Google, Mozilla, and Opera React To Microsoft's Embrace of Chromium (venturebeat.com) 186
With the news earlier today that Microsoft is embracing Chromium for Edge browser development on the desktop, VentureBeat decided to see what the other browser companies had to say about the decision. From the report: Google largely sees Microsoft's decision as a good thing, which is not exactly a surprise given that the company created the Chromium open source project. "Chrome has been a champion of the open web since inception and we welcome Microsoft to the community of Chromium contributors. We look forward to working with Microsoft and the web standards community to advance the open web, support user choice, and deliver great browsing experiences."
Mozilla meanwhile sees Microsoft's move as further validation that users should switch to Firefox. "This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice. We are not going to concede that Google's implementation of the web is the only option consumers should have. That's why we built Firefox in the first place and why we will always fight for a truly open web." Mozilla regularly points out it develops the only independent browser -- meaning it's not tied to a tech company that has priorities which often don't align with the web. Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge) all have their own corporate interests.
Opera thinks Microsoft is making a smart move, because it did the same thing six years ago. "We noticed that Microsoft seems very much to be following in Opera's footsteps. Switching to Chromium is part of a strategy Opera successfully adopted in 2012. This strategy has proved fruitful for Opera, allowing us to focus on bringing unique features to our products. As for the impact on the Chromium ecosystem, we are yet to see how it will turn out, but we hope this will be a positive move for the future of the web."
Mozilla meanwhile sees Microsoft's move as further validation that users should switch to Firefox. "This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice. We are not going to concede that Google's implementation of the web is the only option consumers should have. That's why we built Firefox in the first place and why we will always fight for a truly open web." Mozilla regularly points out it develops the only independent browser -- meaning it's not tied to a tech company that has priorities which often don't align with the web. Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge) all have their own corporate interests.
Opera thinks Microsoft is making a smart move, because it did the same thing six years ago. "We noticed that Microsoft seems very much to be following in Opera's footsteps. Switching to Chromium is part of a strategy Opera successfully adopted in 2012. This strategy has proved fruitful for Opera, allowing us to focus on bringing unique features to our products. As for the impact on the Chromium ecosystem, we are yet to see how it will turn out, but we hope this will be a positive move for the future of the web."
Re:It's the last gasp at a browser. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even kittens?
Re:It's the last gasp at a browser. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's literally how Microsoft came to be, with MS Basic based upon listings grabbed from the litter bin.
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so doing what they always have done. use someone else stuff. its litterly how dos/windows came to be.
Doing what just about all companies and groups do, It's also how Linux came to be (clone of UNIX), how macOS came to be (BSD + UNIX clone) and how WebKit itself came to be (was previously an open source browser engine called KHTML).
Re: It's the last gasp at a browser. (Score:1)
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"Remember IE4/5/6? "Part of the OS and can't be removed?"
Well if there had been anybody trying to compete with MS back in the day things might have went a different direction. The only competitor in the browser space was Netscape and they completely imploded due to technical and product managerial incompetence. It took nearly 10 years for Firefox to resurrect the dead ended Netscape codebase to come up with an alternative. And if the only thing you can say about your browser is that is open source and behol
Re:Anyone slightly concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
That is why I lament the loss of Edge, not because I liked it (or Microsoft) at all.
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There are multiple browsers. Using a common core that everyone can make good.
No difference than multiple linux distributions. They all use the same core and all fix it. And then add their stuff outside of the core system.
Re:Anyone slightly concerned (Score:4, Interesting)
No difference than multiple linux distributions. They all use the same core and all fix it. And then add their stuff outside of the core system.
If Linux becomes the dominant system, that will begin to be a problem, just like it was when Windows was the dominant system. Monoculture is a bad thing [schneier.com].
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If Linux becomes the dominant system, that will begin to be a problem
Nope. Unlike windows (or the Google search engine), anyone can fork Linux. If the world standardize on Debian, then Arch will be an alternative for those finding Debian too stale. And if Arch too gets stuffy, some hackers will roll their own and eventually become the expert's choice. If the Linux kernel gets bloated, there is BSD.
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Re: Anyone slightly concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
IE6 was closed source, controlled by one company and was allowed to stagnate for 5 years. How is that in any way similar to the current situation?
Re: Anyone slightly concerned (Score:3)
That's not the point. IE 6 was used because web developers only trageted it because their users only used IE 6 and this is because only IE 6 was targeted etc.
It took almost 12 freaking years and WinXP eol to break this cycle! Not that webkit is opensourced as this is irrelevant.
If Chrome has a bug which breaks a standard in every other browser you code to that bug and tell everyone Firefox isn't supported. Open sourced or not your users don't care nor will run your patches. Only Google dictates and matters
Re: Anyone slightly concerned (Score:2)
You're forgetting Safari which is also not based on Chromium. Web devs are not going to ignore iOS / macOS users. This situation is nothing like the days of IE6. The Chromium source is there and if Google start fucking about, it can be forked. You couldn't do that with IE6.
Re: Anyone slightly concerned (Score:3)
It doesn't make sense to develop 2 websites one for Chrome and one for open standards when safari owns 4% of the market. You put a disclaimer with a link to Chrome. Remember 2005? Mac users needed Windows XP in virtualPC to use the web as IE 6 was required for many sites.
Also khtml and Firefox were opensourced but bosses didn't care and forced IE 6 only site testing. Hell no.
W3C is dead too as only Chrome decides what's used and how it's implemented. We freed ourselves only to hand our keys in for a new pai
Re: Anyone slightly concerned (Score:2)
Why would web devs support Apple devices? Is that what you're saying?
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It's not who controls the source that matters, but who controls the standard.
Chrome vs. Chromium: distinction w/o difference? (Score:3)
What substantial difference exists between free Chromium and proprietary Google Chrome other than Flash Player, supported CDMs for EME (HTML5 video DRM), and how crashes are reported? Two years from now, Google plans to drop Flash Player from Google Chrome, leaving even less difference.
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I remember when IE6 was the only choice for the web and how it held it back by a good few years.
Aside from some internal line of business applications that used ActiveX there wasn't really anything that didn't display just fine in any of the alternatives.
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It's not that they are particularly malicious (as Microsoft proveably was)
Uhm, Google of a few years ago wasn't malicious. They're getting to Monsanto levels these days.
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The concern now is that Google has all the power. It's not that they are particularly malicious
Actually, yes, it is, and yes, they are.
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The concern now is that Google has all the power. It's not that they are particularly malicious (as Microsoft proveably was), but rather when one company controls everything, they can get apathetic and make bad design decisions. Ideally, there would be three or four major browsers, all competing.
That is why I lament the loss of Edge, not because I liked it (or Microsoft) at all.
Yes, competition is good. But, a competitor that everyone ignores and who has negligible market share (Edge) isn't really a competitor and is meaningless. Nobody is working a little bit harder because they're afraid of losing customers to Edge.
There hasn't been any meaningful competition among browsers since the old IE vs Netscape days.
Internet Explorer is still used by a few people who don't know any better, and a few corporate users who are forced to use it or locked into custom-designed systems that wo
That was old Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
If it were the olden days I would be more concerned about the EEE approach of old.
But these days? Microsoft really seems committed to a more standards based approach. Probably in part because they want to, but in large part because they no longer have the power to truly pull off the Extend/Extinguish part of the dance. If they go too far people will just keep using Chrome.
If anything I think having Microsoft on board will help keep Google more honest as Microsoft will have a vested interest in the Chromium engine being more reliable, and probably bring in new ideas for development of their own.
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If anything I think having Microsoft on board will help keep Google more honest as Microsoft will have a vested interest in the Chromium engine being more reliable, and probably bring in new ideas for development of their own.
Maybe. But I'm skeptical.
Microsoft is incompetent and locked into this really strange culture of doing everything in weird and non-standard ways. Edge is a good example of this.
Let's say you want to use Edge, but you deleted the shortcut for it. No problem, just go find the executable file, probably called Edge.exe or something similar, and run it. That's how everything works. That's how everything has always worked.
But you can't do that with Edge. It's not a regular program. Microsoft can't stoop s
Re: That was old Microsoft (Score:3)
That's because Edge is an app and not an application. Any browser from the app store is stored there
What's "old" hasn't changed -- proprietary power. (Score:2)
Don't choose to take a proprietor's side or believe that monopoly power is somehow outside the realm of possibility. Monopolists (which every software proprietor is for that software) have the power to choose what that software does, leaving users out. Decisions like what Opera, Microsoft, and Google are embarking on with their proprietary derivatives of Chromium put those proprietors in power.
It took the world's largest antitrust trials to make Microsoft behave a little better in some respects, but by othe
Re:Anyone slightly concerned (Score:4, Insightful)
What it tells me today is that Microsoft has actually lost a lot of knowledge and that they are basically re-skinning their stuff when they realize that they don't know how to fix it.
Also look at the quite "interesting" problems that appears each time Windows 10 gets an update. It makes me even less inclined to "upgrade" from Windows 7.
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Re: Anyone slightly concerned (Score:1)
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Remember Microsoft's old informal motto: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
Yes I'm pretty sure everybody remembers that but how exactly do you think that applies here?
This will be weird for Chrome devs (Score:2)
A non-trivial percentage of them are ex-IE devs. Assuming any teammates from 10 years ago are still there, of course.
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Mozilla meanwhile sees Microsoft's move as further validation that users should switch to Firefox. "This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice.
Mozilla, for people to choose you, they have to pick you because you're a good alternative, not just because you're an alternative. The fact that Fred Mbogo is an alternative to my local hospital doesn't mean I'm going to go to him if I break my arm. If I wanted to run Chrome I'd run the actual Chrome, not the crappy second-rate copy of it that you've turned Firefox into.
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When they re-did parts of their engine in rust, removed XUL extensions support which prevented them from making the browser fully multithreaded, they made the browser significantly faster (comparable to chrome - faster in some tasks, slower in some other) - now you say that it is a clone of Chrome.
I don't like some of decisions Mozilla made in recent times, but still, Mozilla respects my privacy much more than Google ever will.
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Mmmm.. me too.. only a couple of sites ;-)
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*-And oh no, the griping doesn't stop there. False positives on non-executables. The URL is sent after the download, and positives are permanently deleted beyond forensic software ability to recover, so you have to re-DL, even if it was something you had just spent 7 hours downloading from a slow server across the globe. After, of cours
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How about the default google chrome's usage stats that they collect including Chrome User Experience Report [google.com] that sends details about every page you visit.
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The problem with Firefox was, and to be honest still is, that it's a memory hog, and has been since Firefox 4
Last week I got notified that a simple resource-exhaustion bug I'd reported some time ago had had its status updated in that someone had reported that it's still present in the very latest release. I traced back through the endless "try the latest release and see if it's magically fixed itself in the meantime because we don't give a fuck" responses from Mozilla devs.
Eventually I got back to the original bug report. When I reported it, the browser was called Phoenix.
That really says it all for Mozilla and
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Removing XUL in the way they did, ignoring/WONTFIX of user/developer issues, is what turned die hard holdouts like me against them. Every productivity extension, every extension that fixed bad UI choices they made over the years, were ripped out with no effort to implement something in WebExtensions. I mean, they refused to add something as fundamental as websockets because it was too laborious. I get why it needed to be done but they didn't get that the functionality XUL provided was fundamental to the
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True.. Look at the browser usage growth.. Don't see any reason why Microsoft would choose Firefox instead of Chromium.
https://www.w3schools.com/brow... [w3schools.com]
3 words, Mozilla... "Download Them All" (Score:4, Insightful)
Fix Firefox so that it does useful things again and tons of people would be glad to switch back.
Re:3 words, Mozilla... "Download Them All" (Score:4, Insightful)
This is true, but they can't, because Firefox elected instead to embrace the Chrome add-on model.
Once upon a time, Firefox had a superior extensibility model, on the primary criteria of actual extensibility, and now they don't.
I understand that there are complex issues here, but it's not a good look when you capitulate to those complexities to such a degree that you've got nothing left to substantially set yourself apart, other than that you're not actually the other guy (even though you dance to exactly the same limited API).
You can't even go to the old discussions of the old add-ons for opinions about various features, because those are no longer on line now. Plus there used to be discussion there about to cope in the barren new world (to which I'm still not totally adapted).
I guess Mozilla doesn't see the need to keep unflattering history alive.
Re:3 words, Mozilla... "Download Them All" (Score:5, Informative)
This is true, but they can't, because Firefox elected instead to embrace the Chrome add-on model.
They had no choice. Go back and use a pre-change version of Firefox. The performance is terrible. It's single threaded, one thread dying takes down the whole browser, like it's the 1980s again. Can't even be properly sandboxed.
And the add-ons were a security nightmare. Bugs in the add-ons could be exploited by web sites to steal info from the browser or underlying OS.
The add-on API was holding the whole browser back. They could make necessary fixes because it would break add-ons. A clean start was the best of a bunch of bad options, and at least they selected an API that was familiar and allowed porting of many existing add-ons on day one.
Firefox is actually decent again now.
What add-ons are you missing, by the way? Maybe we can suggest some alternatives.
Re:3 words, Mozilla... "Download Them All" (Score:4, Insightful)
I was about to post "What about Google Hangouts!?", but I just tried it, and it works like it ever did.
I'd have to agree with you Firefox is perfectly fine these days. There are some things I'd change about it, but nothing so terrible I can't just customise my way out of it. Plus I'm fairly confident it's not sending every last detail of my life to G-HQ.
ob Palemoon response... (Score:3)
This is true, but they can't, because Firefox elected instead to embrace the Chrome add-on model.
They had no choice. Go back and use a pre-change version of Firefox. The performance is terrible. It's single threaded, one thread dying takes down the whole browser, like it's the 1980s again. Can't even be properly sandboxed.
And the add-ons were a security nightmare. Bugs in the add-ons could be exploited by web sites to steal info from the browser or underlying OS.
The add-on API was holding the whole browser back. They could make necessary fixes because it would break add-ons. A clean start was the best of a bunch of bad options, and at least they selected an API that was familiar and allowed porting of many existing add-ons on day one.
Firefox is actually decent again now.
What add-ons are you missing, by the way? Maybe we can suggest some alternatives.
Firefox is making a comeback.... but it's yet to win me back. I moved to PaleMoon [palemoon.org] a couple years ago and love it. The time I use FF now is when I need to use the add-on Video Download Helper. If something ever goes horribly wrong with PaleMoon, I would likely go back to FF over Chromium. I just don't care for Chrom(e/ium). There are too many things about FF/Palemoon that I find very useful. For instance... for the MANY sites where I have accounts, I like to keep a password hint in the bookmark descr
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Try tinyapps.org, I seem to recall there was a little app that can minimize anything to the tray.
I could be wrong though...
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What add-ons are you missing, by the way?
Keybinder. It was canceled [github.com] due to deficiencies in WebExtensions that remain unfixed a year later, particularly Bug 1325692 [mozilla.org].
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Fix Firefox so that it does useful things again and tons of people would be glad to switch back.
A few people do distros of Firefox (Debian, Tails, etc.). There's no reason a group could not do a distro of Firefox that is laden with "the features that everybody wants".
If there's really a market.
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Disturbing consolidation (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure I'm entirely comfortable with pretty much everyone except Mozilla jumping on to the Chromium bandwagon.
Lack of choice has never been a good thing, and if everything is running with Chromium at it's heart, there's no choices anymore.
How much data is Google slurping from every Chromium based browser install is another problematic issue.
I'm not a big fan of Edge, but it was an alternative choice from Firefox, Chrome or others. I think choice and diversity in web browsers is ultimately a good thing, since it keeps everything fairly open and sane, since everyone has to cooperate on the standards. If Chromium's engine dominated the web, they can start making tweaks and changes, not telling Mozilla about it, effectively shutting out existing and future competitors. Hmmm. It's play right out of Microsoft's playbook, and you'd be a fool to think Google won't do it.
None of this can ultimately be good for users.
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How much data is Google slurping from every Chromium based browser install is another problematic issue.
Other than Chrome the answer is none. And for Chrome the minimum is a unique install ID, and by default automatic update checks with some metadata such as screen resolution and number of CPU cores, but the latter can be disabled.
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Chrome also supports QUIC, which requires a long-lived GUID (ie. a unique browser ID).
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Chrome also supports QUIC, which requires a long-lived GUID (ie. a unique browser ID).
Cite?
I think you're referring to the Connection ID [ietf.org], but it is not long-lived and it is not global, i.e. not a unique browser ID. Its purpose is to enable connection migration [ietf.org], seamless continuation of an existing connection when the device changes IP addresses (switches LANs, goes from Wifi to cellular or vice versa, etc.). It's actually required to change on every migration, and allowed to change at almost any other point in time, so it's definitely not long-lived, even for a given connection, and is
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Lack of choice ?
https://beebom.com/best-web-br... [beebom.com]
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Terrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the IE6 days, nearly every browser was IE6, with nearly 95% market share at it's height. Despite this incredible monopoly over browser share that microsoft had, we still had plenty of competing rendering engines. We had Firefox (Gecko), Safari (Webkit), Opera (Presto), as well as multiple smaller browsers with their own rendering engines, such as KHTML, NetPositive, etc .
Now we're in an era where there's a near monopoly on rendering engines. With Chrome being based on a fork of webkit (blink), Opera using a fork of blink, and Microsoft now also using Blink, we're in an era where there's really only 3 rendering engines now, and 2 of those (Webkit and blink) are nearly brothers. The only true non-related renderer is Firefox's Gecko.
So surely this is a good thing? If everyone uses the same renderer, the web will look much more consistent right? Yes, that's true. But consistency and standards compliance are not the same thing. In the age of IE6, the web was very consistent, as every website was written for the quirks in Trident, but now we're going to see an era where websites are designed for Chrome, because every browser uses the Blink/webkit rendering engine.
This change isn't a positive one, oh no. Quite the opposite
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Monocultures are inherently bad for several reasons with the most obvious being security related ones. Whether the source is closed or open doesn't matter as proven by history. Compare to nature where a whole population can be wiped out if not diversified.
People used to joke about MS products being bloated (they were) but now we have a very bloated heap of code as the defacto web standard. I for one find that not only sad but scary, it's not like Google haven't been effectively controlling the Internet alre
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An example of a critical bug in a piece of open source software is Heartbleed. OpenSSL was not only open-source, but also regarded as very secure. The news of Heartbleed totally destroyed that credibility. Sure
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Re: Terrible idea (Score:2)
No one cares about open source! If Google breaks something or adds something in Chrome like AMP accelerated web pages that's not in Chromium the answer is not go use my code with this fix?
It is break your standards compliant code so it works in Chrome or get another job.
Yes this is bad.
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Re: Terrible idea (Score:2)
Edge is the most secure and standards compliant browser in existence. Look it up?
Even IE has been standards compliant for quite sometime.
Problem is MS did too little too late and everyone has been comfortable with Chrome for awhile now
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That's so funny i can't even be bothered to construct a reasonable argument.
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So surely this is a good thing? If everyone uses the same renderer, the web will look much more consistent right? Yes, that's true. But consistency and standards compliance are not the same thing. In the age of IE6, the web was very consistent, as every website was written for the quirks in Trident, but now we're going to see an era where websites are designed for Chrome, because every browser uses the Blink/webkit rendering engine.
Web standards are dead. If you think Firefox and Chrome follow web standard
only independent choice (Score:2)
This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice.
Funny, all the modern anti-features of Firefox seem to be put there because they are partly owned by Google and other third parties. They are definitely not there because they listened to the actual users of Firefox, nor did they listen to their original mission to build a lean, standards compliant and extensible browser. It is quite standards compliant, but not exactly lean and "extensible" is quite an interesting word if you disable the entire extension ecosystem.
What will happen to the old browsers? (Score:2)
Another idea (Score:3)
Why wouldn't Microsoft just open source the Edge HTML engine and let the community participate in its development? We need more browser engines, not less.
From now on we'll basically have Chrome (>90% of the market) and Firefox. Palemoon and others are used by a handful of geeks ...
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Something coming that's worse than a monoculture? (Score:1)
I fear something coming that may be even worse than having one browser: having one "base" that is been tweaked by each vendor and the results are just slightly incompatible with each other. Use Chromium and Chrome back and forth enough times and you'll see what I mean. Google has done some slight tweaking that makes it not 100% totally identical. Imagine now we have 4 "Chromium" browsers, but each one takes the Chromium code and just adds or tweaks something or adjusts compiler settings to "make it faste
Mozilla is lying - not independent at all (Score:1)
Mozilla regularly points out it develops the only independent browser -- meaning it's not tied to a tech company that has priorities which often don't align with the web
From this bit of news [computerworld.com] which states that Google pays Mozilla 300m per year, no they aren't independent like they claim. But I do understand what they mean though. 2 big companies using the same engine means less "competition". THen again, Microsoft's IE was always problematic and the devs that took care of it didn't seem to know what they were doing most of the time. When you ask any webdev to work on a webpage and request them to be 100% compatible with IE, firefox and google, they started to rip their hair
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Contractually, Google has no real influence over what Mozilla does with their product beyond being granted the default search engine spot in certain countries. Mozilla has other options available to them as well for funding, and they have saved up enough to be able to survive until they do.
The problem is that every time Mozilla tries to diversify their revenue, people hate the idea more than them just using Google. Adding less invasive ads on their home page for a brief experiment? How vile! Buying and addi
The real questions is... (Score:1)
Will Outlook still use Word's rendering engine or Chromium? So sick of coding my emails for the "Outlook Factor".
Boooo (Score:1)
To me it's irrelevant that I, and most other people, (almost) never used Edge, I liked the fact that there were at least two non-Chrome browsers out there. That helps keep Google honest. A little competition is always a good thing, and now we're heading back to the days of IE6, only replace IE with Chrome and Microsoft with Google.
MS is a has-been (Score:2)
They failed in all new tech, except in cloud-computing, but where they had to actually offer Linux. As such, MS is not just an ordinary computing company, no better than its competition. Past experience shows however that MS has consistent sub-standard quality and could only survive on a monopoly. That monopoly gone, MS is dead. As any giant, it will take quite a while to die though.
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MS is dead. Maybe that explains why Microsoft just surpassed Apple as the most valuable company on the planet.
https://www.marketwatch.com/st... [marketwatch.com]
Maybe the MS browser is dead, but not the company. What they have realized (for now anyway) is that they aren't going to win the browser war. Might as well cut losses.
Microsoft will find a way to mess it up (Score:2)
The rendering engine is just one piece of what makes a browser. You know they will have to make major tweaks to it to implement the corporate Active Directory security policies. Then they'll try to find a way to make it compatible with SharePoint, and ActiveX. By the time they're done, it won't look or act anything like Chrome.
firefox is done (Score:1)
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You get that with Firefox. Chrome fails at all three of them (although for the most part the speed issue is negligible). It definitely fails privacy and security in every way you look at it.