Comment by calvinmorrison 3 hours ago
At some point people should recognize the web browsers are an opinionated VM. Many many many languages only have one runtime. There's no true reason Mozilla NEEDs its own engine, and probably would be in better shape today if they shifted to a privacy defensive fork of chrome.
I partly agree. Firefox moving to Webkit or Blink isn't as bad as people put it, but under one critical condition: Firefox still keeps the capacity to steer away from Google's roadmap and shoulder a competitive and full implementation of the engine on its own (100% maintain a fork that can deviate from Blink as much as needed, including becomming fully incompatible).
Under that specific scenario, we would get the best of both worlds. There would be less engine variety, but it would save Firefox and offer an out of a Google owned ecosystem.
Now I think that's absolutely not trivial, and if Firefox could pull that out it could probably as well push its own engine way more forward right now.
For instance Apple played that game, ended up basically alone on Webkit, and I'm not sure Safari is more competitive to Chrome than Firefox is. Safari keeps some market share, but the reasons are elsewhere.
A fully incompatible Blink fork sounds like Gecko with more steps.
I would like to see the browser be the Users Agent. IE: "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue. I really care less about the interpreter/VM than I do say, how we built a browser on it (which is why webkit is great, and I had my own webkit GTK browser that did exactly what I wanted, and why so many webkit based apps exist!)
IMHO rendering engines can be ignored for restricted use cases or if it's fine to work 98% of the time. What we're expecting from a mainstream browser is a way higher bar, so having no control on the engine is a no go. Tomorrow Firefox having to wait for Google to implement a new sandboxing approach, or not able to override deeper DRM or tracking integration would be a pretty bad situation.
As I understand it that's exactly why Apple took webkit and ran with it.
> Cookie Banners?
People really viscerally hate those, do they. That anger should be pointed to the site pushing them IMHO, but aside from that, dismissing the banner is in itself a legal choice (whatever the default was) that isn't only bound to cookies despite the name. Whatever happens on the backend or service can also be bound to that choice.
I look at it the same way we have newsletter checkboxes. They're a PITA but I wouldn't trust an automated system to make the right choice on every single form, and not sign me to some super weird stuff just because it thought the checkbox was a newsletter optout (imagine a site pushing a "bill me every month for the extra feature" clearly explained option, but with an html input id close to "opt_out_of_free_plan" and it's automatically checked by your browser)
Do you think Chrome gives a shit about firefox's engine? No.
don't forget the decade of -my-shitty-browser-extension: somethingdumb;
im surprised this is earning such downvotes. idk about the "opinionated" vm perspective but I think it needing its own engine oe not is at least something worth considering. firefox has been my go-to alt browser for years as my backup to chrome. it was what I would use to "test again in another browser" but as time has gone by, more and more stuff just doesn't work on firefox :(
It's already problematic to have Chromium dominating/near-monopolizing, and add salt to the wound letting Gecko die this way.
Chromium is so prevalent as an engine, that most developers don't test their code on Firefox and just tell everyone to use Chrome/Chromium when they run into issues.
This has the unintentional side-effect of strong-arming the W3C into compliance with the engine and not the other way around. Why do we bother with the W3C then? if they are powerless and Chromium can do as they please?
But if firefox ran chrome, it wouldn't be a problem. Vivaldi, Opera, and others are doing just fine.
> idk about the "opinionated" vm perspective
What I mean is, it's basically a VM. It's got a screen, inputs, storage, networking.
It might not be a problem in principle, but it's definitely a problem when said one runtime is controlled by a single entity that is both powerful and fundamentally adversarial towards the users.
A privacy fork can only do so much if Google keeps removing underlying things that make it possible. The more it diverges from upstream, the harder it is to maintain.