[franga2000]

We aren't rooting for browser competition, but browser engine competition. Microsoft is clearly not interested in maintaining their own engine, so any users that switch to Edge are ultimately still giving market share and consequently power over the web standards to Google.

[egeozcan]

IMHO, 2.5 good engines are enough (webkit, blink, gecko - in the sense that webkit and blink are very similar). We just need more really good browsers which use gecko.

[berkes]

We certainly need more really good browsers which use gecko.

But for that to happen, Mozilla needs to up their effort to pull apart the components, decouple them from their own integration (firefox, thunderbird) and treat them as first-class projects, whose sole focus is to provide browser-builders and such with the components and tools to integrate the pieces.

Purely technical, it's still easier to build around "chrome" components. Which is why everything from electron, via "webviews" to the oculus browser or that webview-thing in your fridge, uses chrome tech and not mozilla. Edit: in an ideal world, it would be a no-brainer for e.g. Meta to pick Mozilla components to build a browser for their VR headset. Or for VW when they develop an in-car screen. Or for an app-builder to add some web-rendering of their in-app help.

But IMO this stems from a fundamental problem with Mozilla. Their cash-cow is firefox. So if they spend time and money making tech that then makes competing with firefox easier, they lose twice. So they will never truly commit to this.

Even if that would, IMO, be one of the most impactful things for Mozillas' manifesto of a "free internet".

[everfrustrated]

It's notable that there's no real nodejs equivalent running on Mozilla tech. I'd love for someone closer to the tech to explain why there's not a rich ecosystem behind spidermonkey, etc.

[berkes]

I too would love to learn more about that.

I am not sure about the current state. But "back then" all the components in Firefox were tightly coupled and almost impossible to extract on their own.

"Back then" being, IIRC, 2012 or so, when I briefly worked on the web and CMS side of a project that used HTML + CSS (and a tiny bit of JS) to render the UI of a media-box. The OS was basically a thing that could boot a "browser" and handle network stuff. Firefox was not an option, as it was near impossible to even remove things like the address bar, tab handling and all that. But the hardware was so underpowered, that a full browser was not an option. Yet "yet another khtml" wrapped in the most basic "executable" did just fine.

But this is a while ago, and only one project that chose not to use Firefox/gecko.

[mnmalst]

How would they loose? Right now people looking for a "component" are just using chrome(ium), so Mozilla does not have those "users" to begin with.

If Gecko would be as usable for integration as Blink is more people would use it overall which is a net benefit for Gecko.

[berkes]

Their loss lies in the fact that this would enable people to build competitors to firefox, as they would basically make a box of components to do exactly that.

Yet Firefox, the product, is what brings in money. Not the underlying tech.

[egeozcan]

I remember the good old times when Mozilla had a project named Chrome (yes) to (if my memory serves me correct) make building apps with gecko easier.

edit: Probably misremembering, now that I searched for it. Yes "chrome" was (and still is?) used to describe the non-webview parts of the FF but apparently I totally made up the project part.

[jraph]

Are you thinking about XUL / XULRunner?

[eitland]

Was it Prism?

That was a project to make it easy to make site specific browser IIRC.

[egeozcan]

Yes, I think it was. I think some people used it to create custom "chromes" for Gecko, hence the confusion.

edit: Funny enough, the continuation project for Prism was named "Chromeless": https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless

[ksec]

Because IIRC in old Mozilla Chrome was a project name that was the UI layer of Firefox. Chromeless basically just mean Firefox without UI for other applications to built on top.

[rafram]

WebKit and Blink aren’t very similar. There’s only a small amount of WebKit code left in Blink, and their architectures are completely different now.

[egeozcan]

Oh, thanks for the update. I assumed it'd be an incremental departure and that things couldn't have changed so much in 12 years (given the complexity of the browser engines). Now that I've read more about the fork, I learned that the codebases were already significantly different at the time they declared it officially as a fork. Interesting, because it feels like they are very compatible when I'm testing stuff as a developer (apart from their support of new stuff obviously).

[ArinaS]

3. Goanna exists, which is an engine forked from Gecko in 2016.

[Georgelemental]

How many users does it have?

[ArinaS]

It's used by 3 browsers - Pale Moon, Basilisk and K-Meleon. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goanna_(software)....

[coolgoose]

And when they had EdgeHTML which wasn't even that bad, people pissed on it and said it's worse than Blink, idk man, this is an impossible case of getting the monopoly out of Google's hands.

[olyjohn]

People are going to piss on Microsoft either way because of how they handled IE for so long. And they deserve every ounce of piss they get.

[refulgentis]

I find it a very funny meme that Google controls web standards. Well I used to find it abstractly okay to worry about, then funny, and now annoying because it's used as a thought-terminating cliche.

[Vinnl]

It effectively decides how most people experience the web, and that doesn't change when people use Edge.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

This really depends on how much effort Microsoft puts into working on Blink itself vs. its skin. And, since Microsoft and Google are similarly sized companies, Microsoft is in a better position to fork Blink if the shared engine becomes a problem (the way Google forked WebKit).

[benterix]

They do have an enormous amount of control over them, but the bigger issue is that standards are not that relevant given that all developers will test their stuff on Chrome and basically it (slower Firefox on Google sheets? Pause when opening YT documents? Who cares!).

It's not a cliche, it's sad reality. It doesn't have to be thought-terminating, though - some people try to do something about it.

[vladvasiliu]

Don't know what YT documents are, but FWIW my experience with Firefox on Linux is much better when using Google's products than Edge on Windows. Maps, in particular, is an unbelievable dumpster fire. It lags like crazy and has extremely weird behavior. Think the map's labels showing up in the search box for a second. When panning, it seems to reload pretty much everything byte by byte.

The only thing which works on Edge but doesn't on Firefox is casting from YouTube to my TV, but since this ignores my adblocker I never use it anyway.

The comparison is done on the same physical machine, with the default Edge config (I don't use windows that often, so don't bother to change settings).