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.
tomscharbach wrote:HotCakeX"Maybe the new Microsoft Edge goes open source to be easier to port to Linux."
Possible, I suppose, but Microsoft has shown no particular interest in porting to Linux any time soon -- the port is still in a "someday, when we get around to it" status (see "Edge on Linux" and other discussions in the Forum on the topic). It doesn't sound like porting to Linux was a driver in Microsoft's decision.
It seems unlikely that ease of porting to Linux was a factor in choosing Blink (Chrome) over Gecko (Firefox). Firefox was ported to Linux a long time ago, and is the browser packaged as the default browser in just about every major distro.
Well Microsoft say they love Linux, so it's time to show it in action..
HotCakeX "Well Microsoft say they love Linux, so it's time to show it in action."
Microsoft is steadily heading in the direction of Linux -- Azure, for example, is increasingly tied into Linux, Microsoft seems to be moving to Linux on its servers, WSL2 provides tight integration between Microsoft's in-house Linux kernel and Windows, and Microsoft is preparing Linux versions of core revenue products (e.g. Microsoft Office) for deployment. I expect to see the process continue (and accelerate) in the future. I won't even be surprised if Microsoft abandons the NT kernel in favor of the Linux kernel as the foundation for Windows within a decade.
However, as impatient as I am to see Edge ported over to Linux (as are many on the Forum who use both Windows and Linux in daily work), I can understand why Microsoft is not making the port a priority. Linux has a very small desktop market share (about 2%), the port process is complicated, and the number of Linux users who are likely to use Edge (people who use both Windows and Linux for day-to-day work) is almost certainly extremely small. In short, the cost/benefit equation does not favor making a Linux port a priority.
Yes you're right
Strange, my reply has been posted thrice after 3 days...
Yeah, I said its impossible too.
Well that link shows what happened to an extension that's 'wise to trust'. And ublock was not the only extension making use of that API, I'm just saying that security was a priority there.- Spoiler
Thraetaona wrote:Well, nothing is preventing them from porting the same extension to other browsers, too.
But that comes at the cost of maintenance.
Even if firefox's share droppdd to 1% compared to 99%, would it still make sense porting to it, considering that it still is the worlds second popular browser?
Well, That's impossible, but i was just saying that if chrome's usage is going to grow, then less and less developers will care about Firefox's support. how can you expect someone who doesn't care weather their site is accessible by anything other than Chrome to port their extensions to other browsers?
Firefox's usage is indeed higher within the Linux ecosystem, but be aware that some extensions might specifically target a certain OS; same reason we don't use shell (like KDE) integration extensions in chrome/firefox under windows.
Linux usage is only a tiny portion of desktop share, let alone the influence of mobile markets on this.
ublock origin is not the only extension making use of that API
Regarding trusting ublock, you might be interested in this: http://tuxdiary.com/2015/06/14/ublock-origin/
Well, why would anyone who values privacy at that rate, choose google chrome in the first place? there are many alternatives.
"Decent yes but far from perfect."
Well, it should use something like 140k at max, given that most of those rules are outdated and no longer in existence, it could be trimmed down to a much smaller amount.
I don't think that's going to happen though. I mean right now 8% is a lot and if some extension developers don't make Firefox version of their extensions then it's their own loss..
- I hope to see more improvements to the WSL2 in the future Windows insider builds
- Well there certainly are things that windows lacks, like I said many development tools were built with Linux in mind, just like how Windows has first-class support for gaming/entertainment or professional/enterprise software.
Abandoning NT in favor of Linux is impossible. Considering Windows's goals and target audience. Besides porting all those legacy/UWP apps to Linux requires you to either implement the Win32/UWP API as an alternative to POSIX in Linux, or simply rely on projects like Wine to run windows apps which adds some overhead and doesn't work flawlessly; what's the point of that?
And there will be many legal issues involved.
Best choice in my opinion is using the strengths of both sides, WSL2 is an excellent example of this. Low overhead/resource usage, easily accessible and its basically sufficient for basic development needs. more complicated things require direct access to the hardware which is not available at this moment, sadly. - That will most likely happen in the next decade.
even console making companies like Sony and Microsoft said that PS5 and Xbox X are the last generation of console to host physical hardware. the next generation will definitely be cloud based, so users only would need to have some kind of browser or desktop to play their games. - I hope they never abandon Windows' NT kernel. Windows has so much advantages over Linux.
There is nothing even wrong with Windows. it's not like Gecko vs Chromium. even if it was like that. Windows would be the Chromium and Linux would be the Gecko. - I agree with most parts, but I highly doubt Microsoft will ever abandon the NT kernel in favor of Linux, if anything is going to happen within a decade its probably the rise of DAAS (desktop as a service), think of it as a desktop alternative to cloud gaming.
As much as I like Linux, it just wasn't built for gaming or desktop in mind, NT kernel focused on desktop and even had parts of GUI included in it.
Same reason why development (Especially for a language like C++) has always been much harder under windows.
I prefer to use the 'best of both worlds', the GUI and browser within windows combined with WSL2, the only feature WSL currently lacks is direct access to hardware (USB or GPU for example), direct GPU support is important because many AI development frameworks use GPU acceleration.
As far as Edge's portability is concerned, since its no longer using the UWP API, we can expect Linux support; although many features may be missing because of the tight integration between window's core foundations and the browser, and Linux's lack of proper hardware acceleration (It's been getting much better lately)