I agree with you entirely. My third reason to stick with Firefox is to vote with my feet regarding browser engine diversity.
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This keeps getting repeated and I still haven't heard a convincing argument on why that's a good thing. Chromium/Blink is opensource, has two megacorp contributors (Microsoft and Google) - it's a far cry from MS IE monopoly. Plus Apple has WebKit.
Firefox just adds incompatibility to the mix of things you have to support, frankly I'd switch to Firefox if they decided to build it on top of Chromium.
When they were actively working on Servo and had devtools team I could see the potential, but after they sacked those - what's the point ? Market share is shrinking so compatibility is going to get worse, devtools are worse, performance/stability is worse in my experience.
When Google wants a feature implemented in Chromium, it gets implemented, pretty much regardless of how buggy it is. When I want a feature implemented and Google wants it not implemented… tough luck.
Just look at the most recent changes to webextensions that chrome is trying to do... basically solely to make ad blocking nigh impossible. That's why browser diversity matters.
Is that different with Firefox? I haven't been paying attention in a while now but I constantly read complaints about UI changes - and Firefox has it's share of experimental features that ended up being exploited or abuse (asm.js comes to mind).
It's not much different with Firefox, no. I was making a point that browser monopolies are bad; the fact we only have three real browser engines (two of which are based on Konqueror) is a problem.
But at least Mozilla do a basic back-of-the-envelope “is this feature a huge security vulnerability” check before shipping. (Looking at you, <portal>.)
Only in the sense that when Google wants a new web standard the Firefox devs need to be convinced before it happens there. That has stopped a few, but not all, user hostile things from becoming defacto standards over the years.
When Google invents a feature I want, Mozilla writes a position statement on how it's evil and never implements it.
It's hard to get behind engine diversity when Mozilla is trying to take the web in a direction I don't really want.
Meanwhile Brave does the same thing, but with Cryptocurrency.
I wish we had an open source clone of Vivaldi.
What features are you referring to?
FLoC may be one that could be characterized as “evil.” I mainly think about APIs that extend beyond the browser, like USB or Bluetooth, that Firefox won’t do for security reasons.
Those are the features I was thinking of.
FLoC seems to be pretty irrelevant to anyone not directly working on ad infrastructure, so I'm fine with Mozilla ditching that.
I don't think it's enough that Chromium is open source. Yes it's very different from the MS IE monopoly, but Google has a very different business model compared Microsoft.
The value of IE to Microsoft was to lock people into Windows - both developers and users. They recognized that the web would become a software platform in its own right, and knew that if everyone ended up using web software then it'd be a lot easier to use non-Windows platforms.
Google gets much of its revenue from web advertising, so the value of Chromium to Google is to keep the web profitable for them. For example, Mozilla can't do to Google what Apple did to Facebook. They can do things like veto any move away from cookies as the primary tracking mechanism, at least until they have an alternative ready to go.
An open source license doesn't fully solve the problem because forking Chromium isn't enough. All the software on the web is built on top of APIs that Google gets a say in, and these are designed to be useful for ad/tracking networks.
How much does Microsoft actually contribute to Blink's core really? The benefit for Microsoft of Chromium Edge is they get to outsource development. Their interest is in making it run well, and so far they've largely left the web features to Google. If Firefox became a Chromium fork they'd be just another junior partner in name only; Google would still be running the show on policy. In fact, possibly worse, because of their poor negotiating position.
WebKit only matters because of iOS, and Blink and WebKit still share a lot of DNA. It's not a credible competitor otherwise.
I do agree killing Servo was a shortsighted move, but, speaking as a long-time Mozilla community member, that's hardly the only shortsighted move MoCo has ever made (see also: dumping embedding for Fx4).
>The benefit for Microsoft of Chromium Edge is they get to outsource development
They also wanted to get superior compatibility. While the old edge was quite a bit better than IE, it still feel short.
The point is Firefox has preferable ergonomics. For example, Firefox allows an end-user to specify their own fonts and colours. Chrome/Edge do not allow this.