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Microsoft Employee Sparks Outrage by Suggesting Firefox Switch Browser Engine to Chromium

posted by martyb on Monday January 28 2019, @10:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the remember-when-browser-war-was-IE-vs-Netscape? dept.

takyon writes:

Microsoft Engineer Causes Online Wrath After Saying Firefox Should Use Chromium

Mozilla should give up on its own browsing engine and switch Firefox to Chromium, a Microsoft engineer said in a series of tweets, as what the company does right now is "building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5 percent."

The message posted by Microsoft Product Manager Kenneth Auchenberg has triggered an almost instant reaction from the user community, with most of the replies pointing out that building alternative products that can compete against Chromium is vital for the health of the browsing ecosystem.

"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 5%?" he tweeted.

"I couldn't disagree with you more. It precisely *because* Chromium has such a large marketshare that is vital for Mozilla (or anyone else) to battle for diversity. I'm shocked that you think they're not contributing. "Building a parallel universe"? That *is* the contribution," web developer Jeremy Keith responded.

[...] Auchenberg's message has obviously received more acid replies, including this one criticizing Microsoft's recent browser changes. "Just because your employer gave up on its own people and technology doesn't mean that others should follow," Asa Dotzler tweeted.

Also at ZDNet.

Previously: Microsoft Reportedly Building a Chromium-Based Web Browser to Replace Edge, and "Windows Lite" OS
Mozilla CEO Warns Microsoft's Switch to Chromium Will Give More Control of the Web to Google

Related: Is Google Using an "Embrace, Extend..." Strategy?
Google Denies Altering YouTube Code to Break Microsoft Edge

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by chromas on Monday January 28 2019, @10:48PM (3 children)

    by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 28 2019, @10:48PM (#793273) Journal

    Mozilla should switch to EdgeHTML now that Microsoft's done with it.

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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by driverless on Monday January 28 2019, @11:26PM

    by driverless (4770) on Monday January 28 2019, @11:26PM (#793299)

    Well shit, Mozilla have copied everything else in Chrome to the point where it should really be called Chromefox, why stop pretending and just go the whole hog.

  • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday January 29 2019, @05:12PM

    by richtopia (3160) on Tuesday January 29 2019, @05:12PM (#793623) Homepage Journal

    If Presto was open-sourced I would support further development there. It still is the best behaved browser when memory starved.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:37PM (#793808)

    Are you sure they are done? They have been known to fuck the corpse as well.