Microsoft Project Manager Says Mozilla Should Get Down From Its 'Philosophical Ivory Tower,' Cease Firefox Development (zdnet.com) 444
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A Microsoft program manager has caused a stir on Twitter over the weekend by suggesting that Firefox-maker Mozilla should give up on its own rendering engine and move on with Chromium. "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 five percent?" wrote Kenneth Auchenberg, who builds web developer tools for Microsoft's Visual Studio Code.
Auchenberg's post referred to Mozilla's response to Microsoft's announcement in December that it would scrap Edge's EdgeHTML rendering engine for Chromium's. The move will leave Firefox's Gecko engine as the only alternative to Chromium, which is used by Opera and dozens of other browsers. Few people agreed with Auchenberg, including engineers from both Mozilla and Chromium. Long-serving Mozillian Asa Dotzler was not impressed. "Just because your employer gave up on its own people and technology doesn't mean that others should follow," Dotzler replied to Auchenberg. Auchenberg clarified that he didn't want to see Mozilla vanish, but said it should reorganize into a research institution "instead of trying to to justify themselves with the 'protectors of the web' narrative."
Auchenberg's post referred to Mozilla's response to Microsoft's announcement in December that it would scrap Edge's EdgeHTML rendering engine for Chromium's. The move will leave Firefox's Gecko engine as the only alternative to Chromium, which is used by Opera and dozens of other browsers. Few people agreed with Auchenberg, including engineers from both Mozilla and Chromium. Long-serving Mozillian Asa Dotzler was not impressed. "Just because your employer gave up on its own people and technology doesn't mean that others should follow," Dotzler replied to Auchenberg. Auchenberg clarified that he didn't want to see Mozilla vanish, but said it should reorganize into a research institution "instead of trying to to justify themselves with the 'protectors of the web' narrative."
the only alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)
"he move will leave Firefox's Gecko engine as the only alternative to Chromium, which is used by Opera and dozens of other browsers."
What about Safari, which uses webkit? It's the default browser on both macOS and iOS, and does not use Chromium.
Re:the only alternative? (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't cross-platform (isn't an option for 90% of computer users) and isn't necessarily all that different from Chromium (whose Blink engine is a fork of WebKit).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Also Steam uses WebKit across all OSes andMidori is a WebKit-based browser that runs on Windows and Linux. Qt also used WebKit as its embedded browser widget for numerous years. There are also plenty of other cross-platform apps using it. That you got modded Informative for a completely false statement is laughable.
Re:the only alternative? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing I said was false. I'm talking about Safari (as was the post I was replying to). You're talking about WebKit. Safari is a web browser. WebKit is a layout engine. They are not the same thing.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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I installed Midori on my father's laptop, which is one of those tiny cheap things that can barely run the OS, and which require an IT professional in order to perform an update successfully. (I wish I were exaggerating)
He is fine with it. I've tried it. It's plain, not ugly. I would use it again, and I would definitely recommend it for those who do not tinker too much with their browser.
I guess I am too old to seek or even appreciate beauty in a browser.
I run Windows 7 on my gaming computer, and it look
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re: the only alternative? (Score:3)
Good to see you back. Problem is everyone and their brother have uefi and secure boot disabled and CSM 1981 bios emulation so they don't see any increase in boot times nor have a recovery partition. But secure boot is evil so that's fine if you ask anyone here
Re: the only alternative? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:the only alternative? (Score:4, Informative)
No it doesn't -> https://imgur.com/bZa5nWY [imgur.com]
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WebKit is cross-platform. Safari isn't. Safari and Chromium are web browsers. Chromium's Blink is a fork of WebKit. The post I was replying to asked "What about Safari?"
Re: the only alternative? (Score:3)
Because Blink (Chromium) is based on WebKit, WebKit doesn't exactly serve the same purpose as Gecko.
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And what are the purposes of each besides to render HTML?
To be different from Chromium? (Score:2)
I think in that case, they meant preserving a line different from Chromium.
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Keeping Google honest-ish.
Re: the only alternative? (Score:5, Informative)
No, WebKit was a fork of KHTML from the KDE Project, as used in the Konqueror web browser for Linux.
Re:the only alternative? (Score:5, Funny)
Well the BEAST was slayed and their tags shall BLINK until the end of days.
Book of Mozilla
Re:the only alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)
>"What about Safari, which uses webkit? It's the default browser on both macOS and iOS, and does not use Chromium."
Wake me up when it runs on even one of:
Linux desktops
BSD desktops
Android phones
Oh, and MS-Windows (since dropped 7 YEARS ago)
Throwing out a closed-source, Apple-only product as an "alternative" is hardly the counter to the Chrome/Google monoculture.
I believe that Firefox is the ONLY open-source, multi-platform, non-chrome based browser left. And as a bonus, this only true alternative is fast, robust, provides far more customization and user control, community-based, and backed by an organization that cares about standards, security, privacy, and internet freedom.
So if you want to fight our rapid plunge into to the next dark-age/IE-rerun, then I suggest you install and use Firefox on whatever platform you use and encourage others to do the same.
It is absolutely SHOCKING to see some sites that are already becoming essentially Chrome-only as their rendering is partially broken in Firefox and their "solution" when you complain is to install Chrome. I never thought we would have to go through this s*** again. But here we are.
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Throwing out a closed-source, Apple-only product as an "alternative" is hardly the counter to the Chrome/Google monoculture.
Surely freedom includes the freedom of others to use proprietary software? In this case, the huge proportion of affluent consumers (and I don't mean me) who browse the web on their iPhones, iPads and Macs using Safari provide an important incentive for web developers to avoid creating sites that work solely on Chrome. That indirectly benefits users of other browsers like Firefox.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, what about Webkit, that Chromium forked from Safari, which Apple forked from KHTML?
It's a bizarre irony in that the most popular used web browser was basically forked from a LGPL project known mostly to Linux nerds.
Firefox was beating MSIE in every Metric and then google just did the obvious thing, stole Safari, rebranded it Chrome and now the highest quality Mac Web Browser became the best web browser overnight and Google didn't have to much at all.
But the sad fact is that Google uses their monopoly
Re:the only alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)
A few truths exist, one is that if Microsoft says you shouldn't do a thing, it must be critically important for you to double down on that thing.
Complete moron (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's more, like, do our code for us, for free, so we can make money out of it.
Re:Complete moron (Score:5, Insightful)
the real reason would be to ask why the f would you choose microsofts chromium browser over anything else?
besides, wtf would mozilla "research" if they dropped their own rendering engine? would they research how to keep adblockers running on chromium?
Re:Complete moron (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that you have figured it out - the nail in the eye of many ad providers is the strength of Firefox/Gecko when it comes to allowing ad blocking tech.
Without ad blocking the web would be useless and we could as well just look up the small waterholes that run no or very limited ads.
By driving development to a single rendering engine you allow a very limited number of people in control of what we are served.
As long as the rendering engines follows the standards declared by the World Wide Web Consortium then we don't have a problem. If they have "hidden features" as IE had for a long time, then we are as users in the hands of the major corporations.
We are in a Max Headroom [wikipedia.org] world. Hello Blank Reg!
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I think that you have figured it out - the nail in the eye of many ad providers is the strength of Firefox/Gecko when it comes to allowing ad blocking tech.
In nature, differentiation of a species often means that what kills some, does not kill all. Software monoculture is just a bad idea, for much the same reason. Sure it makes things more compatible, but you also loose the edge that competition fosters, and in the event some serious problem is found with one, you have no alternative ready to go.
For instance, it is not inconceivable that a zero day worm would get in the wild that would easily infect any variant of the standard engine, but have firefox be com
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Without ad blocking the web would be useless
For who? You? The vast majority of web browsing is now done on mobile devices, and the mobile browsers don't have ad blocking by default. Thus the vast majority of people using the internet are not using ad blockers, and I very much doubt the web is *useless* for them.
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Firefox+uBlock exists for Android too.
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I've no problem with News Guard per se, though I don't always agree totally with their ratings, but the very concept of letting a single arbiter be the 'protector' of all that is good is terrifying.
People don't need to be protected from 'fake news'. They need enough information to determine that news is fake and who is promoting it. That includes arbiters such as News Guard and people to verify News Guard remains impartial.
In no case does a monoculture promote anything. Or perhaps you were being sarcastic a
Re:Complete moron (Score:5, Insightful)
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That Microsoft manager seems to be totally incompetent at observation and analysis.
Being incompetent seems to be a prerequisite for being a manager at MS.
Or maybe the opposite... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, restore plug-in compatibility, same with status bar, allow user interface customization, remove pocket, and go fully open source.
Basically take advantage of everything that made them better than Chrome, instead of throwing it away.
Just an idea.
Ryan Fenton
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The old plug-ins and the UI customization were what were holding Firefox back. Go back and try one of the versions from before the change over, comparing performance with current Firefox and Chrome. It's night and day.
And that's before you look at the security nightmare that results from Javascript being able to hook deep into the browser, alter the UI and get executed in critical paths.
Look at the projects keeping the old system alive, like Waterfox and Pale Moon. All suffering from being unable to fix the
Re:Or maybe the opposite... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oh great, Javascript that can write to the filesystem. How could that possibly go wrong?
Lots of ways. But it's also useful, and if you simply chroot then it's not a big deal.
By the way, those web archives are actually just ZIP files and can be extracted with tools like 7zip. The HTML is inside.
What I want is for them to pop up in my browser to be annotated like what happens when I click on them in the Scrapbook sidebar. I don't want to be dicking with them. I have what I want now, and I don't want my browser to have LESS functionality.
Also in Chrome when you save the page you can select between "complete" (the archive) and "HTML only".
Irrelevant, that's not what I'm talking about. Does that preserve the page as currently displayed?
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Reading and Writing to the file system always seems like a good idea to the Web App Developer, because their Web App can do everything a normal App can... However this is the same problem that opened the door in the early 2000's with Microsoft Active X technology and automatic plugins. Active X was meant to compete against Java Applets. With two key benefits, they ran faster, because they were just an executable binary that ran in a browser (or other application) window, and it could write to the file syst
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No, firefox stop using XUL some years ago, at same time multi-process, rust and new add-on where added (talking about years, not one single version switch)
The new design required to trash many old code and design decisions. One of the main reasons was that using the interface as a rendering product would block the split of user interface from the rendering in two different, independent processes
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Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
These days Microsoft makes more of their money off of abusing people's privacy then selling software, so of course they are opposed to the browser that still allows savvy users to block that shit.
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rape (n)
...
3) an act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse; despoliation; violation: "the rape of the countryside."
Bombastic, but not outside the traditional meaning of the word.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You're obviously unaware of Bing, Windows 10 telemetry, and the other crap Microsoft's into these days.
I understand; I left Microsoft behind myself over a decade ago, but they're no longer primarily a seller of software.
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For the moment, it is. The concern isn't terribly high at the moment, primarily because Microsoft is still very bad at monetizing it. Right now, they're laying the groundwork for shifting from "selling Windows and Office" to making money in other ways. The apps that show up spontaneously on the Start Menu of Windows 10 aren't because Microsoft thinks you'll really like them. Microsoft defaulting the OOBE to using an MS Account and allowing all data collection isn't simply out of the goodness of their heart,
Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft should be broken up by DoJ again in an antitrust action
That implies that they were broken up by the DoJ once before. They were found guilty of antitrust violations, yes, but before any action could be taken against them Bush took office and his DoJ declined to follow up on the matter.
Re:Microsoft... (Score:5, Interesting)
That implies that they were broken up by the DoJ once before. They were found guilty of antitrust violations, yes, but before any action could be taken against them Bush took office and his DoJ declined to follow up on the matter.
I'm glad you got modded up to 5, I only wish that the more than 5 comments I've posted over the years 'twixt then and now saying the exact same thing hadn't typically been downmodded by butthurt microsofties. Microsoft was found to have acted in basically every anticompetitive way possible, and Bill Gates was implicated personally. That's why I make sure to describe him as a career criminal in every discussion about how fucking wonderful his charity work supposedly is (even though it never actually is — he's just doing Big Pharma's work for them, spreading IP law while actually failing to eradicate anything.)
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Re: Microsoft... (Score:3)
I prefer Google.
It's 2019 not 1999. Damn I feel old.
Who has a monopoly on node.js Google! Who has a monopoly on progressive web apps Google! Who has a monopoly on electron based hipster code editors which have a dependency on Google Google! Even visual studio code which I like and runs on Linux and based on electron runs on node.js and chromiom has Google all over it with the MS label. But geeks here bash it because it's from microspft.
Folks wake up. IBM was so hated by the gray hairs back in the 1980s that
Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant (Score:5, Interesting)
Edge failed so cut down anyone who continues to try and compete.
Pathetic.
Re:Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant (Score:5, Insightful)
Some random dude at Microsoft is butthurt that Mozilla beat Edge.
Clickbait for Nerds.
Re:Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant (Score:4, Informative)
Clickbait for Nerds.
You might be on to a new tag line for /. there
Clickbait for nerds, stuff that doesn't matter!
Re:Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant (Score:5, Insightful)
firefox is pretty much doomed at this point as they will almost certainly never recover marketshare at this point and it only gets worse from here as no one tests sites for firefox anymore.
Why don't you put a "Best viewed with IE" blinking-GIF on your homepage?
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Re:Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant (Score:4, Insightful)
firefox is in its death throes. It is bad for all of us, but you can't blame companies, sites and developers for dropping testing for it. The user population just doesn't justify the investment in many cases. Really though mozilla has no one to blame for this but themselves, rather than innovating they tried to clone Chrome, rather than listening to their userbase they dictated to them, rather than helping the developer community they fucked them over.
Re: Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant (Score:3)
IE and Edge we're the only fall back from this nightmare! They like Firefox of old kept lazy project Managers in check from domination. While slashdot cheered Edges demise as Google is cool I shiddered. :-(
Odd I find myself cheering IE and Edge but I am principled.
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I hope the training course was not on website development.
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and arguably, changing the Edge rendering engine was never all that necessary in the first place.
Edge's problem was never really its engine. From playing with it a bit, it didn't seem to be noticeably worse. The problem was the UI and the design philosophy, and everything that came with them.
The example I always use is that of the custom formatting that MS set up to turn phone numbers in web pages to clickable links, the idea being you could click and it would pass you through to a voip application (eg. Sky
Um, WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Chromium is the "parallel universe" here, not Firefox. The Firefox browser is far older and can trace it's origins back to Mosaic. Of course, the tweet was posted by someone from Microsoft, who is clearly biased on the matter. Firefox is the only significant competition left, and it's good that users still have a choice.
Re:Um, WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Firefox browser is far older and can trace it's origins back to Mosaic.
Not quite... Internet Explorer was Mosaic's bastard child. Netscape, Mozillas predecessor, was independently developed. Chromium is descended from webkit, in turn coming from the KDE project's khtml.
Yes, I'm old enough to have used Mosaic myself, back in 1993.
Re: Re:Um, WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow (Score:2)
It seems at least one Microsoft manager hasn’t learned anything from the company’s past. Hope he’s not in charge of anything important.
Very short sighted (Score:4, Informative)
A single engine is bad for the ecosystem. It's much harder to find an exploit that works everywhere.
Webkit is chromium. Apple is using the chromium engine.
I've used Mozilla since V 0.05. I file the original memory leak bugzilla report. I've forgotten the number, but it was under 100.
I was getting updates on it for over 10 years, until it was finally solved.
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........., It is on life support and I can't see them coming back from here, but who knows.
I'm sure I heard that said about Netscape Navigator a couple of decades or more ago. When Chrome emulates IE and turns to crap as it likely will when it is a monopoly, we will need something to fall back on again.
It takes some bravado (Score:5, Insightful)
to commit career suicide by admitting you backed the wrong horse.
Gecko, for all its warts, is now the only non-Safari option (sorry, Tim, I don't own any Apple hardware) to avoid a Google monoculture.
Don't take advice from your enemy (Score:5, Insightful)
Your enemy is not worried that you will fail. She is worried that you will succeed.
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Or progressive and uses female pronouns by default?
Either way it's a pretty good troll.
Fake News (Score:4, Funny)
I know Program Manager, and I know that it cannot "say" a thing.
Spending money on the browser (Score:2)
I'd love it if Mozilla stopped spending money on supplementary projects, and concentrated on just paying people who are putting effort into developing the browser.
I proudly belong to the 5% (Score:2)
Seen this already... (Score:2)
"Microsoft Project Manager Says OpenSource Programmers Should Get Down From Their 'Philosophical Ivory Tower,' Cease Writing Their Own Software"
this piece of FUD brought to you...... (Score:5, Funny)
by the same pack of flaming assholes who have wasted 20+ years and billions of dollars designing shitty, bug ridden, non standards compliant web browsers, that have such massive security holes that any 13 year old script kiddie could drive a tank through them.
Yeah M$, you're a real authority on web development *sarcasm*.
monocultures suck; long live the open web! (Score:5, Interesting)
Three Issues:
1.) Monocultures Suck: Experienced web developers know that no browser is without its deviations from W3C specifications. One of the ways that this becomes evident is when the developer observes inconsistent behavior from one browser to another. Bug reports get filed, and hopefully, just hopefully, if the browser vendor is not overrun with arrogant "WONTFIX" jerks, the behavior is corrected to conform with the standards document. In a monoculture, this doesn't happen as often, and gradually, the sole-surviving implementation displaces the documented standard, creating a significant barrier to the creation of alternative implementations in the event that people start to crave competition again. Instead of implementing the standard, an alternative browser now has to reverse engineer and mimic all of the bugs in the dominant rendering engine, so as to be compatible with the same web content.
2.) Mozilla happens to be a "Protector of the Web", and the "Narrative" is Appropriate: One of the great virtues of Mozilla is that, in addition to being a non-proffit organization, they aren't an operator of any major web properties. As such, they aren't subject to the conflicts of interest that you often see with companies like Google and Microsoft, who are often tempted to tailor their browsers to their commercial interests: interests that may be at odds those of the user.
3.) As of early 2019, Firefox Significantly Outperforms Chromium: Has Auchenberg even tried Firefox in the past year? Ever since the release of Firefox Quantum, Firefox has been blowing the pants off Chrome. Better yet, its Servo rendering engine is written in Rust, a modern language with safety guarantees that aren't achievable in C++. Mozila's leadership with Rust points to the possibility that we will one day be able to have some confidence in the security of our computing environments. Sticking with C++ is not the path forward if we hope to ever fully trust complex software like browsers.
Re:monocultures suck; long live the open web! (Score:5, Interesting)
3.) As of early 2019, Firefox Significantly Outperforms Chromium: Has Auchenberg even tried Firefox in the past year? Ever since the release of Firefox Quantum, Firefox has been blowing the pants off Chrome.
It follows the standards better in my experience, too. Still waiting for Chrome to catch up.
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This guy works on Microsoft's Visual Studio Core, based on Electron which is Node.js+Chromium, the source is under the MIT license and it's shipping for Win/Mac/Linux. Basically open source, cross platform all the way through. It's Microsoft adopting technology (Chromium) that they got from Google (Blink) that they got from Apple (Webkit) that they got from KDE (KHTML), if it's a conspiracy to kill "real" open source projects and pull an embrace, extend, extinguish it must be a really long con by all the ma
Fork Chromium (Score:5, Interesting)
Forking Chromium and customizing it to follow Mozilla's philosophy would free up lots of resources currently dedicated to copying Chrome UX/functionality, and keeping up with the latest W3C standards. It'd also make moot the hand-wringing over issues like AMP, media DRM, and H.264 support.
The main argument against doing so would be leading to a monoculture. However, Chrome has beaten out Firefox in security the last 2 pwn2own competitions, so there's questionable value in that. Maybe the move to Rust will be a silver bullet, but if it's not, maybe that should be the end of the road.
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Forking Chromium and customizing it to follow Mozilla's philosophy would free up lots of resources currently dedicated to copying Chrome UX/functionality, and keeping up with the latest W3C standards.
Firefox is ahead of Chrome in standards. Chrome is catching up.
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It's nice Chrome is making features advertisers want, but I really wish they would get the basic positioning right.
Re:Fork Chromium (Score:4, Insightful)
If Chromium becomes the only browser engine then you won't have to worry about "W3C standards", because whatever Chromium does (bugs and all) will *be* the standard and the W3C might as well cease to exist. That is one of the problems with monocultures.
Keeping Corporate Control At Bay (Score:2, Interesting)
The presence of Firefox on the scene moves the overall state of web browsers just by being there, occasionally introducing new features which others might adopt, and giving the web user more options rather than just the Lucrative Interests. Not at all a bad thing.
It's time for @microsoft to get down... (Score:5, Interesting)
...from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Linux, if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than ? percent?
Cool argument, bro!
Dear Mozilla, (Score:3)
please ignore that idiot!
We love you. And we love the diversity you bring to the web market and your commitment to internet freedom.
A faithful user.
Webrender (Score:5, Interesting)
Or how about we don't give two fucks about "popular" and instead focus on technological superiority!? I'm a life long Opera user (which is now Blink/Chromium based) but seriously considering converting to Firefox *JUST* because of Webrender. I have it in testing on one of my development machines, and it literally is a solid 10x faster. When they say "the web at 60fps" they truly mean it. The web has become a very complex graphical thing, it only makes sense to have high performance dedicated graphics processors handling all of this instead of general purpose processors. THIS is what Mozilla has accomplished that none of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon or other tech giants have been able to muster up yet. Offloading all that work to the GPU also means the CPU is free to do other more important tasks, or in the case of laptops, this means extended battery life.
Funny (Score:5, Interesting)
IF I *had* to use Chrome, I'd quit the Web. And if that'd be too painful, I follow after Stallman and have the pages mailed to me.
*That's* how much use I have for Google and the evil crap it's gotten us all sucked into. Every effing site on the web is pulling crap in from all over, loading on the trackers, even orgs that *ought* to know better. A nasty race to the bottom.
MS is in no position to make comments. Everything they've made lately has failed or is an insanely-rigged pile of used-to-be.
The "new" Microsoft at it again (Score:3)
Aging monopolist argues for monoculture (Score:5, Insightful)
Aging monopolist argues for monoculture, who woulda thunkit? I on the other hand think that Mozilla should just continue incrementally reimplementing Gecko in Rust as they have been doing rather successfully. I wonder if this guy even knows what Rust is, or why it matters?
Let's keep this in perspective. Firefox is still double the share of Edge and equal to IE, that is still hundreds of millions. My counter proposal: Microsoft should stop shipping IE, make it a download. Kill it faster. It's just one more platform to support, arguably the most problematic one, it just dumbs down the whole internet.
Microsoft is scared... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mozilla is clearly doing something right.
Firstly they have Microsoft telling them they're wrong.
Secondly the latest stats I've found show Firefox market share increased by 10% in the most recent monthly statistics plot the top google search shows (from 9.1% to 10.05%)
See:
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Keep up the good work Firefox devs!
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There seem to be some kind of major correction [statcounter.com] in mid-November, but the overall trend still looks like a slow decline to single digit on the desktop and ~0% on mobile so under 5% overall.
More collaboration would be better (Score:2)
Aaaaahahahahaaaa! (Score:2)
Well I say Mr. Microsoft can go f*ck himself. How about that?
MS has a problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
They should've joined Mozilla and not Google. They'll notice in two years and then it will be too late.
Google is demonstrably untrustable (Score:3)
This is in the same newscycle as Google (the web's biggest advertiser) updating their API in a way that breaks most adblockers. Regardless of the reason they did it, Google won't make changes that don't favour Google. This lead inexorably to a Google-centric web and monopolization of power.
Let me translate that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me translate that:
We want to track you and deploy closed source solutions/codecs/whatever and that tiny firefox is always blocking it, pushing open source solutions and allowing people to block ads and tracking ... bastards!
MS kept a broken IE for years, and it still being used (where they disabled many other things, IE they do not disabled), keeping broken sites working still today instead of finally forcing then to upgrade to something that works in all browsers. Those shitty old sites are still blocking many people from using better browsers. MS should not really be talking about other people browsers!
First disable the IE in all windows installs and then you can comment other people browsers!
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Chromium is open source. Nothing stops somebody using it as the basis for their browser from doing something different there.
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A quick look at Chromium's github shows regular updates every few minutes. That doesn't sound much like a cathedral or a corporate tower to me. Even if Google is maintaining control of the project (and they seem to do so to a much lesser degree than Torvalds controls the Linux kernel), the development is clearly happening in the public, with every individual check-in available to merge.
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At least, someone should tell them to "learn to code."