While Microsoft seems to have finally "surrendered" to Chromium when it announced its new direction for the development of its web browsing, one of the last companies resisting the adoption of this open-source browser, Mozilla, received support from its defenders when it faced pressure from Microsoft engineers to abandon its resistance.
Kenneth Auchenberg, a program manager at Microsoft, responded via Twitter to a post recently uploaded to the blog.mozilla.org website regarding his company's decision to abandon development of EdgeHTML in favor of future development of Chromium for its upcoming browsing efforts.
Thought: It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5%?https://t.co/0zi2NCtzb4
— Kenneth Auchenberg 💭 (@auchenberg) January 25, 2019
Auchenberg's seemingly flippant response was met with backlash from both web users and a Mozilla engineer.
Hey, Mozilla engineer and Chromium committer too here… Not having multiple implementations of the web means that the web stops being an open platform… People start relying on Chromium bugs, and standards / specs become useless, making innovating impossible.
— Emilio (@ecbos_) January 26, 2019
Auchenberg counters Mozilla engineer Emilio's concerns with a strong argument that at this point the market has shown its preference and companies should focus on the contribution of open source, rather than the concept of a separate rendering engine. In theory, focusing on a single open source system could accelerate innovation, as everyone involved would continually bring new implementations.
2) This complexity makes it incredibly expensive to implement a web runtime. Even for Google/Microsoft it's hard to justify such an investment that would take thousands of engineers in multiple years.
The web has become too capable for multiple engines, just like many frameworks.
— Kenneth Auchenberg 💭 (@auchenberg) January 26, 2019
The entire firefight between Mozilla and Microsoft engineers was interrupted by a single ominous tweet, from former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal, who wrote: “I’m afraid this won’t end well,” as another Mozilla engineer blames Microsoft for its decision to adopt Chromium.
Thought: It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5%?https://t.co/0zi2NCtzb4
— Kenneth Auchenberg 💭 (@auchenberg) January 25, 2019
Gal now works at Apple, but with Mozilla struggling to hold onto market share and users left with a choice, the argument of Mozilla's defenders and engineers may soon be dismissed in favor of the "free market.".
