[kwlug-disc] Firefox blasphemy: time to switch to Blink rendering engine?

[Doug Moen]

As Paul mentioned, there are 3 major rendering engines: Mozilla Gecko, Apple WebKit and Google Blink. On iOS, WebKit is the only engine that is permitted to be used. The "Firefox" and "Chrome" apps on iOS use WebKit. There are billions of iPhone users, so WebKit is important.

The 3 major organizations that determine the web standards are Mozilla, Apple and Google. I have been observing this process closely, since I am following the evolution of the WebGPU standard for a few years now. I am on the mailing list and read all the meeting minutes. It is Mozilla, Apple and Google employees who do all the heavy lifting in defining this standard. And they are equal partners in defining the standard. There is no sense in which one of these orgs is dominating the design, or in which one is only a junior partner. The WebGPU project's goal is to ship WebGPU 1.0 simultaneously in all 3 browsers when the standard drops, which means Mozilla, Apple and Google all have a veto on design decisions they are opposed to.

> The early advantage of the Linux kernel was that we had one smart guy
> at the helm that most people trusted.
>
> Google is not that guy.  Neither is Mozilla.  We don't have that guy
> in the browser space.

For me, Mozilla is that guy in the browser space.
Mozilla's mission is to create a free and convivial internet, one that puts users, not multinational corporations and advertising companies, first. Here is their mission statement:
  https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

Paul mentioned Brave (he said, "Brave is not that company"). It's simple: Brave is an advertising company.

For me, it would be catastrophic for Mozilla to drop their role of defining web standards, leaving it to Apple and Google to define what the web is.
Paul's comment is dead on:
>> Who would be hurt by a modern day web rendering engine mono-culture?
> Anybody who does not think certain browser extensions are a good idea.
> If Mozilla loses the browser engine then it loses its seat at the
> table when it comes to web standards. 

Right now, there's a big fight between Google and Mozilla about replacing cookies with an even more effective surveillance mechanism for delivering eyeballs to advertisers. I am on Mozilla's side in this fight, and I don't want Mozilla to drop out of the web standards process and let Google win.
  https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-analysis-of-floc/