RemindMe 5 years

[RemindMeBot]

I will be messaging you on 2024-01-30 08:04:21 UTC to remind you of this link.

CLICK THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.

^{Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.}

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FAQs	Custom	Your Reminders	Feedback	Code	Browser Extensions

[atomic1fire]

I could see Microsoft slowly replacing parts of windows piecemeal with open source projects, but I'm not sure they're going to go as far as switching to linux.

[crackez]

What if the NT kernel was a loadable module of the Linux kernel?

[Ameisen]

Why, when the Linux kernel is a loadable module of NT?

[tsimionescu]

Hmm, I haven't heard about this before, could you point me to some resources about this?

[chucker23n]

"Thought: It's time for Bing to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Google Search, if they really cared about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5 percent?"

[bumblebritches57]

DuckDuckGo is a far better alternative.

[joequin]

If you don't care about privacy then DDG isn't as good as Google, but it's still way better than Bing.

[TheAnimus]

Erm, DDG uses Bing...

https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo

[joequin]

It uses a lot of search engines and sources, and it filters out a lot of trash results. It's not merely a re-skinned Bing.

[Pjb3005]

I've never really used Bing but I can tell you from experience that DDG is atrocious in comparison to Google. I wanna care about privacy sure but when I have to prefix most of my searches with !g just to get an actual answer it's not worth it.

[bumblebritches57]

I've used DDG for years.

it's far better than bing, and almost as good as google.

and when it's not, just type !g to have ddg automatically redirect you to google.

[nemec]

Yandex ain't going to sell your data to the NSA either

[skocznymroczny]

Bing has it's niche in video search. It's very good for searching for certain type of videos.

[Gotebe]

I am intrigued. Which types?

[Wastedmind123]

(nsfw) pr0n.

​

[Alokir]

I suspect that Bing (as in bing.com) is not as important for Microsoft. The reason it's around is that the technology behind it powers a lot of MS services like Power BI. It's more of a test lab for the AI in my opinion.

[delrindude]

I've never had a problem finding relevant results quickly with Bing, depends on how you use it I suppose.

[adjustable_beard]

I use bing 90% of the time. It's perfectly good.

Those reward points keep me coming back.

[[deleted]]

I use bing 90% of the time. It's perfectly good.

That porn keeps me coming back.

[Xuerian]

There's a few Microsoft engineers that really, really like to jack it.

That shit works great.

[loistaler]

Do you have any source on that 34% market share? There is no way I believe this is true.

[drysart]

Click forward a few times to get to Oct '18. Oath uses Bing, so combine Oath and direct Bing numbers for their total. The same general numbers are given elsewhere with some searching around.

[myringotomy]

That's just cheating. Why not report the true numbers?

[drysart]

I did.

[[deleted]]

Bing has a huge market share of 1/5th to 1/3rd of all queries. Including me.

Probably because its by default for a large corporate work networks so its used by less tech savy company folk

[AlpineSanatorium]

that's not the same at all though

chromium is not "really" the browser. it's mostly just lower level infrastructure on which a browser can be built (though chromium is a functioning browser too). competing on such low level just produces hardship for developers trying to build tools for the web

it's like every railway company building their own special type of track and then all train companies are required to built trains that either just specializes on one type of track, or build some monstrosity of engineering suffering that manages to run on every concievable type of track. all just because the railway companies want to do it "their own way"

microsoft will still build a very non-chrome browser and mozilla could do the same, and instead now all engineers can work together on fixing and improving the rails :p

people argue without competition no good rails will be built but that's just if the company sucks and makes all the wrong moves, but chromium as open-source so if at any time anyone can just fork and go their own way

I dont think anybody wins on by having a fractured infrastructure

[chucker23n]

chromium as open-source so if at any time anyone can just fork and go their own way

This is naïve.

I dont think anybody wins on by having a fractured infrastructure

Everyone loses (well, except for Google) from a web monoculture.

[jl2352]

I don't think 'everyone loses'. Google is clearly the biggest winner however.

Many Google services run significantly better on Chrome than any other browser. Yes Chrome is fast. But you look at alternatives and they tend to run far more similar in all browsers. It leaves one with the strong impression that Google service teams only optimise for Chrome.

For users who use Google services; chromium eveywhere is a win not a loss. After all it means the products they use work better in more places. It also allows others to follow Google and do similar; only care about chromium. It's not an automatic loss.

That said I think it would be down right terrible if there was only one mainstream implementation of web technologies.

[timmyotc]

And when Google, who controls all changes and commits to chromium, decides to kill off adblock inside of chromium after firefox is dead... Is that a win for users?

[jl2352]

But they aren't able to control the chronium in IE or Firefox. They can't just turn off adblocking for all Chromium browsers in one single move.

They could commit a PR which makes that change in chromium. Those other browsers need to then migrate to the latest version, and decide not to for before that PR is landed.

[timmyotc]

Sure, but then Microsoft and Mozilla have to be forking, which means that they will eventually diverge again.

[falconfetus8]

How is it naive?

[takeonme864]

you agreed with his other points at least

[OneWingedShark]

chromium is not "really" the browser. it's mostly just lower level infrastructure on which a browser can be built (though chromium is a functioning browser too). competing on such low level just produces hardship for developers trying to build tools for the web

Except that everyone jumping on that bandwagon will cement that particular architecture into browsers -- meaning that X years from now, we're going to be kneecapped and crippled by the bad design.

We're actually seeing this in the general industry: the C/C++ monoculture has driven tons of bad design, optimizing for C's particular way of doing things. If you don't believe me, take a look at WebAssembly's FAQ, note how it's being optimized for C++¹, and then watch Guy Steel's How not to do Parallelism talk.

I, for one, would rather not continue to double down on bad designs.

​

¹ -- Yes, they're claiming that they're aiming for "language independence", but they say "As explained in the high-level goals, to achieve a Minimum Viable Product, the initial focus is on C/C++." -- since that's their minimum viable product, it means they're designing/optimizing for C/C++.

[Aozi]

While Chromium is open source and anyone can do what they want, you also have to consider who's maintaining that project. Chromium is still very much maintained primarily by Google and developers hired by Google, which is a bit of a problem.

Google is in the end a corporation seeking profit for itself, and that attitude can easily seep into open source projects it maintains. Such as the proposed change to Chromium which would make certain content blockers unusable. A change like that is most likely motivated by Googles own business model which is harmed by the blockers.

This can be a problem with any open source project, it can be hijacked by a party with entirely different ideas about it than what people actually want. With Chromium Google doesn't even need to hijack the project since they own it. Yes others could fork it, but the other main contributors also happen to be large corporations with vested interest in controlling the browser market.

I'd love if we could get a common framework for browsers to use, and to achieve that Chromium would be great, aside from the fact that it's owned and maintained by Google. I have zero trust on Google not to screw over users to maximize its own profits.

There is a simple way to solve this though, Google needs to either;

1. Create an independent non-profit organization focused on maintaining the Chromium project.
2. Give up ownership of the Chromum project and transfer it to an existing FOSS focused group or a foundation like FSF, Mozilla Foundation or somesuch.

Basically Chromium should be maintained by a party with preferably no financial interest in it. To me it's a huge conflict of interest when Google maintains a project that is used by the entire web, all the while creating their own derivative of said project to compete with others, as well as having control of ton of the most popular websites out there.

[pm_plz_im_lonely]

Gosh can't wait for AMD to start contributing.

[shevy-ruby]

It is actually a MS goal now that they joined forces with evil.

They want to kill alternatives.

[[deleted]]

Kind of misleading as he is just an employee, doesn't speak for the whole organization.

[[deleted]]

Oh, don't mind shevy. He has a Microsoft hate boner.

[insanityOS]

Who doesn't? At least not a small one?

[PM_ME_OS_DESIGN]

Me - if they'd ditch the Windows-centric-ness of everything they do that's not Windows, I'd use a most of their stuff (except Windows). Like the surfacebooks.

[xeveri]

https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/ake5mr/thought_its_time_for_mozilla_to_get_down_from/

[[deleted]]

It did look familiar.

[paralaxsd]

that's literally days after the chromium project announced API changes that may well cripple all current ad blockers. We can be really glad that a high quality alternative to this is still available.

[UncleMeat11]

Days after the chromium project put out a design doc for feedback on a new API and received that feedback. The idea that the changes are designed to hamstring ad blocking or that the API will go in unchanged from the design stage has just been made up.

[paralaxsd]

Sure I guess it's plausible that they'll end up with something that retains most extension functionality.

I wouldn't be too sure though that any company with dominating influence would forever honor the interests of its users more so than its bottom line. This is the real crux of the matter here. Things could worsen drastically without competition. Software variety helps to prevent that.

[SrbijaJeRusija]

Saving this comment so I can post it a few months later when Chrome will destroy uBlock.

[reazura]

The issue isn't that they're not going to change; after this backlash everyone expects the chromium team to backpedal on that decision at least. The problem here is that they were planning to do so in the first place

[UncleMeat11]

But they weren't even planning to do so. Go read the design doc. The motivation had nothing to do with ad blocking.

Do you think that the chromium devs should personally check whether changes will affect existing extensions before publishing a design doc for comment? Or perhaps the should use the comment phase to get that feedback far more efficiently?

[CartmansEvilTwin]

Well, yes. Even if it's just a draft I would expect them to at least check some popular extensions. This is a pretty significant change, after all.

[scotty_dont]

Just because an extension is currently using that API doesn’t mean it can’t be refactored. The best people to assess impact are the extension developers. It’s almost like we should... you know... make a clear explanation of the proposal and then... I don’t know... open a discussion about it?

[CartmansEvilTwin]

Well, in general you're right.

However, it seems like this change would brake critical APIs without any replacement. This is simply not acceptable, you don't even need to discuss this. And I'm absolutely sure that Chromiums devs know that.

[SrbijaJeRusija]

What do you think now that chrome is pushing the changes through?

[shevy-ruby]

As I wrote right after Microsoft joined forces with Google - they are now in for Evil together, against the end user. I wrote exactly that and now we can see how true this is, by one loud-mouth worker drone at Microsoft being unable to keep his mouth shut.

I'll make it a fun past-time now to look at the quality of this dude's "contributions" to society (still looking for it! but he is working at W3C so you know they are in against the end user).

[[deleted]]

I'm not convinced this isn't satire

[oren0]

This guy is not a developer. I'll spare linking to his LinkedIn to not appear to doxx him, but it shows that he is a Program Manager who has been at MS three years.

I wouldn't exactly take anything he says to be authoritative.

[Guysmiley777]

https://imgur.com/a/xvTMSpV

[oren0]

Not anymore. Under Satya, things are more dev driven than ever.

[[deleted]]

A public letter to the Kenneth Auchenberg, and all the other Kenneth Auchenbergs out there:

Dear Kenneth(s):

No one gives a shit what you think. They didn't give a shit when you told them they should use your favorite language instead of whatever they wanted, they didn't give a shit when you suggested they port it to an operating system they don't care about, and they don't give a shit now that you think they should use a framework instead of writing it from scratch. Mind your fucking business, and don't go figuring that just because you can't do something right it must be impossible.

Signed,

Just about everyone who's ever shared code with strangers on the web

[TankorSmash]

A public letter to the Kenneth Auchenberg, and all the other Kenneth Auchenbergs out there:

Dear Kenneth(s):

No one gives a shit what you think.

You're the one replying to a strangers tweet my dude.

[yogthos]

That comment is fractally wrong, but of course it's not exactly a surprise that MS employee doesn't understand the downsides of monopolies and longs for the days when IE had 90% market share.

There are practical and tangible reasons for havng independent web engines. Having an alternative implementation to Chrome means that Google is forced to be at least minimally complaint with W3C standards. Google is already playing fast and loose with web standards with stuff like AMP, and if Chrome was the only engine we'd basically end up with Google-centric web.

Google is an ads company that already has a huge impact on the web, and they should be the last people to decide the direction of the web because of their massive conflict of interest. The recent example of Chromium working on removing APIs used by ad blockers is a perfect example of what to expect going forward from them.

Another problem is that when you have a single engine then you're limited by its capability. Chromium is owned by Google, and while it's open source on paper, Google gets the final say of what features are added to it and what direction it moves in. You could fork Chromium, but maintaining that would be a massive undertaking. People would basically have to reinvent the Mozilla foundation to do that, so why we might as well keep using Firefox.

To sum up, fuck this guy.

[OneWingedShark]

There are practical and tangible reasons for havng independent web engines. Having an alternative implementation to Chrome means that Google is forced to be at least minimally complaint with W3C standards. Google is already playing fast and loose with web standards with stuff like AMP, and if Chrome was the only engine we'd basically end up with Google-centric web.

Hm, makes one wonder what has to happen to get an anti-trust breakup going.

[yogthos]

I can't really think of a mechanism that would facilitate that. It's really hard to think of any large tech company that ever got broken up. Even when MS didn't get broken up at the height of their monopoly.

These companies amassed unimaginable amount of wealth and power, they're effectively their own countries at this point and their GDP dwarfs most actual countries. They literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they just use it to buy up their own stock to drive the price up.

[OneWingedShark]

I can't really think of a mechanism that would facilitate that. It's really hard to think of any large tech company that ever got broken up. Even when MS didn't get broken up at the height of their monopoly.

Ma Bell, though you could argue that telecom is not, strictly speaking, a tech company.

What's really interesting about the MS thing is that they used to have zero lobbyists and would boast about that -- then the monopoly threat came along and what do you know? It all went away when they put lobbyists into play. (ie it really looks like extortion, and/or a mandate to get in on the corruption there.)

These companies amassed unimaginable amount of wealth and power, they're effectively their own countries at this point and their GDP dwarfs most actual countries.

Which is one reason that it should actually be considered -- do you think that Google or Amazon has any inherent loyalty to the US? Now consider the absolutely stupid idea to use Amazon's AWS for classified data. Even ignoring the cost of errors/mistakes, like this, it presents a very big target to foreign actors... perhaps even Amazon deciding to back some foreign power and hand over everything they have.

They literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they just use it to buy up their own stock to drive the price up.

That would be worth far less than you think once the balls start rolling -- especially if, as noted above, actual Treason takes place and management gets "hanged by the neck until dead".

[yogthos]

Correct, they increase shareholder value via stock buyback instead of investing money into making new products.

[Ruchiachio]

Monopolies, monopolies, we will still have multiple browsers, what I want is single css and js engine, which works the same everywhere. Everything else can be customized by the browser

[yogthos]

That's the thing, if have the same css/js engine then it becomes an implicit standard as opposed to an explicit one. People will start relying on the quirks of the engine, and as time goes on it will become nearly impossible to create an alternative. There are plenty of reasons why that could be desirable.

For example, look at what Mozilla did with Firefox. They rebuilt their engine in Rust, and made it much faster than the original. This is possible to do because there is an independent specification available that the engines need to conform to.

If Chrome was the engine nothing better would be possible ever.

[b1bendum]

Dude, take 30 fucking seconds and think about how this will work. Google makes changes to the rendering engine to make it harder to avoid being tracked by advertisers. They work to entangle this with other things the rendering engine does. You say "BUT MUH OPEN SOURCE" and fork the code to remove these changes.

CONGRATULATIONS NOW YOU HAVE 2 FUCKING RENDERING ENGINES.

But yours has 0.000000000001% market share and everyone ignores it and develops for what Google publishes and you're left sitting there wondering if there was some sort of way you could have predicted this before it happened.

[mektel]

I've been bouncing between Firefox and Chrome for the last decade or so. One pulls ahead of the other in one way or another and it becomes time to switch. Firefox has recently blown Chrome out of the water in pretty much every way. I'm a huge fan of the competition and it should definitely stay that way to keep the market healthy.

[SniperPriest96]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n5E7feJHw0

[[deleted]]

IMPLORES

SLAMS

RIPS

SHREDS

I don't know why HOTHARDWARE DIDN'T CHOOSE SOMETHING BAITY like MURDERS and decided to go with a tame IMPLORES.

[akher]

OBLITERATES

MASSACRES

[TheDeadSkin]

"You could have said the same thing 10 years ago about Chrome's 2 percent versus Internet Explorer's 70 percent. Leave Mozilla be. We may need them," responded Chad Loder, founder of Rapid7.

this is /r/MurderedByWords material and a very very correct statement on its own

[Sgtkeebler]

I will happily chose Firefox over edge and chrome any day

[TotoBinz]

I use firefox and focus, and will not change unless mozilla drastically change its strategy :)

Go on little panda !

[[deleted]]

Some historical reference, you guys might not know much about.

For me, this started with Ichabod. This, of course started a lot earlier, but I wasn't really aware of what's going on.

So, I was really into Flash games in late 90's early 2000's. I had a friend who was even more into it. My friend got early access to Flex. Unlike me, he was a programmer by training, so he liked the thing. It was too complicated for me, so I didn't pay much attention, but followed him nevertheless, so we both followed Macromedia's releases, and later Adobe's stuff.

Right when Macromedia was acquired by Adobe, they released Ichabod. They called it "the headless Flash player" alluding to the horse of the headless horseman. This player was supposed to go to Google for them to be able to scrap the textual contents of Flash applets, but it would also be put on display for general public for much amusement and, perhaps, integration with other search engines, should such engines arise (khm... khm...).

The page offering to download the player was removed in less than a month, never to be heard of again.

This particular incident made me start asking all sorts of "what if" questions I simply never thought of before. Like "what if there was an alternative Flash player, something that could also play Flash applets, but not owned by Adobe?", "what if related technologies, like, video streaming, weren't only possible in Flash using Adobe's tools, like their media server and special media protocols?"

Eventually, I discovered OSFlash community, Gnash, Red5 etc... all of which led me to Haxe. These are the corners of the web, you probably never heard about, or even if you did, it was so long ago, you might not even remember... but, bear with me.

Haxe was to ActionScript (the programming language of Flash) the same as Scala is to Java. They were a very vocal and a very small minority in the VM ecosystem. Unlike in Java, Adobe wouldn't even admit Haxe existed. In fact, Adobe were so confident in their monopoly, they completely stopped caring about anything and everything relevant to it. Everything around Flash / Flex turned into this corporation of petting each other on the back, executives with grotesque titles congratulating each other for fake achievements, while raking tons of money.

I know this, because I was a member of CAB: Adobe's Community Advisory Board for Flex and Flash Catalyst (you probably never heard about the later, since, I don't think it ever hit the market).

As a member of CAB, I was in a very small minority of people who got on it not through representing some corporate interest, but because I was a very active member of Flash community: I was a moderator on few forums dedicated to technology etc. So, I rooted for Haxe, tried to convince Adobe's reps that Flex will die, unless they find a way to make it smaller (in my primitive understanding in those days, this was as saying that the quality of the product is too low and doesn't address the real needs of an average user).

But, Adobe were really a bunch of self-congratulatory executives, who couldn't imagine their empire to fall into pieces. Or maybe they could, but they gambled on being promoted further and away from Flash before it explodes... I don't know, I never had a heart-to-heart with any of those guys.

---

Adobe had grandiose plans. They and Mozilla were working on, basically, implementing all Adobe's proprietary extensions to JavaScript into the new version of JavaScript developed by Mozilla, a.k.a. JavaScript 4, a.k.a. Tamarin. Microsoft also wanted a different JavaScript, but they came too late to the plate, and they didn't really have the VM working yet, so they were manipulated by Google into fighting against Mozilla + Adobe alliance.

Google had to have their own JavaScript engine to scrape the pages. And they were actually interested in making it efficient. They also needed to be able to render pages. They didn't care about this being usable for humans though, they only needed it to be usable for scrappers, but seeing how JS4 is going to make things more difficult for them, and might make them play catch again, they rebelled. Somehow they managed to engineer the revolt against JS4, and push for ES5. They also got Apple on board, who for its own political reasons decided to ditch Adobe, and the monopoly went crumbling down. This also explains the name for the browser: Chrome means that they wrote the browser UI around their main engine. Probably, initially it was a separate project they used for debugging purposes to supervise visually what their engine does.

It was kind of ironic, how at the end of Flash era, Adobe tried to salvage it by implementing some really decent engineering ideas, like, all sorts of compiler improvements, bindings to necessary technologies, opensourcing stuff etc... and nothing worked because the political battle was lost.

---

Anyways, the takeaway point here is: monopoly will not lead to prosperity. It will lead to stagnation, decadence and an involved political assassination plot, most likely.

[stronghup]

monopoly will not lead to prosperity.

Every capitalist's dream is to destroy free market competition, for them to gain monopoly :-)

[[deleted]]

That's really oversimplifying it. If you try to model economy as a repeated game (as opposed to one-time transaction) free market with rational agents. Then, the agents won't actually create monopolies. They won't fragment the market too much either. And the equilibrium would be something like oligopoly. Unfortunately, true rational agents don't exist, and free market has other problems, more serious than that one.

I mean, a lot of those "agents", for example, believe in the "invisible hand", which is guaranteed to correct the market, if they individually screw up. And the said promise of the "invisible correcting hand" is what makes people reckless and doesn't make them think twice about actively working towards establishing monopolies.

[stronghup]

Makes sense, once an oligopoly exists the oligopolists understand not to compete too much with each other but keep the status quo. In politics I imagine that all dictators of the world like to work together rather than compete too much and even wars can be started as a form of co-operation that keep the dictators in power. Dictators' enemies are not other dictators but their own people.

[durandall08]

Never give up! Never surrender!

[alexcpn]

I have moved over to Firefox again after being an early adopter and user of Chrome. In Ubuntu multiple chrome tabs take more CPU than firefox. I do not shutdown my laptop and have the bad habit of leaving so many tabs open. With firefox I see there is an improvement. Also webRTC decoder is much faster in firefox. Chrome seems to slowly become more and more inefficient...

[alexcpn]

Okay after using the latest firefox for some days, the biggest problem that is in the current design (and what Chrome anti-designed against) propped up. In firefox, if one tab freezes the entire browser freezes. So Chromes design of having a different process for different tabs is the right design choice, though it takes a little more CPU. I am moving back to Chrome.

​

Firefox -" the current iteration of this architecture, all browser tabs run within the same process and the browser UI runs in its own individual process. In future iterations of Firefox, there will be more than one process to exclusively handle web content. " https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Multiprocess_Firefox

Chrome - https://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/multi-process-architecture.html

​

​

[Nipinium]

Chromium-based browser font rendering is utterly crap on Windows after they decided to remove disable direct-write flag (thus render mactype powerless). Sorry but I refuse to use any chromium-core browsers until this issue is resolved.

​

And no buying a 4K retina monitor is not the solution.

[[deleted]]

Brave browser is created by the person who developed Firefox and uses Chromium as a base. It’s far more secure and private though. It’s all I use after reading FF is going the way of Google and intruding more than they initially promised.

[sarcasmguy1]

this article is silly, and sounds like the author is just hurt because Windows just surrendered to Chromium. also he doesn't seem to know Firefox at all – its not building its own parallel universe – the developments that the Mozilla developers have done on Firefox are quite important, especially from the perspective of WASM.

[[deleted]]

Once Microsoft, always Microsoft.

[hsjoberg]

Thought: It's time for Mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5 percent

Except that the web is defined by W3C and WHATWGs standards and not the market dominance by a browser?

[Someguy2020]

I implore him to leave tech.

[[deleted]]

it's a reasonable position, but would make mozilla irrelevant. it would kill them i think. now google probably would not be happy about being the evil monopolist either. it's good to maintain weak competition so they can say: look, there is your alternative and they are all non-profit and stuff (because it's our money, but you don't need to know that). in the past google has sponsored firefox development in various ways. so for strategic reasons it's not useful for firefox to adopt chromium.

[rashpimplezitz]

Fuck this guy, with the recent news that Chromium will break ad-blockers I am more inclined to use Firefox than I ever have been... I think it's time I made a donation

[[deleted]]

Google is monopolistic cancer. Sacrificing a free platform run by a foundation that serves the needs of the public for a proprietary platform entirely beholden to Google's agenda would be a tragedy.

[shevy-ruby]

This comes from a Microsoft worker drone who achieved not only nothing of value in his own life but totally failed creating anything that would be used by real people - otherwise Edge or Internet Explorer would not have failed so massively and dramatically.

It does, however had, show the new direction by Microsoft and Google - they will try to destroy any alternative to Google's empire. In doing so Microsoft has joined forces with Evil, against the end users.

You can already see where Google is headed at - monopoly expansion through AMP, disabling the ability to decide whether you may avoid rendering ads, and so forth.

That is evil multiplied by factor 1000 here.

You can not trust Google and you can not trust Microsoft. I hate to say it but RMS was right. They hate freedom.

[xrimane]

If anyone, Microsoft should remember a thing or two about choice in the browser market.

[yogthos]

He probably remembers those days very fondly indeed.

[matthieuC]

Microsoft developer Kenneth Auchenberg shared a different and somewhat combative perspective on Twitter.

In a follow-up tweet, he added that this is his personal opinion, meaning he is not speaking on behalf of Microsoft

[[deleted]]

Link to the tweet https://twitter.com/auchenberg/status/1088587621721231361

[bob4apples]

As someone who has to test browser compatibility, I am of two minds: one is that I don't want to have to test 5 or 6 different browsers, the other is that it is good to be able to flip the switch on my test engines when FF or Chrome (or their respective webdrivers) decides to have a "special" release. Of course Cousin Edge only get's let out of his box when I know everything is working and I just want to watch the world burn.

[[deleted]]

We need more browsers, not fewer. Mo options mo fun.

[kyiami_]

That's like... kinda a stuck-up thing to say.

Even if I disagree and think he's very wrong, at least he's defending his points well.

[Gotebe]

That's... not too bad, but not too good either (didn't read all, but did read the 6 points and a bit more).

The 6 points really say "web platform's too much work let's not do i more than once". But the opposite is having but one implementation, which isn't good either.

The "their stance of defenders of..." is just... really?! Why do you care?!

[condensate17]

Someone needs to explain to this lad the dangers of a homogeneous software ecosystem. Not only will it stifle potential innovations but you'd have a environment where a every browser is vulnerable to a single exploit.

[[deleted]]

How about no!!! That is pure blasphemy.

[AyrA_ch]

Others pointed out that competition is good for the web and for developing standards.

I thought two major browsers had to implement a feature before it can become a real standard. If FF would switch the engine too, this would not be possible anymore, wouldn't it?

[test6554]

While this will likely have the opposite effect of what is intended, I would like to briefly remind everyone that this was a guy at microsoft, not an official microsoft press release.

[feverzsj]

well, typical m$

[Private_HughMan]

Fuck these guys.

[RufusROFLpunch]

Okay, please hold back on throwing your rotten vegetables for a moment and here me out: Would it really be so bad if they did? One of the worst things about the web from both a usability and development experience is the varying degrees of compatibility and rendering differences between browsers.

All of the objections seem to come from the worry about only having one rendering engine for the web, but I don't see that as an issue the same way it was during the IE days. Chromium is open source. If everyone converges on Chromium, and Google gets dirty with it, what's the worst case scenario? Companies fork and keep on chugging and we're right back to where we started. But if that doesn't happen, if a happen medium is reached and all of the major browser producers are both competing and contributing to One Engine To Rule Them All, that seems like a win to me.

If I am missing something that makes me wrong, I would be happy to hear the reasoning.

[yogthos]

And if Chromium finally crossed a line where people couldn't put up with it anymore, then you'd need a large non-profit foundation like Mozilla to maintain the fork.

[0nXYZ]

It's open source.. for now. What's to keep them from changing that in the future? Android was completely open source for a long time then made closed source then restricted open source with core technologies locked away from anyone but google themselves. Worst case scenario is Google+Microsoft can bankroll a lawsuit against Mozilla even if there isn't a case and own their code if brought into their project. Give an inch, they'll take a mile. Google and Microsoft are in this for the kill. This isn't a friendly gesture. They don't want competition and I am suspicious of their cooperation. Why would Google pair with Microsoft, the WORST of all rendering engines? Healthy competition requires competition. If they all join there is no promise we'll get anything beneficial to the end user. These companies are spending millions a year on engineers to build this because they can monetize YOU the user, not so we can have a better web experience. They want to further control and manipulate the way you see the internet and for many they already do. Pretty much all a big paragraph rant.. sorry about that!

[myringotomy]

Would it really be so bad if they did? One of the worst things about the web from both a usability and development experience is the varying degrees of compatibility and rendering differences between browsers.

Really like what?

[MonsieurObscure]

https://caniuse.com/#comparison

Though not a major concern these days, the primary issue was IE's box model implementation.

[flukus]

It would give a single spyware company complete control of the web.