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Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

If Mozilla no longer plans to move forward with it and use it, it's dead. Nothing can save it. So what does it mean "don't let it die". I mean are bunch of people supposed to develop a modern browser engine on the side as a hobby or something? That's hilarious considering even MICROSOFT couldn't keep up, and switched to Chromium.

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It's not that MS couldn't. I am sure they have the resources, had they really wanted to. But they just didn't see the incentive since their own browser, IE, was well and truly dead. Capturing the market again starting from level zero just wasn't attractive enough. Instead Chromium offered them the best of both worlds. No need to do the grunt work, but they can now still bundle their browser with their OS and try to grab usage share from Chrome and Firefox, by offering the added attractions of deep OS integration and installed by default. If Edge ever become a serious competitor to Chrome then MS's influence within the Chromium project and web standards will become bigger and bigger, serving as a soft obstacle against absolute Google monopoly. They also always have the option to maintain more and more parts of the Chromium code base independently.

What do you mean by "couldn't keep up"?

Edge (old) felt totally usable and some say that outperformed at 4K watching its competitors

I don't think they couldn't keep up from tech standpoint

By keep up I mean in terms of standards.

Edge was always usable, but you'll always get second-grade experience if apps switch to the "fallback mode" on your browser.

Google is playing this game of quickly introducing standards they're already implementing in Chrome, and choking out the competition. And it worked with Microsoft. Worked with Opera.

Firefox is last man standing.

The usage of Safari is 3-5x that of Firefox.

Safari and Firefox are increasingly on the same page and flat out refuse to implement Chrome's non-standards (see, e.g. https://webapicontroversy.com).

It's Safari and Firefox as the last competing browsers standing, and Firefox is increasingly irrelevant. Whatever your opinion of Safari is, soon it will be the only browser trying to resist Chrome. And judging by the amount of new "standards" Chrome ships enabled by default with each release, Google couldn't care less about Safari either.

Safari does it, because otherwise Apple would lose on the store front, and Chrome adoption has literally turned the Web into ChromeOS anyway.

Firefox doesn't come with OS and hardware to keep it around.

Google is interested in eliminating native applications in favor of web apps that it can control by providing analytics, SEO, ads, and so on.

So they're very aggressive to introducing "app-like" APIs to Chrome even often at the expensive of user experience, performance and security.

As you said, their very goal is turning the web into ChromeOS. And the web is everywhere.

Honestly, that's NOT a good thing for the future of either the web or applications.

Here, https://www.chromium.org/teams/web-capabilities-fugu

and their PWA partner,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/progressive-...

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/06/24/build...

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