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Mozilla's CEO is not enthusiastic about Microsoft's switch to Chromium:
When Microsoft announced that its Edge browser would be revamped using Chromium, the internet's response was generally quite positive. Edge is far from the worst browser on the planet, but it's certainly not what we'd call a fan favorite. As such, even the slightest indication that it could be changed significantly would have been welcome news for many.
However, it would seem that "many" doesn't include one individual in particular: Mozilla CEO Chris Beard. In a blog post published today, titled "Goodbye, EdgeHTML," Beard expressed his frustrations with Microsoft's decision.
"By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google," Beard writes in the post. "This may sound melodramatic, but it's not. The "browser engines" — Chromium from Google and Gecko Quantum from Mozilla — are "inside baseball" pieces of software that actually determine a great deal of what each of us can do online."
Microsoft's switch to Chromium could be a big boon for Google's own implementation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mobydisk on Monday December 10 2018, @05:38PM (1 child)
Here's why that doesn't work: Not enough people will install your fork. Web designers will continue to develop for "real" Chrome and your voice will be lost to the wind under the weight of the simple fact that every machine out there will have "real" Chrome preinstalled on it.
The problem when IE was king was not that we didn't have open-source browsers that were better, the problem was that one company had such a large market share that it didn't matter if it was complete garbage.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Monday December 10 2018, @10:42PM
It seems that EVERYONE who responded to me is missing the forest for the trees, and missing the trees for the forest. You're all missing the big picture. This has nothing to do with Linus's Law. This has nothing to do with creating a better product through many eyes (although, humorously enough, Blink is the result of forking Webkit, which was the result of forking KHTML [KDE's Web renderer], which resulted in a phenomenal renderer).
This is about a common RENDERER, and has absolute nothing to do with a Web browser (except that a Web browser needs a renderer). This has nothing to do with amassing a user base large enough to overthrow Chrome (although you have to remember that the thought of Chrome overthrowing Internet Explorer was once considered laughable).
Everyone (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and browsers that don't yet exist) starts with the same RENDERER (I'm using caps to emphasize the difference between a renderer and a Web browser), then differentiates their WEB BROWSER based upon everything that is not a RENDERER: user interface, plugins and extensions, etc. Firefox, for example, would get the necessary speed boost and additional stability that Quantum didn't achieve (and it's significant when playing Web games).