Instead of building another Chromium-based browser, I’d love to see if it were possible for Mozilla and DuckDuckGo to form a partnership that potently helps both firms. I’m concerned we will end up with a monolithic browser stack controlled by Google unless Firefox gains more adoption and support. I believe multiple parties and players help us build a more open and standards based web.
I use Firefox as my daily driver primarily for privacy concerns and control, and secondarily to avoid monolithic browser stacks controlled by Google. Firefox isn’t perfect, but I enjoy the experience and have no issue browsing the web with it.
Monolithic browser controlled by Google is already the case, the corpse of firefox is being dangled about "Weekend at Bernies" style so they can pretend they don't control the web.
Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action.
I use FF every day and it works really well for my purposes. I do all of my daily desktop browsing in it and only open Chrome if I need to access an internal corporate web site on my work laptop. To me, FF isn’t a dangling corpse, it works well and it’s just not fair to the devs at Mozilla to make such a harsh statement.
Statcounter says that Firefox has about a 4% worldwide market share, compared to Chrome's 64%[1]. Assuming that the parent poster was talking about Firefox's quality instead of market share is more than a little presumptuous.
I agree, though I think your characterization isn't entirely fair.
Firefox might have become irrelevant in terms of market share, but it's far from being a "corpse", if you meant anything by that outside of the "Weekend at Bernie's" analogy. It works quite well, its extensions are far less likely to get totally nerfed for the purpose of showing ads, and it even still develops features before Chrome does.
It's definitely being dangled out there for the sake of excusing Google, but it also seems like someone's seriously holding it back. The Servo debacle was pretty inexcusable. Servo of course still exists under the Linux Foundation, but we'll be lucky if we ever see it mean anything to Firefox or become anything other than a curiosity.
1. We the people are completely unable to use the power of market forces to come up with an alternative and supplant the established market leader
2. The government will regulate this in a way that is better than the alternative
3. That lobbying forces and the general corruption that is widespread in D.C. won't impact that in any negative way.
4. That big tech companies aren't experts in skirting regulations or that Google doesn't already have a plan B if something happened to one of their moats.
Market forces generally cannot stop a monopoly without government interaction. It's simply too powerful. They either buy upstarts or sue them into destruction in court. The only other way is if technology has a huge shift and the monopoly can't keep up before an interloper comes in and disrupts. That doesn't look to be happening anytime soon. I only see "Web3" and "Metaverse" and neither of those really spark joy in most people.
Chrome does not even come close to meeting the definition of a monopoly. Google is not "unreasonably restraining competition" nor is it even selling its browser.
Besides that point, you have to be keen to distinguish between a situation where there is just a clear market winner versus a company attempting to monopolize, e.g. do people just prefer to use Chrome at the end of the day? Most internet users today are aware of Microsoft's browser. Almost all millennials and under are additionally aware of Firefox. The definition of monopoly isn't just "people choose to use this product in lieu of others" but something closer to "people are forced to use this product in lieu of others" or "people have no other choice than to use this product"
A lot of people won't think outside of the box and see that the definition of monopoly has to evolve with the times. It's not the early 1900's any longer, big tech is redefining the way we need to address lots of things.
The CURRENT_YEAR fallacy is never a convincing argument, but especially not here considering the last significant anti trust action was one taken out against Microsoft for very related things.
We've had "Big Tech" and monopolizing actions amongst them for a while now.
Parent is right though. We didn’t have global tech empires with that kind of leverage at the time the monopoly laws were created. By spreading a browser for free, Google gains control in many subtle ways that eventually lead to revenue. That is definitely dangerous, although it doesn’t fit a classical monopoly.
Re: point number 1 - market forces can't fix lack of DRM support in a browser made completely from scratch. Even Spotify, and sometimes news sites ask to enable EME now (which I refuse out of principle). A brand-new browser already got squashed by Google's refusal to allow Widevine modules to run on said browser, and if DRM becomes a commodity solution, it's goodbye to the open market of web browsers.
But you just said the crux if the issue: you refuse out of principle, but that doesn't mean others share your principles.
Why did Google's refusal squash a brand new browser? Why was it even a factor? Did it have to be? Is there an alternative approach one could take to not need google's involvement to include a Widevine module in their said brand-new browser?
My refusal to allow EME content is entirely my own decision, and irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make.
My point was that DRM (EME) support is becoming an expectation, and you are outright locked out from certain EME schemes like Widevine unless you're a "blessed" browser (which you can't be, yet - by definition, you're too small to enter any meaningful communication with a large player, as the browser I mentioned found out).
> Why did Google's refusal squash a brand new browser? Why was it even a factor? Did it have to be?
Said browser (Metastream [0]) was meant to build a different experience for watching video streams together, potentially including DRM-ed sources. Widevine allegedly has a 70% market share, so the refusal really was a big deal and a deal-breaker for the intended vision of the browser.
> Is there an alternative approach one could take to not need google's involvement to include a Widevine module in their said brand-new browser?
What do you propose, beyond technical workarounds that can cease working at any time? I imagine that there may be a risk of invoking the DMCA or lawsuits, whether wrongful or not (might makes right after all, and Google has the deeper pockets here)
The right way to do this is to engage into a DRM licensing process, which is a fundamentally business-based one. And when you're small and dealing with a stubborn large business, there's no right to appeal their decision.
if you look at the stats in the US, chrome is slightly less than 50%, safari has a much bigger slice of the pie (with edge a wee bit more popular than the worldwide trend)
People SHOULD do a lot of things but ultimately distribution wins. If IE comes with OS, they'll use it. It's similar to people using windows or whatever OS is by default.
Tbh a lot of the tech is business tactics. Pumping so much stuff into the browser makes it an impossible task just trying to maintain feature parity nevermind compete on quality.
Building out a high quality subset is not viable, the second your browser stops working with Amazon or Ebay or whatever else your browser is finished.
> Pumping so much stuff into the browser makes it an impossible task just trying to maintain feature parity nevermind compete on quality.
To compete or gain a market doesn't mean you need to have all the features. Doing things differently can and does work. The more I read books like Competing Against Luck and The Design Of Everyday Things the more I'm able to see it and even work on projects that do that.
> the second your browser stops working with Amazon or Ebay or whatever else your browser is finished
This is why standards are so important. Why it's important to have Firefox and Safari in the marketplace. Apple using Safari on iOS and iOS large market helps keep the standards ecosystem in check with Chromes dominance.
The lack of modern tech communications standards is causing problems for consumers. While I don't always like the HTML, CSS, and JS specs... the fact that we have specs and multiple implementations is a benefit to people who want to try and compete.
> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action.
Is it the dominance of 'Chrome' or 'Chromium'. I see 'Chrome' as Google's official product, 'Chromium' though seems to have become a boilerplate in recent years for kickstarting your own browser, and I don't know how I feel about this.
On the one hand Google is already a monopoly in the browser space, because we have gone from "Browser Wars" to "Engine Wars" where 3 distinct browsers (Edge, Chrome and Brave) all running the same tech from Google.
On the other hand I see this as a major service Google has done to help everyone in web development. In a way this engine monopoly has made things much easier, I no longer care if you're running Chrome, Edge, Brave or some other V8 based browser, I know I will see a consistent experience across those browsers. And while part of me is fearful or this shift, another part of me is like "so what". So what if Chromium is a dominant browser "core", it's OSS and though Google has major influence, it's still OSS.
Chrome (not Chromium) has something like 63% global market share. I'm not sure Brave, with its ~1%, is worth talking about unless you're also talking about Vivaldi and Opera and every niche browser that exists.
IE6 post-dates the conclusion of this lawsuit, and held ~90% of browser, not desktop browser, but browser market share for the better part of the next decade.
What changed? Firefox was released, Safari was released, and quite a bit later, Google Chrome was released, but it would still be a while before IE6 would lose its dominance even once IE7 was released.
1. IE6/7 were just egregiously bad experiences for both users and developers, with Microsoft being almost entirely disinterested to the point of disbanding their browser team. Holding the web back was clearly part of their strategy.
2. Chrome, on the other hand, is well-maintained and rather good. Unlike Microsoft in the 2000s, the web is a core pillar of Google's business. Any challenger to the throne will have to overtake a moving target powered by a world-class engineering powerhouse, rather than a static dinosaur like IE6/IE7.
3. The barrier to entry in the browser market today is roughly an order of magnitude greater than it was back then. Browsers today are far more complex; they're more like operating systems.
As far as the free market is concerned, nobody is seriously challenging Chrome in this area. Ever. Unless/until Google loses interest and stops competing.
All of your criticisms of IE6 are fair and on point, but if you recall IE7 was Microsoft putting the gang back together again and trying to put some effort in again. Still not a great browser, but still a marked point where they abandoned their abandonment of Internet Explorer as a project.
Google also originally piggy backed on WebKit to build their browser. The JavaScript runtime was homegrown, but Google worked within WebKit before forking out of there. My guess is when Google Chrome is eventually overtaken, it will be by another Chromium-based browser under similar circumstances.
The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS and iPadOS.
The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much
harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major
browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per
Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS
and iPadOS.
Yeah and, perhaps I'm giving them too much credit for strategy/foresight, but it feels like this all plays precisely into Google's hands.
There is just enough competition, and Google's web apps are just functional enough on Webkit/Firefox, for Google to sail clear of accusations of monopoly.
Well, not sure what to tell you mate. You can make the case that Google Chrome is a monopoly that should be brought to heel by the Law, under new legislation if necessary, or you can’t.
Again, I don’t even particularly like Google Chrome, but do you know the only reason I keep a Chromium-based browser installed at all is? Government websites. Not Chrome though, currently it’s Brave with all the crypto stuff turned off. I don’t even need one for anything else. To the extent that Google Chrome is entrenched, it’s the same entities whose powers you mean to bring to bear on them helping them stay entrenched.
Some of us feel trepidation about Chrome being 'too big to fail' simply because Google has demonstrated itself to be capricious and fickle in terms of continued support for products. One only has to glance at killedbygoogle.com to see a pattern of rather arbitrary decisions to kill various things. If for any reason Google decided to kill off Chrome, it would be nice to have an alternative to fall back upon.
The web is 10x more complicated now. Firefox's challenge was being bug-compatible with IE, but the challenge now is replicating the entire browser runtime.
Does the web being 10x more complicated mean that 1. Google Chrome, which full disclosure: isn’t my browser of choice, deserves the same end as Internet Explorer? And 2. That the government is the means by which it should be brought to heel?
I mentioned this in another comment, but Google Chrome originally piggybacked on WebKit, homegrown JS runtime aside, before forking out of there. I think there’s a decent chance that the same could happen to Google via another Chromium-based browser. Just because it’s not immediately apparent how Chrome will lose its dominance today doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen. Nor does that mean it should. People actually like Chrome. I used to like Chrome, and it’s easy to see how people with a different set of priorities than mine still do.
The old song was about IE6, and today’s song is about Google Chrome. The lyrics might be different but it’s still the same old song.
I don't want to see Chrome (and Chromium) die, I merely want to see other browser engines flourish. Heck, even Trident, if we could turn back time and have Explorer become a good web citizen.
My problem with Chrome dominance is that it's both a dominance of a single company (since Chrome is by far the dominant "fork" of Chromium, and owned by an advertising corporation), and a dominance of a single browser engine. The latter is IMO a really big threat, as it leads to browser engine monoculture. Monoculture leads to a single point of failure, and in this case, a loss of knowledge about how to build a browser engine that's "the websites that are actually out there"-compliant. Much more relies on the web now, so it's paramount that we have a useful alternative browser engine implementation.
Sure, but what’s the original sin at work here? Google investing their time and resources into their browser projects, or the fact that web became this complex mess because web developers beat the drum for 15 going on 20 years that the web should be an app runtime?
Duplicating an app runtime feature for feature and bug for bug is difficult in a capital intensive sort of way. Even companies that can afford the expenditure, primarily Microsoft, decided to get out of that game because that level of expenditure comes with its own opportunity costs even at their level.
And there are alternatives: WebKit and Mozilla, one of those is the exclusive web renderer for iPhones and iPads which is not an insignificant amount of hardware in the world.
Google puts the work in. It’s really just that, and it’s their private prerogative to put that work in if they so choose, where others choose not to. The diversity of rendering engines isn’t great compared to say 15 years ago, but it’s not so bad that it’s a total monoculture in the way IE6 was. Actually thinking about it, more people are using more and different browser rendering engines than back then because Chromium-based browsers don’t have the total dominance that IE6 did, and there’s a lot more people on the web than there used to be. We had diversity, but we’re talking iCab, pre-WebKit OmniWeb, Opera on Presto, and yeah, Trident’s not really around anymore, but it was there, and so was Gecko and WebKit.
At least you don’t need a browser that supports ActiveX controls for regular websites anymore.
I respectfully disagree. If Mozilla can lessen its dependence on hush-money from Google, that is a /good/ thing. One may believe that Firefox/Gecko is an animated corpse, but it's the only realistic alternative to the Chromium ecosystem that we currently have. Other rendering engines are too obscure to matter and/or the hobbyist project of one person or at best a small team, including Palemoon and its ilk.
> "Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we're building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile), allowing us to strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that's accumulated over the years in major browsers," explains Weinberg.
"Safari" refers to the browser app built on top of the WebKit engine. Browsers on iOS use the WebKit engine (and not the Safari browser itself).
The same engine (WebKit) is available on all Apple platforms. One can also build a desktop browser on top of WebKit like DuckDuckGo suggests it may do on macOS. This approach has a tremendous advantage for solid platform integration and allows them to focus on building a good user experience (and, in this case, secure* good user experience).
WebKit is just the part that renders web content. Browser makers are free to include plugin functionality in their implementation if they want to, including content blockers like ad-block, fancy tab and theme functionality, etc.
It is also possible to extend the content blocking feature, so it also works in Safari itself through a regular web plugin or a content blocker extension.
DuckDuckGo offers the "DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials" plugin for iOS and macOS, blocking all kinds of trackers.
Yes, I’ll admit that part of the article is was a bit unclear to me. On iOS for example, you have to use Safari as your rendering engine. Chrome, Firefox, and any other browser ultimately us that on iOS. Android the os-provided rendering engine is Chromium. For desktop OSes I didn’t get the impression that they’re building their own rendering engine and at this point it would be a hefty engineering effort to do so. My assumption is that Chromium would be the underlying technology most commonly employed here.
Probably depends on the GUI framework they're using. QT uses Chromium for its QtWebEngine. I think that would be one of the most sensible choices to achieve cross platform support.
Since it's got such a low market share, it's much easier to declare your website "not compatible with Firefox" than it is to test on Firefox, even though 99% of sites that claim they're not compatible with Firefox work perfectly as soon as you spoof your user-agent to WebKit.
ok, interesting. I just checked, as of right now I still very much get the message "Unsupported Browser - In order to provide the best experience we require you use a different browser." So I'm not sure where our configurations differ.
Perhaps Mozilla should create more paid coding positions rather than padding Mitchell Baker's purse. She's sucked a lot of the air out of that organisation.
The prevalence of chromium forks makes me wonder if there is something about the Firefox code base that makes it far less attractive to work with then chromium’s. Is it just raw features of the core engine? Or is there a bigger issue? I believe the chromium team does put some effort in helping even competing forks with technical issues.
I wonder Mozilla is unable to demonstrably provide support in this area?
> I use Firefox as my daily driver primarily for privacy concerns and control
I'd switch to Firefox in an instant if they would just make the multi-profile functionality a first class citizen instead of hiding it behind about:profiles.
It's a feature in Chrome that is hugely essential to my daily workflow and the current equivalent in Firefox has too many friction points to sway me at the moment.
I use Chrome for everything. I have 27 plug-ins running right now. But if Manifest 3 turns out to be as bad as predicted, I’ll abandon ship for Firefox without a second thought.
DDG has been very lightweight with regard to user experience. And they actually have to, otherwise, they couldn't distinguish themselves from the competition (ie. Google). So there's no realistic risk of invasiveness.
WRT the features: Firefox needs market share above all. I'm actually terrified by a future where companies can't be bothered to put even a minimal effort to make a website/service run acceptably on Firefox. Try to use Slack on it, and you'll see what I mean.
> I'm actually terrified by a future where companies can't be bothered to put even a minimal effort to make a website/service run acceptably on Firefox
This isn't the future unfortunately. This is the present.
Future? As a webdev I don't remember having to check if something works on Firefox since probably 7-8 years at least. Userbase is too small to justify allocating resources.
Too small? According to this site [1], market share is about equal to Safari and Edge+IE. If you are supporting Safari, Edge/IE there is no justifiable reason not to support Firefox.
I never did when I was maintaining an embedded web app. I checked in Chrome and Firefox. I would go in and figure it out if someone reported a bug in Safari but mostly no one at the company used Safari so it was really not tested for and the app just was never meant to run on mobile at all so safari wasn't much of concern.
"Firefox has been very lightweight with regard to user experience. And they actually have to, otherwise, they couldn't distinguish themselves from the competition (ie. Google). So there's no realistic risk of invasiveness."
Agreed, we already had discussion here about Gecko beeing used more in project I think there were a project for a Gecko based electron alternative.
That said I'm not sure what is the current state of Gecko and how it could be used easily in new project. I'm not even sure that's a goal Mozilla is pushing.
As much as I think Firefox is great as a project, if only because it's not Chrome. I think we could use more people entering the space with fresh ideas. A monoculture with just Firefox and Safari outside it is is still basically a monoculture. Plus Mozilla is pretty solidly captured by Google, sorry to say, that's where all of their revenue comes from, more or less. If Firefox actually started getting big market share tomorrow, Google could just pull the plug on them.
I honestly think that some body like duckduckgo should fork firefox, hire as many firefox developers as possible and get seriously on track with developing a seriously better browser.
Firefox has been consistently getting worse in dumb ways, and the mozilla foundation seems to be interested in anything and everything but delivering a superior web browser.
Mozilla is not altruistic enough like that to turn off Google funding into their org. This is a company that’s trying to sell VPN subs for god’s sakes, like every other mom-pop vpn shop. These cats need that Google money and could give two fucks about seriously competing with them.
How do mozilla receiving money for a setting which is literally on the first page of the settings page and is directly available from the url bar and you can set it with like 2 clicks causes you any problem? Are you donating money to mozilla in exchange for something? Or are you helping out with the code?
The standard adoption might be pushed by Google only or at best by a limited group of developers working on chromium. Monopoly, even with open source is dangerous.
> I believe multiple parties and players help us build a more open and standards based web.
How is choosing Firefox over Chromium going to help in that regard? And why do you think Chromium is a monolithic browser stack by Google? How is it monolithic? I see plenty of "Chromium parts" forked and used in different environments on their own all the time. Blink, V8 or mixed combinations like CEF ... Also what makes you think it's "controlled by Google"? You say you want more open standards, but funnily enough Mozilla is one of those ignoring most new widely adopted and open standards because of ... well, some developer simply doesn't want Firefox to support it. See the "Web Serial API" for example.
> How is choosing Firefox over Chromium going to help in that regard?
Chromium is absolutely dominant in that space, since basically all major browsers except Safari and FF are based on it. Creating your own stack is hardly an option and Safari isn't forkable, so if you don't want to support the near-monopoly of the Chrome browser stack Firefox is the only option.
Now, I do agree that FF made some very questionable decisions recently, but so did Chrome (see Manifest v3) and the way it's going right now, we'll have yet another Internet Exporer-like scenario on our hands soon.
Yes, I guess by "Safari isn't forkable" he means the GUI application, but WebKit itself is definitely open-source and has been forked before (and is itself a fork of KHTML).
It's still mostly controlled by a single company. The fact that it's open source makes the situation a tad better, but it's still a lot of power and network effect centered on a single entity.
I use Firefox as my daily driver primarily for privacy concerns and control, and secondarily to avoid monolithic browser stacks controlled by Google. Firefox isn’t perfect, but I enjoy the experience and have no issue browsing the web with it.