I applaud the death of IE and Edge. One thing I'm worried about though is that Chromium may take over the market and we end up with websites working only in Chromium based browsers and other important browsers like Firefox and Safari get left in the dirt.
This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too.
Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).
It seems very unlikely:
- Mozilla has been in a far worse uderdog position before during the IE6 era, with way more incompatible sites and less funding.
- Mozilla is not for profit. Fighting for the open Web is one of their goal. It always has been. They are not perfect, but their track record is damn good compared to almost any player of their size and impact in the tech world.
- Mozilla strongly invested in their own tech, including rewritting the browser rendering engine and taking huge risks such as create a bloody hole new language, rust, in the process. To my knowledge, the "oxydation" project has been a success so far, and rust is proving everyday that it's a positive force in the world as well.
- Firefox is the only decent mobile browser. I can't navigate the web without the ublock extension. I just can't.
- Mozilla keeps innovating. Their last brillant idea, the tab container, is worth switching on it's own.
- Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side. Even during the V30 to v50 transition period where Firefox was, at the time, clearly an inferior product, we kept using it to support it for the sheer ideal of it. We hoped it would come back from it, and it happened: Firefox is now a fast, lean and fantastic browser again.
- Privacy concerns are (FINALLY !) being taken in consideration from the crowd. And Chrome is terrible at this, so moving to a chromium core, while technically not related at all because you can set it up the way you like, would carry the stigma.
All in all, I'm incredibly optimistic about Mozilla et Firefox's future despite the market share taking a serious hit.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock/review...
I use Firefox. I always have. My experience is totally different to yours. Before FF57 it was a single process and it ran nicely on a 4GB machine with a 2009 Intel Atom processor. Afterwards it became much hungrier for memory and processor. I had to buy a new computer. (I tried Chrome of course but it is hungrier.)
This is not my experience. On my MacBook Pro it is slow and tends to cause system lockups on a regular basis. Everytime there is a new announcement about how the new Firefox has improved performance and stability I give it a try and each time am disappointed.
On my phone the Firefox browser is almost unusably slow and slow enough that it can't replace Chrome. Mozilla has released other mobile browsers which perform faster but they lack the features I need in my browser.
I don't know how true this is when considering all the calling-home (split over multiple settings in about:config making it difficult to disable) in modern firefox versions.
> Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side.
A lot of geeks are moving away from it to forks or to other browsers like qutebrowser, which actually makes senses considering that mozilla keeps trying to sabotage the poweruser demographic.
Although I would have loved even more choice (or MS championing the superb Firefox rendering engine instead), I think we're already well off with two fully featured and completely open source browser engines.
> building a fully featured browser engine from
> scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80%
> of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible
> task in 2018.
> I think we're already well off with two fully
> featured and completely open source browser engines.
Which is apparently something developers want, since apparently none of them were working in the industry the last time we had a monoculture.
Watching Mozilla align Firefox's extension API with Chromium's, I'm a little surprised that they haven't already made the move. If browser evolution continues along the current path, I predict Firefox will switch to Chromium within 3 years.
> Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).
It's already happening. Until a year or two ago, the only time I ever opened Chrome was when a page using some sort of experimental API ran slowly or not at all on Firefox. Now, the number of mainstream websites I see with serious glitches in Firefox is increasing by the month.
It's not Firefox's fault if people aren't testing their websites on both browsers, just like it wasn't Firefox or Chrome's fault whenever people only tested their webpages with Internet Explorer and its mess of exclusive APIs and deviations from standards.
- Firefox Focus is switching from Chromium Engine to Gecko Engine.
- Huge amount of work in WebRender, they're starting to test it. If it lives up its promise Chromium Engine might fall far behind in terms of performance.
So maybe you're right but from what we can tell right now, the current trend for Mozilla is to remove the last pieces of Chromium and bet everything on a new generation engine which is not Chromium.
I feel like Debbie Downer from SNL back in the day, so let's hope you're right.
Let me explain: there is no true open standard (as explained at https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/). You don't realize this until you make HTML5 games or apps, like when Google decided to break tons of HTML5 games with https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...
So basically it is already really hard to support all web browsers out there, since there is no "standard". So what you do is you limit yourself to a few, and display "Best played in browser X", because browser Y has these strange issues, and might introduce others with a new update, and the same for browser Z and F.
So if you make rich web content such as games, the ecosystem will automatically push itself to a limited amount of web browsers.
That is Firefox. Shuttering that kills the project. It's like, I don't know, Tumblr deciding to ban porn or something.
Much like the debates about other developer tools in fact (text editors et al).
100% agree here. I'd be way more worried about monoculture if any other browser would be discontinued, but the MS browser history was and is just a shitshow.
<rant>
I can't even remember how many years MS and even some people in my vincinity were going on about how amazing the new IE (or later Edge) were and that MS would totally be changing their ways now. Usually, if you used their browser for more than five minutes, that sounded more like a bad joke.
To this day, the (properly updated) Edge on my dev machine does user interaction orders of magnitude worse than FF/Chrome. Tabs frequently stop functioning properly and even won't reload anymore, until you find out that some subprocess crashed and you'll have to close and re-open the site to try again. The adoption of new web standards happens at a crawl.
Yet, at the same time, their "Edge is totally a next-gen browser! Promise!" rhetoric leads to actual companies prohibiting users from getting and using an actually useful browser like FF.
Their dev story sucks, too. The best of their jokes was when someone wanted to convince me on how cool VS2015 was for HTML/Javascript development. Yes, I totally want a 16GB+ IDE that literally can take minutes to load from an SSD and frequently freezes to do nimble HTML editing m(
The funny thing is: They actually arguably fixed that one in the mean time (VS Code), but their browser politics remained. Perhaps this signifies the same shift there?
</rant>
TL;DR: I actually wouldn't mind that much, but MS has been repeatedly overselling and underdelivering for years and just slows down everyone else doing it.
I know what you mean, but that is mildly amusing and not entirely false.
Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on webrender.
From a security point of view, I think that's true. What are other problems?
I think everybody using the same rendering engine would be a net positive.
If you don't have a large team of developers and a few millions in the bank you basically don't have a chance.
As Google keeps pushing more and more features in the browser the bar keeps getting higher and higher. I'm actually surprised that Mozilla still manages to mostly keep up, but since it's mostly running on Google's money it's still not quite a relief.
I don't think this is even remotely true. Those same arguments (using apis, good security, good ui, speed, etc) could be made for any piece of non-trivial software. But there's no way a browser is "on par" in complexity with an operating system.
If edge dies, and FF shrinks further (both of which seem likely), FF will in effect be reduced to an alternative implementation of chrome; not a implementation of a web browser. Both Edge and FF already include chrome-quirk emulating features; you can expect those exceptions to become the norm.
Apple - for all it's wealth - isn't likely to bother bucking the trend here. The same forces pushing MS affect Apple too; and given their high-end only marketing and various political factors, they will be completely ignored in much of asia - and that's a lot of devs creating a lot of stuff that is likely to depend on chrome-only features eventually.
I presume you mean that Safari doesn’t support experimental standards that Chrome is pushing because they align with Google’s businesses strategy.
This is exactly the problem with a browser monoculture. If we’re not lucky Google will be the new Microsoft.
Google owns Android, which is the Windows of the mobile world. They push a development monoculture based on their platform. They leverage their de-facto monopoly in some sectors to penetrate other sectors. They hoover up young developers and keep them in gilded cages that encompass as much of their lives as possible. The only difference is that their cash-cow is advertising rather than an office suite.
Google IS the new Microsoft. They are MS just before the Halloween Papers and the antitrust trial: rich, dominant, and mostly well-liked by the dev community at large.
But worst of all, it seems like Apple just doesn't care. Bug reports don't seem to be read at all, while when reporting an issue for Chrome you usually get a reply within 24 hours.
You mean the actual reliable standards -- and not just rushing to add shiny stuff before it's standardized?
Safari does tend to release features a bit later than Firefox or Chrome, but it’s also an open-source, standards-compliant browser that includes almost all modern web tech that the others support. In daily use, I rarely find anything that isn’t supported, with the one exception of issues around WebRTC that have been fixed for some time.
The comparison with IE is flawed.