Forum Discussion
What were the main reason(s) Microsoft chose Chromium over Firefox?
I insist that these reasons are mostly from a business and technical point of view.
1. Integration
Its rare to find any applications using embedded Gecko.
XUL is Mozilla's UI markup language, similar to HTML.
Gecko has always been rather tightly bound with Firefox/XUL. If you did not want to build your interface in XUL then the embedder was carrying around a bit of extra code that was complicated. There have been some various attempts at making Gecko an embeddable interface independent engine.
Although In recent years, Mozilla has greatly been reducing the usage of XUL in Firefox.
I think Mozilla is right not to invest in embeddable Gecko. Even if they succeeded; on a technical level, Gecko + Xulrunner = pretty huge code base. And if they manage to get Servo into production anytime soon it would just be a waste of time anyway.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko
It's something that even Mozilla recommends against.
Due to limited developer time and resources, embedding seems to have gone largely out of focus and thus Gecko is indeed harder to embed than WebKit.
Servo aims to be more embeddable but the API is still in work. (more info in the next section)
2. Stability/Reliability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)
The link you've provided clearly states that Servo's "CEF support never reached a usable state and support was removed from Servo in early 2018".
But it does not necessarily mean that Servo is deprecated or an abandoned project.
https://servo.org/
https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap <== This should be sufficient
As you can see the project is under active development and aims to replace major components of Gecko with the ones written in Rust.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation
3. Familiarity/Compatibility
While Firefox's extension store might be one of the best, its something inevitable that chrome has the most amount of extensions available and most newer extensions are mostly limited to chrome.
most of those 'newer' extensions are developed by the same people who don't read or care about web standards in general.
4. Monopoly
Like I have previously mentioned, while Chromium is a free and open source project developed by Google, modifying the source code shouldn't go unnoticed. Besides, it goes through many reviews and isn't instantly merged into their Stable branch which Chrome is built on.
I'm not saying that monopolies are good, but even Google's "dictations" are Open Standards and that is nowhere as bad as closed sourced ones (IE).
And browser built upon the same platform (Chromium) are not Forced to follow Google's standards, if They have significant Marketshare they can do what google did with Webkit. Fork it.
and regarding UA sniffing, most browser capabilities (tech's) could be 'spoofed' in a similar way.
From a technical and business perspective it was better to choose Blink over Gecko due to several reasons
1. Integration; It's harder to embed Gecko compared to Blink. (There's a reason everyone's going with Webkit/Blink) And since Microsoft acquired Github along with Electron, which is already using Chromium's engine at its core, improving and integrating the new Chromium-based edge should result in Electron apps being both faster and smaller in size.
Its worth mentioning that Progressive Web Apps are the upcoming alternatives to Electron. Microsoft already added support for PWAs in Edge, now they should work with other browsers vendors to add missing functionality, like file system access.
2. Stability/Reliability; With Servo around and major rewrites of the Gecko's components in Rust already in-progress, Gecko wouldn't really be a viable option
3. Familiarity; Chrome has the most amount of extensions available, something the classic edge has always lacked, building upon Chromium's Foundation should make the transition from other web browsers easier and smoother for the end-users.
4. Compatibility; Because of chromium's massive marketshare, most of web contents are built/optimized with chrome in mind.
Many sites are created and run by developers who haven’t read and don’t care about web standards; this is why all the effort to create a real standards-compliant browser fail, They either have to create fixes (hacks) for nearly every site (Almost Impossible) or switch to chromium.
Less browser diversity = Less targets to test for
Although having a monopoly in the market should generally be bad, chromium, unlike IE is not closed source and can always be forked.
The real question after a while should be: why would anyone choose to use a different browser other than the pre-installed one that is equal, if not better?
Hope this Helps!
Thraetaona And what's is going to happen if Edge starts take big chunk of marketshare from Google Chrome? I understand that Chromium is open-source but quite under Google control. They might decide to add some code giving some advantage to Chrome instead of other Chromium-based browsers. Not to mention their popular approach to make Youtube, Gmail and other services to work only/better/faster under Chrome. Using Vivaldi for example had issues with many websites even tho based on Chromium and they changed user agent to Chrome, I think.
altean wrote:Thraetaona And what's is going to happen if Edge starts take big chunk of marketshare from Google Chrome? I understand that Chromium is open-source but quite under Google control. They might decide to add some code giving some advantage to Chrome instead of other Chromium-based browsers. Not to mention their popular approach to make Youtube, Gmail and other services to work only/better/faster under Chrome. Using Vivaldi for example had issues with many websites even tho based on Chromium and they changed user agent to Chrome, I think.
So true.
Indeed, Infact Google's popular services such as YouTube allowed them to kill IE6 in the past.
But we should also not neglect the fact that Microsoft has their own marketing capabilities, too. The ability to have a web browser pre installed on most of desktop devices alone has a significant influence on this.
Mobile devices remain, and the popularity of search engines also plays a role in this.
It certainly isn't an easy task to take Chrome's marketshare away, but i doubt its the goal.
And while Chromium is a free and open source project developed by Google, modifying the source code in a way that it affect's chrome's performance positively while lowering other's shouldn't go unnoticed. Besides, it goes through many reviews and isn't instantly merged into their Stable branch which Chrome is built on.
Most chromium based browsers just change their user interface and add some extra features (e.g integrating with a specific service or adding an ad blocker) without touching the core engine, and even if they do, they will probably upstream (contribute) the changes back into the original code (Chromium).
But let's say that they edit their site's or services (like youtube) in a way that it favors Chrome or constantly asks the user to consider switching to it.
Then it that case user agent switching should generally prevent them from doing so.
Regarding Vivaldi, maybe there was a problem with the vivaldi itself or Gmail, or even a bug in chromium.
There are many possibilities, hard to trace the issue without info.
- Spoiler
Thraetaona wrote:Indeed, Infact Google's popular services such as YouTube allowed them to kill IE6 in the past.
But we should also not neglect the fact that Microsoft has their own marketing capabilities, too. The ability to have a web browser pre installed on most of desktop devices alone has a significant influence on this.
Mobile devices remain, and the popularity of search engines also plays a role in this.
It certainly isn't an easy task to take Chrome's marketshare away, but i doubt its the goal.
And while Chromium is a free and open source project developed by Google, modifying the source code in a way that it affect's chrome's performance positively while lowering other's shouldn't go unnoticed. Besides, it goes through many reviews and isn't instantly merged into their Stable branch which Chrome is built on.
Most chromium based browsers just change their user interface and add some extra features (e.g integrating with a specific service or adding an ad blocker) without touching the core engine, and even if they do, they will probably upstream (contribute) the changes back into the original code (Chromium).
But let's say that they edit their site's or services (like youtube) in a way that it favors Chrome or constantly asks the user to consider switching to it.
Then it that case user agent switching should generally prevent them from doing so.
Regarding Vivaldi, maybe there was a problem with the vivaldi itself or Gmail, or even a bug in chromium.
There are many possibilities, hard to trace the issue without info.
Not really. Google stole the market from Microsoft even when Microsoft installed Edge and IE by default on Windows, even when Microsoft showed tips when people tried to change default web browser from Microsoft browsers to a 3rd party.
Google, with their annoying banners on Google search results that tell people to switch to their Chrome browser, took the market share. that's only one of their tactics.
user agent switching is an old trick that no longer should be used because it's as easy as drinking water, to spoof user agent.
websites should detect which technologies a browser is capable of instead of simply detecting what the user agent is.
