Thunderbird is community maintained, not by the corporation.
They adopted a modified version of manifest V3
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It doesn’t matter who caused the problems. It’s about do you want to fix this or not. I’m sure I want to fix it. But using/supporting Firefox is not the way, IMO.
I could be wrong, though. Let’s end this discussion with agree to disagree. Until we see a new point that we wouldn’t regret discussing it.
Is it Google’s or Chromium’s fault, assuming no one modify the implementation?
I wonder if there could be anything related to the fact that the company who has the number 1 and 2 most visited websites[1] is the one in charge of the Chromium project. Nah that’s silly, there couldn’t possibly be any stock in said company making the experience of their #1 and #2 site more annoying for users of non-Chromium and particular non-Chrome browsers.
here’s the wikipedia link in case you don’t trust similarweb to not have annoying trackers ↩︎
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surpassing chromium doesn’t mean crap if google still controls the direction of the web browser engine itself. see : APIs being added and needing to be removed by downstream forks (ex. Idle Detection API, WebUSB API, WebSerial API, WebBluetooth), or even Manifest v3 deprecation (most chrome extensions will migrate to Mv3 or die, they won’t bother catering to random downstream forks like Brave or Vivaldi that have to keep patching support for Mv3 back in if they want to maintain support. Edge has sad they’re on Google with this one.
if they are privacy focused it is a constant uphill battle since they have no control over their browser engine. that’s the benefit and power of Firefox, since they aren’t completely beholden to Google. yes, financially it’s still a problem since Google pays 'em but we’ve seen how they’re able to keep Manifest v2 and v3 support in. a chromium fork with resources less than 1/4th of Google Chrome developer team won’t have the manpower or commitment to keep supporting Mv2 when upstream Chrome/Chromium keeps going ahead without Mv2.
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Do you mean surpassing Chrome? I didn’t say Chromium, either, as quoted by you.
Surpassing Chrome market share definitely means a lot, as Chrome market share is the core of the whole issue. Assuming if Brave has 70% market share today, it could control the implementation in its Chromium fork, which would be independent of Google’s Chromium.
The same would be true for Mozilla if Firefox has 70% of the browser market share today.
The problem is not you should stay away from Chromium. In fact, it’s the way to go IMO, considering it has the highest adoption rate, so things wouldn’t break all that much for the end users. It also has better performance and security, etc., than any other browsers/engines.
it’s not just community maintained, a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation called MZLA Technologies now manages Thunderbird development
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Unless they have their own browser engine, it doesn’t mean much. They still will have to follow Chromium development. Maybe they might have influence on some aspects but ultimately Google decides what features go into Chromium.
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Because it was not the relevant or correct comparison to make.
The statement you responded to was a comparison between independent browsers (as in standalone, not dependent on any other upstream browser nor browser engine). That would be Firefox, Safari, and Chromium.
Chrome (like Edge or Brave or Vivaldi) is just a comparatively small layer of additions, subtractions and tweaks on top of Chromium.
In some contexts, it would be more right to compare Chrome to Safari or Firefox. But in this context, that would’ve made no sense,
but I feel like you were trying to misled people to think that Chromium as a browser has a vast market share
I don’t know what led you to make that assumption, but it is an incorrect assumption,
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Why surpassing Chrome market share require an in-house engine? Most people don’t even know what Chromium or Blink is, let alone Gecko, WebKit, etc. They only know the browsers, Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox, Safari, etc. It’s the feature as presented in the browser that kills, not the engine.
Only when you have significant market share, you introduce what’s called standard. The engine doesn’t matter.
It’s the still the same. I don’t get your point. Because Chromium doesn’t own the market share that you were referring to. It’s Chrome, not Chromium. Google doesn’t even build Chromium straight from the source. The only build they have is Chrome. People are using Chrome on their devices, not Chromium.
It’s because you said:
Since you said about the main players in the market, in which you also said Mozilla is :
I can only understand that “this market” that you were talking about means the browser market share. As, you can see, there’s no such thing as Chromium that take 60-70% market share. It’s Chrome.
It would be strange if you didn’t talk about market share. In any case, since Google doesn’t have any right to control the other forks of Chromium, nor it invests its marketing budget on Chromium. I just don’t see your point of why Chromium would be the issue.
technically yea a browser could surpass chrome with unique features and appealing to people BUT it doesn’t change the fate of the web still being in Google’s hands.
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Do you believe that even when Firefox, for example, has more market share than Chrome, it still wouldn’t be able to shake Google control of the web?
Firefox has a different browser engine. Safari too. If they came to the top they definitely can influence web dev.
However, Edge/Brave/Opera/$CHROMIUMFORK coming to the top doesn’t change much. You asked about why surpassing chrome doesn’t need a separate browser engine and I answered based on that.
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Do you understand that any of the browsers you listed can change any line of code inside of Chromium’s source to however they want?
Mozilla probably could. But that isn’t a valid comparison to (Vivaldi/Brave/Arc/etc) Mozilla has control over the browser and the browser engine. There is no base or browser engine they depend on but do not control. Chromium derivatives do not control or maintain the base upon which they are built.
They could hard fork it and take on responsibility for maintaining the entire Chromium base and blink browser engine but that would be orders of magnitude more work and difficulty than what any Chromium derivative currently does. As mentioned above Chromium is ~40 MILLION lines of code and growing. Microsoft is the only one remotely in a position to do this, but they seemingly have no interest, and would probably not be any better than Google (possibly worse)
I really think you fundamentally are severely underappreciating the distinction between between derivative browsers and independent browsers, and the monumental difference in scope and scale between these two fundamentally different endeavors.
edit: also, just so we are all clear, this isn’t a ‘browser wars’ thing to me. As Browsers I like and use Firefox, I like and use Brave.
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I agree to most of your points. However, I still don’t think it’s Google’s or Chromium’s fault that there’s no hard fork, i.e. there’s no rich boy that want to make a move, and in a good way.
And I still don’t think that just by building the engine yourself would solve the issue. In fact, hard forking Chromium would be cheaper than to build an in-house engine. I am sure even that improving/rewriting Firefox/Gecko is more expensive than hard forking Chromium.
I don’t think I do browser wars, either. We are both like to express our opinion. That’s all.
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Absolutely. However, maintaining one’s own browser engine is an expensive task. The investment on development should be reflected in compatibility.
Also I already mentioned above how soft forking Chromium is impossible..
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There is a good reason why Microsoft threw in the towel on EdgeHTML, the browser engine for MS Edge. Without website support (and some intentional Google monopolist practices), maintaining their own browser engine was a money losing machine.
So the dilemma for indie browsers wanting to use Chromium and go against some of Google’s decisions, they have 2 options :
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A soft fork (where they follow upstream Chromium patches and just add their own features/remove things on top of Chromium) - This means that major underlying changes will become hard to completely revert. For example, the removal of Manifest v2 support means they have to patch in their own way of supporting Mv2 extensions. This becomes expensive and harder the more and more upstream moves away from Mv2. Also, this will be completely nullified by the fact most extensions will move with upstream Chromium changes, so you won’t even have Mv2 Chrome extensions to support on your patchworked browser
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A hard fork (complete fork of Chromium where only you develop features for the browser) - This grants you freedom from Google’s changes, but is enormously expensive too. Not to mention, you might lose the website compatibility that Chromium has.
Both options are extremely unsuitable, for the same reason - cost and compatibility. That’s why Firefox is barely surviving on Google’s cheques. It comes at a price and I argue in the past few years indie browser engines (not browsers) have gone extinct - your only, real options are Blink under Chromium-and-friends, Gecko under Firefox-and-friends or WebKit under Safari-and-friends.
Nothing else matters, and no one else has the voice in W3C even if they have the browser engine to show.
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Seems that they’re at least cutting costs at the right place. Better than last time when they fired actual developers and killed Servo.
edit: it might be this one? People - MozillaWiki
In which case, yes, it’s just HR and other useless eaters non-essential staff.
In my opinion, focusing on AI is a grave mistake, and a waste of time, money and resources, this topic is controversial, but it is my belief that AI in hindsight will be seen as over-glorified and over-hyped in the future. Not to mention, that you can dig for and probably find evidence suggesting that the reward-to-investment ratio for AI is abysmal (may not be the case yet, due to the immense hype and subsequent investments, inflating its value) or is declining.
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