> If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$.
And further contribute to the browser monoculture?
> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.
And you've reported this, I assume?
> Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.
Really? I explicitly avoid Chrome on my computer because it can't handle the web without chewing through my RAM.
> Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.
I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.
This is a total non-response. They're not actually under an obligation to report a bug and use their time - Mozilla, however, is obliged to make their browser work properly, and to ensure the team that's working on it is properly staffed/resourced/competent.
Your response is downplaying someone's actual concern by acting like it's wrong that they don't spend their spare time participating in open source software development.
Furthermore, this "browser monoculture" argument is ridiculous. WebKit and Blink are both open source, and Mozilla is increasingly becoming what Opera was back with Presto: a lone engine with quirks that nobody wants to waste their time working around.
If Mozilla gave up Gecko tomorrow and forked WebKit (a la what Blink is) I don't think I'd bat an eye. This is like what junior programmers wind up learning at some point - nobody cares what the code looks like, just that it does what it's expected to.
I say this all as someone who's contributed to some Mozilla repos, has a massive personal investment in Rust (and has read a good chunk of Servo, and liked it), and has been a fan since the Mozilla Suite days.
> Your response is downplaying someone's actual concern by acting like it's wrong that they don't spend their spare time participating in open source software development.
Anything that broken would be fixed, almost instantly, had they reported it. I am not very amenable to people who discuss their very extreme personal anecdotes that they have failed to even put even the basic (some may even say courteous) amount of help and instead talk about their experience like it's typical.
> Furthermore, this "browser monoculture" argument is ridiculous. WebKit and Blink are both open source, and Mozilla is increasingly becoming what Opera was back with Presto: a lone engine with quirks that nobody wants to waste their time working around.
Open source does not ensure that a monoculture will not develop; both WebKit and Blink are financed by billion (trillion?) dollar corporations that have almost complete control over what will or will not be worked on or merged in. Every engine has its own quirks and slant on how it interprets the web standard: if WebKit was the dominant browser today we'd all be even more hesitant to roll out WebM or WebGL 2.
> If Mozilla gave up Gecko tomorrow and forked WebKit (a la what Blink is) I don't think I'd bat an eye. This is like what junior programmers wind up learning at some point - nobody cares what the code looks like, just that it does what it's expected to.
Who exactly are you likening to "junior programmers"?
> I say this all as someone who's contributed to some Mozilla repos, has a massive personal investment in Rust (and has read a good chunk of Servo, and liked it), and has been a fan since the Mozilla Suite days.
And you know my personal history on this pretty well too, but you'll notice I'm advocating for Mozilla in this case.
There already is a browser monoculture. Even Microsoft's default browser is now Chromium with a different logo on it. The way to get diversity in browsers is to have adoption. There are hundreds of alternative browsers out there, but they do not diversify the browser market because they are unusable. You want diversity of browser adoption, not diversity of implementation.
There just aren't enough users out there to stick to a bad browser for religious reasons. It has to actually be better.
The browser market is as free of a market as you can get. Chromium has won. It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE. It's basically too late to catch up. While trying to catch up, they will lose what little market share they have left, and the result will be an undisputable browser monoculture. What Mozilla can offer is a different frontend (or "userspace" if you will) to Chromium. That is the realistic approach.
> I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.
desktop user agents: 8% and dropping, about to be overtaken by Internet Explorer (lmao)
> The browser market is as free of a market as you can get.
Given all the UA-sniffing and purposefully sending broken or degraded sites to various browsers going on nowadays (including on Google properties), no, it's not.
> It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE
Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world, and incessantly being featured on the front page of the biggest (90%+) search machine in the world.
I'm skeptical of this argument. Advertising companies shill garbage to us all the time. If it were bad, people would have stopped using it. As strong as the Google brand is, I don't think people are using it just because they were told to. Consumers, even the least technical of them, are still savvy enough to notice "slow internet". Their friends tell them to switch to Chrome, then they stop complaining about it, done.
> Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world
Yes, this is the reason why it became the best. It had loads of talented developers deployed on it for years and years. You can either complain about it or be happy that it happened and you have access to the fruits of this labor for free.
And further contribute to the browser monoculture?
> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.
And you've reported this, I assume?
> Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.
Really? I explicitly avoid Chrome on my computer because it can't handle the web without chewing through my RAM.
> Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.
I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.