Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?
Everything that makes Firefox different would be lost, and have to be rebuilt. But let's talk about a different reason why forking Chromium to keep the features you like isn't as simple as it sounds.
Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically).
At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream Chrome.
Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong direction does not always get you to your destination quicker. Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.
The problem is that the difficult not only increases with time unbounded, but is on a steep curve. Eventually the manpower and resource required to keep up with upstream will eventually match and outstrip that required to develop and maintain a new engine.
Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec? I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own spec, but what is the purpose of having N different implementation of the same spec with their own idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
I don't think that zero-day is really an argument, given that the vast majority of users are on Chromium. If there is a zero-day on Chromium, most people have it.
> At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But Google controls both. It means that Google can push for what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user. E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google not to care about something for it to impact Chromium/AOSP.
That's the whole point of competition: you want the users to have choice, so that it pushes the companies towards building a better product. Monopolies never serve the users.
Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.
What if the developers of the dominate engine becomes complacent and decides that it's "good enough" and we get stuck in another IE6 situation where development stops for years and years?
Yes, Chromium and Blink are open source, but they are effectively Googles open source project. If you're unhappy with their direction you'll need to fork it.
Exactly, the situation with Chrome is the exact same sort of benevolent dictator problem we had with Internet Explorer, except this time dressed up with an open source license.
Mozilla often disagrees with Google on what should get into web standards and the design of the spec, especially apis that give hardware access or seem to make privacy harder for the user. Having their own implementation is kinda crucial for that.
Look at how llvm forced gcc to improve their error messages (among other things).
Running a different compiler is also useful to find bugs in your project, and in the compiler itself. I would imagine this applies to the web just as well — a web browser implements an open spec (just like a C++ compiler), at the same time being much more complicated than a C++ compiler.
If I remember correctly, RFCs need at least two independent implementations to become standards. I think that would be a good idea for web stuff too. It's a way to make sure the spec isn't just blindly following the implementation.
I see these statements as "Everyone should be like me!". Same statement is always applied to KDE & Gnome & Xfce and of all the numerous open source solutions.
Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers. They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla / Firefox is proving them wrong.
Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition? I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when everyone things and does the exact same thing.
China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be looked down upon.
They wanted a browser they have full control over. And you can move much faster when you don’t have to negotiate every change with third parties. Also, Firefox 1.0 and Chrome 1.0 were released within months of each other (though Firefox 0.x had existed for a little while), so Firefox wasn’t that established yet. The main competition at the time was Microsoft Internet Explorer with over 90% market share.
I'm fairly sure pretty much everything at google since the doubleclick acquisition has been a loss-leader in order to give users good 'viewers' for advertisements, there's some nice byproducts along the way of course.
Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense, Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's.
Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.
To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.
Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.
Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/
And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.
They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.
I don't disagree, and yes, you make a good point, and I added that the interests of Google and Microsoft coincide, which is also bad for us. The banning of ad-blockers, for instance, is also in the interest of Microsoft.
I think Microsoft just doesn't care about ad-blockers. They probably don't have a strong position on it. If they work it's fine for them, if they don't its also fine.
They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily web browsing.
In 2024, Microsoft generated 12.58 billion dollars in revenue from advertising, which is nothing to scoff at.
And we also have to look at future opportunities — the share of the advertising market may be small, but they represent THE alternative to Google's ads, including on all alternative search engines.
If they aren't concerned about ads or ad-blockers, then why are they so aggressive about pushing Edge on Windows users? And in the EU, when people first open up the Edge browser, why do they inform people that Edge will share their data with the entire advertising industry?
> They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.
IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.
I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.
My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
It's hard to tell if they neglected the original Edge or if they just couldn't keep up with Chrome.
IE was a completely different story, it was full of proprietary Microsoft technology (ActiveX) and a lot of Enterprise applications used it heavily.
Microsoft didn't care about browsers maybe 15 years ago, but this changed a lot. A lot of Microsoft software is just available in the browser, they migrated a lot of things to web technology. That's also the reason they switched their browser to Chromium, they needed to ship something that actually works.
> Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together.
Even without (conspiratorial) intent this seems to be happening unintentionally- Andreas is ex-Apple, after all, and that's why he switched development away from his own language to Swift. I wonder if it's analogous to Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza inevitably eventually ending up at Microsoft.
That said,
> Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
Sounds like too good a no-brainer to actually happen, at least under current leadership. Few of these "dream mergers" ever actually happen. Another example, Apple buying DuckDuckGo as a counter against the Google search monopoly, has never come close to happening after years of speculation.
Sure it does, it competes on many fronts like Office (vs docs), Sharepoint (vs Google Drive), Azure (vs GCP) and many others.
Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.
