[jallmann]

There is a lot to be said for having choice. Just because the dominant browser today is OSS (Chrome) doesn't mean Mozilla should declare victory and pack its bags with Firefox. Likewise, Android is hardly the ideal torch bearer for a Free mobile OS -- while AOSP is open-source, the development process is certainly not open, apps are not open, and that's ignoring other problems of abysmal performance, locked down hardware, and vendor crapware.

The reason that Firefox had the impact it did was because the browser is the gateway to the Internet. Firefox came of age just as the Internet was maturing as a platform, and because of that, Mozilla was able to play an important role in influencing the semblance of openness that we do have on the Internet today.

There was a similar platform shift to mobile, and Mozilla totally missed the boat. Now, please tell me, how will a FOSS (mobile) browser help open up the greater mobile ecosystem? The OS is the gateway to mobile, not the browser, and we need a better gatekeeper.

[atopal]

> There is a lot to be said for having choice. Just because the dominant browser today is OSS (Chrome) doesn't mean Mozilla should declare victory and pack its bags with Firefox.

Just since this is repeated so often: Chrome is not and never has been open source software in any shape or form. Chromium is OSS, but has only a tiny fraction of Chrome's market share and AFAIK nobody really knows what the differences between those two are (outside of the obvious: Flash player, pdf reader, etc.). Btw, Firefox is still the only major browser that's OSS, neither Safari nor Edge/IE are open source.

This isn't academic nitpicking either. Mozilla had to build a PDF reader from scratch (pdf.js), it couldn't just reuse what Chrome was using to display pdfs, since it wasn't open source. However everyone can now use pdf.js for the same task.

[comex]

Note that Chrome's PDF reader was open sourced almost two years ago as pdfium - it was closed source prior to that because it was licensed from Foxit rather than written from scratch.

[pekk]

Chromium behave so similarly to Chrome that it makes no difference to me to use one instead of the other, except for my feelings about the Google brand. It is not a terrible mystery what the differences are. If Chrome were really a proprietary product on the same order as Microsoft Windows, it would not be practically or legally possible to have Chromium at all.

[rplnt]

Does Chromium include all the spyware features found in Chrome?

[jallmann]

I know, but then claiming Chromium as the most popular browser would invite pedantry the other way around, "Hardly anybody uses Chromium, they use Chrome!"

And the analogy holds with AOSP versus the Android that is distributed with Google apps. In any case, comparing the development of Android to Chrom(ium), it is night and day in terms of openness.

[acdha]

Hyperbole does not lead to anything useful.

You might not consider Chrome to be open-source by your personal definition of the term but that's fine hair splitting: you can submit a patch to Chromium and some weeks later millions of Chrome users are running it; you're similarly free to fork chromium and make significant changes while still pulling in code from upstream. Yes, license nerds can argue about philosophical meanings but it's far from the closed-source world of IE/Trident, Opera, etc.

> Mozilla had to build a PDF reader from scratch (pdf.js), it couldn't just reuse what Chrome was using to display pdfs, since it wasn't open source

That's a single, separate component which, as comex pointed out, was licensed from a third-party vendor and nicely illustrates that Chrome is in fact open-source: the only reason it wasn't an option is because it wasn't part of the open source Chrome codebase.

You're also leaving out a key part of the pdf.js (and Shumway for Flash) story which was people at Mozilla trying to demonstrate that you could write complex renderers inside the JavaScript environment and sharply reduce the amount of exposed C/C++ code. I suspect they would have gone with pdfium had it been available but the security improvements would still have made that decision non-trivial.

[wfunction]

> There is a lot to be said for having choice.

Yes there is: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_c...

[jallmann]

That's a really lazy rebuttal. Having another option that would be superior along multiple dimensions leads to analysis paralysis? We're not talking about Javascript frameworks here.