I wish they had thrown in with helping Firefox instead of handing even more web influence over to Google. A percentage of what Microsoft spent on EdgeHTML contributed to the Firefox project—ideally as employee time—would go a long way, along with the counterbalance of putting the Firefox engine and code base front and center of more Windows users.
Sadly Chromium is WAYYYY easier to development on than Firefox. Had Mozilla spent effort making the base of it as a framework in the same way Chromium is, they may have considered it.
There is a reason why Electron, QT etc use Chromium.
Kind of a shame.. There are a few areas where FireFox absolutely smokes Chrome. The way it reflows some heavy DOMs interactively is almost magical in comparison.
Curious, what makes Chromium better in your opinion? I have probably just touched the surface of the dev tools on both and haven‘t used any features that I would be missing on either.
It's a blank browser, has barely any "Google" specific stuff in it ready to go. It is easy to develop for, doesn't require cross language compiling (rust/c++), builds fast, easy to understand how the different parts work (at least for a browser developer it should be), has documentation, is meant to be used to develop your own browser.
Are you sure Chromium builds fast? lol, it takes my laptop with 12 cores and 64gb of ram over an hour to compile from scratch, not counting the ~20gb of git history to download (I maintain an internal build at work).
They worked on it a bit [0] but it has been abandoned along with all the other embedding efforts over time. As someone who embeds Chromium (via CEF) only because it's easy, I would really appreciate (and have been shouting into the wind about) focus on the embeddability of Gecko.
I suspect that their work in using Electron for things like VSCode made switching Edge over to Blink more enticing. I wonder if they ever considered looking at the Mozilla frameworks
Unfortunately historically there was a history of Mozilla not being a very stable platform to develop on top of (though I have no idea if Chromium was worse). There had been at least two separate embedding APIs that have been abandoned (the original one in the ActiveX control era and the external one after they moved to Hg), at least three Electron-like things (prism, XULRunner, and positron), and the field of corpses of Mozilla-based apps (I've worked for two, there were lots more).
Maybe they're better at API backwards compatibility now? Not sure; I'm unlikely to try again given previous experience. Which is a shame; I still use Firefox since it was called Phoenix…
If anybody has more recent experience working on their stack, I'd be happy to be correctly though. Preferably with examples of projects that _haven't_ been burned.
Cynical thought: in no way am I claiming this was the only reason for Microsoft choosing Blink, but it’s probably easier to find and replace Google analytics APIs with Microsoft endpoints than it is to add them into a code base after the fact.
That's pretty misleading. When you want to sync state across Chromium installs, you use a Google account, and that's really just scratching the surface.
Chromium comes with quite a bit of Google baked-in.
I don't see why they would've done that, given how much it was baked into other stuff behind the scenes throughout the years. Auditing it would be a massive undertaking that I'm not sure even the most well-off organization would like to try.
They probably can't, especially if the engine interfaces with proprietary code or is deeply linked to the kernel for example. It's likely part of the reason why they never got it updating as frequently as the Chromeium counterpart can, as this is entirely userspace.