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.
HotCakeX "So I'm both curious and really interested to know the logic and reason that why Microsoft chose Chromium instead of Firefox."
Microsoft hasn't, as far as I know, issued any statements or advisories about why Microsoft chose Blink (Chrome) instead of Gecko (Firefox), but it did issue a number of statements indicating that Microsoft's motive in replacing IE/Edge was to improve compatibility and simplify web-based design/deployment.
It seems to me that if compatibility and simplification were the drivers, then the reason why Microsoft chose Blink is almost a no-brainer. Cross-platform, Blink-based browsers have about a 65-70% market share (slowly rising), Webkit-based browsers have about a 15-20% market share (more or less stable but irrelevant to the Windows market) and Gecko-based browsers have about a 5-10% market share (slowly eroding).
The well-stated technical issues Thraetaona raised (integration and stability) are important and might well have been a determining factor if the contest between Blink and Gecko was close (and would be sufficient reason to choose Blink over Gecko in that event), but I don't think that it got to that point. I think that Blink was the inevitable choice given Microsoft's stated goals.
The market bit Microsoft badly when Microsoft introduced Edge using a non-standard engine (Edge quickly turned into a niche product), and once bitten, twice shy.