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 platform support).
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, but consider FF's primary funding/revenue: it's Google. MS building on FF could mean Google would reduce their search deal, meaning MS might end up being forced in to increasing their funding for FF to help keep it an entity capable of operating at its current size. Or, FF simply becomes smaller, and MS has tied themselves with a shrinking partner.
However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors, and ends up losing share, so why fight that?
> 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 insuring that MS will have no influence whatsoever and Google is even closer to a monopoly.
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.
You could argue Google is a religion for some people. Google Chrome is the popular browser. And doesn't #2 apply on Google Chrome as well?
> However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors [...]
Recently, yes. Because they screwed up their MSIE market dominance with embrace & extend. With which market dominance they put the WWW in a dark age of incompatibility. From which Mozilla and Firefox (and Konqueror, Safari, and Google Chrome) eventually flourished.
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.
It's not 'reading in to it' so much as relaying the gist of a conversation I had with someone fairly high up in the browser team who was privy to the decision making process. I specifically asked about FF and he gave some of the main internal back and forth arguments (though I've certainly distilled it down!)
I'm sad too but the reality is Firefox is being slowly smothered by Chrome's ubiquity. Only a tiny minority of Web developers test on anything other than Chrome and mobile safari.
Firefox is my favourite browser, I use it every day but I often have to work around bugs in websites caused by this lack of testing. I think Microsoft don't have a choice if they want their browser to be popular it has to just work and the only way that is possible is basically for it to be Chrome.
> Only a tiny minority of Web developers test on anything other than Chrome and mobile safari
I work in a web dev shop and nearly everyone here uses Firefox as their main dev browser. We do run tests on other browsers as well but we mainly develop with Firefox and its tools.
Although part of the reason could be that we know most of our customers use it instead of Chrome. Don't ask me why, but if I had to venture I'd guess it's because Firefox is quite popular in my country for some reason.
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 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.
Well, then there's no way to tell whether they're using the strangler pattern, or simply not replacing Gecko with Servo at all. I find the former to be highly unlikely though, given the amount of work that would entail.
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.
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.
Other web browsers using Gecko include Airfox, Waterfox, K-Meleon, Lunascape, Portable Firefox, Conkeror, Classilla, TenFourFox, HP Secure Web Browser, Oxygen and Sylera (for mobile).
Other products using Gecko include Nightingale, Instantbird and Google's picture-organization software Picasa (for Linux).
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.
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.
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.
I'm not a programmer myself, but it's my understanding that chromium is pretty well suited to being embedded.
Just look at how successful chromium has been in this space, stuff like Chromium Embedded framework, Electron, the myriad of chromium based web browsers etc...
The New Microsoft is just PR due to the fact they are not the top dog anymore. It's good for us, but it's important to remember that it can change at any moment, or sometimes, that because it's not really part of their core value but just the way they want to look like, they won't make the best decisions according to openness and standards.
They might just have stayed with Trident then. The problem they're solving with this move is developers not testing in Edge, and Firefox is facing that problem more and more as well.
I particularly enjoy that they've kept the ability to mute single tabs by clicking on the speaker icon on the tab which google recently removed from Chrome and not having to go into the flags settings and switch the "mute site" right-click option to "mute tab".
Feels like a snappier Chrome with better video playback.
I think this is a good step, but the cynic in me has to ask: How many services were removed, and how many replaced? It's good that things like Single Sign-on or Google Now aren't there (by default), but is it fair to assume they've just been replaced by Microsofts versions (i.e. whatever Live is called now and Cortana)?
Cortana hasn't made it in yet in any form. Bing is the default search engine, though.
The Single Sign-on was replaced with Microsoft Account (for home users) / Azure Active Directory Account (for enterprise users) single sign-on support.
1. Firefox does not catch some exceptions. This problem is fixed in 67 version so I can wait (but I still need to wait).
2. Firefox crashes for me randomly sometimes when I restart React dev server.
* Samples in the link I have given are still not working even if you enable gfx.offscreencanvas.enabled. Therefore I conclude that this is not working at all.
* As well this is good option for development but Firefox 44 was released in 2016. I think it is safe to assume that Firefox will never release this or at least will not release in acceptable time frame. Most probably we will see messages like this soon "We see you use Firefox. This feature is supported on Chrome, Chromium or Edge browsers. We recommend using one of them if you need this.".
I use Firefox as well, but my main browser is Chrome. I just prefer the rendering on it, and the overall seamless integration with Google products which I use a lot. It's not uncommon for me to spin up 3 different browsers though to test various things from 3 separates 'angles'. Granted I might not get the seamless Google integration but at least it would be an alternative option. I like options.
Conversely, I’d never use a hosting provider I assumed would deplatform me in response to the slightest outrage or corporate coercion. That’s why I’ve been avoiding GoDaddy ever since 2007: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2661752/myspace--godaddy-s...
I feel bad for Opera, seems they stand to lose the most in this battle of the Chromium forks. They have a really good product that I use as my main driver after being fed up with Safari on macOS, but Microsoft is well poised to deliver a compelling experience across platforms (fingers crossed for Linux support at some point.)
They were bought up by some Chinese firm though and thus a lot of people lost trust in them. Not sure if anybody has done extensive research into what type of telemetry they gather. I would recommend FireFox but I never gave up hope for FireFox so you could consider me a fanboy. However FireFox Quantum has changed a lot of people over to it.
Firefox still has some UX deficiencies on macOS, I do use it on Windows though.
What really turned me off is how long it took them to implement video autoplay blocking. I sent them about four dozen requests, reports and outright pleas, and they didn't even add it to the roadmap until after I had given up hope. They were about two to three years late on that one.
Chromium's dev tools are still ahead by a mile as well, the Performance inspector has saved me days worth of debugging time.
The dev build is pretty good. I could see myself using the new Edge if it had Windows-specific features or support for things that typically only work on Edge/IE.
Dead is not quite correct. IE has been put on a permanent feature freeze, but MS has committed to keep releasing security updates for IE11 during Windows 10's entire lifetime. It is also the only browser shipping with the current Server editions. So I would argue that immortal would be a more accurate term.
Some of those services seem to be target specific: Everything starting with "Chrome OS" aren't part of any chrome build outside Chrome OS.
IOS Promotion Service might be https://codereview.chromium.org/2643723004/, so that's running on iOS and nowhere else. As for its value, that's for somebody else to decide (or everybody for themselves).
(Disclosure: working on Chrome OS firmware, which shares approximately no code at all with the components that end up in Chrome userland or any of its derivatives)
So when they say they removed these they mean source code wise not just some compiler flag? Thus making it a proper fork that will deviate over time, not some simple Chromium renamed project. So we may or may not see them pull in Chromium changesets depending on needs.
My biggest hope is that no matter how much Microsoft changes (Chakra instead of V8 would be very interesting to see) that it will remain fully and properly open source moving forward. I wanted to see the original Edge go this route but at least now they can.
Funny how these are now all browsers derived from work by Apple.
This is true as well, although my understanding is that they reworked all of that original code if I'm not mistaken, but nonetheless, a huge amount of credit belongs to both KDE and Apple regardless, which I find fascinating because: Google, Microsoft, and even Amazon (with their Chrome fork for their Fire tablets) benefited from it.
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.
Interesting observation Wayne. The lack of a rebuttal to the facts presented here, in addition to this comment holding the prestigious bottom slot seems to underline your assertion in a spooky way.
I wonder how many people you need to over-represent a minority mind-share on other topics here...
Plus their browser would be faster.