Should Mozilla contribute to Chromium or should it continue to develop itself independently?
GeneralThis forum is for non-technical general discussion which can include both Linux and non-Linux topics. Have fun!
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
View Poll Results: Should Mozilla contribute to Chromium or should it continue to develop itself independently?
Should Mozilla contribute to Chromium or should it continue to develop itself independently?
Following Kenneth Auchenberg tweet (Program manager at Microsoft but expression of its own thought here):
Quote:
Thought: It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5%?
From my side, Mozilla should keep going its own way. Even if I'm not a big Firefox fan, I think it's really important to have separate projects with different people/philosophies/implementations to let people choose what they prefer considering their own criterias. It's healthier for the whole community.
It's not because Microsoft decided to use Chromium engine components for its Edge browser that everyone else should follow the lead. Independence and competition sounds sane to me, even in the open source world.
More, I'm not really reassured with this kind of thinking from Google (see LQ discussion)...
Distribution: Currently: OpenMandriva. Previously: openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, CentOS, among others over the years.
Posts: 3,881
Rep:
Quote:
Thought: It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5%?
It's just sour grapes from Kenneth Auchenberg... :shrugs:
Not sure exactly what you're saying there, but first of all; I would take whatever M$ says with a VERY BIG pinch of salt for starters, second of all, they have been trying to kill off any competition ever since they started - so look at the motives behind it. They only care about open-source because they know they can't simply kill it off, or they would do just that. Don't be fooled.
Both MS and Google can take a flying f*ck at a rolling donut, for all I care. I will ALWAYS choose an independent Firefox (or FF-based) browser over anything Chromium-based. That dude is just another in a long line of idiots with an opinion at MS, just like that jackanape Steve Ballmer.
Distribution: Slackware/Salix while testing others
Posts: 1,718
Rep:
Competition helps everyone also acts as a type of check/balance for integrity/honesty. I would like to see more browsers to put pressure on Chrome/Chromium and Firefox, not less.
Just as an afterthought, although the Mozilla Foundation has made some missteps (who hasn't?), it has generally acted with integrity and on the side of user privacy.
The latter alone makes them incompatible with anything Google.
MS have a crap browser which is around 3 - 5% market share (and market share is all they care about), so they "do an Opera" and expect another independent browser project with a similar market share to follow them in their failure and idiocy (called a "commercial decision" no doubt). MS made a lot of glaring errors with Edge. In my opinion the arrogance of not making it available on Windows 7/8/8.1 was the biggest mistake and really hurt it's uptake. It meant that a lot of users were stuck with IE as an MS browser on those Windows releases, and started to look elsewhere for a modern browser. Once those users made the move to Windows 10, they already had a browser they were accustomed to - perhaps the browser they also used on Android devices - and Edge would have been a non starter for many.
google have cornered the web browser market, MS have been wiped out and the move to the chromium base is just an acknowledgement of this.
Mozilla/firefox and some of the smaller, independent (non blink/webkit) projects are all that's left. But in terms of modern, full featured browsers there is really only firefox left.
I have been using Iridium (a chromium fork) for probably more than 12 months, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I will probably abandon ship and move back to firefox before long...
Distribution: Slackware64-current with "True Multilib" and KDE4Town.
Posts: 9,040
Rep:
I've been very pleased with Pale Moon and it seems to just get better.
As it is a fork off a older version of Firefox and if you (whomever) liked the older Firefox, you might like Pale Moon.
Thought: It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5%?
This is not even wrong, in so many ways it blows my mind a little.
First of all, I don't think Mozilla is in an ivory tower. They ship a browser, and have, since forever. They walk the walk.
Second, nobody has to accept Kenneth Auchenberg's junky false dichotomy of either "caring about the web" or not contributing to Chromium. It's not clear at all that Mozilla maintaining their own "parallel universe" of patches that probably don't get accepted into Chromium if they don't please Google is in their best interest if they do care about the web. 5% of users on Gecko might turn into less than 5% on Blink.
Third, later on in the thread, Kenneth Auchenberg believes that they will somehow wrestle control of the Chromium project from Google. That's a fine belief, but what if you're wrong? Hope you enjoy your 1% of Chromium fork, I guess?
There's also this:
Quote:
1) The modern web platform is incredible complex. Today it's an application runtime comparable to the Java or .net framework.
Bad example. There's a bunch of JVMs with different implementation goals and strategies.
Quote:
No it's collaboration on a common project for a common mission. The current approach is failing us. We are stretching our limited resources too thin for the web to win. We need to rethink this.
What evidence do we have that the current approach isn't working? It seems to be working so well that it's getting a little out of hand! It's too late to rethink a 'from first principles' approach, at this point.
Anyway. I've burned enough time on this. I'm not ideologically opposed to Firefox-on-Chromium, I'm just not convinced that's necessary. In the twitter thread, I think Asa Dotzler and Marion Daly make good points; I'd skip the rest.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.