> Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support.

Google learned it can be "standards compliant" if it submits a draft spec to WHATWG/W3C, and while the comment and revision process is still ongoing, roll out those features in Chrome and start using them in YouTube, Gmail, Google docs, and AMP. Now Firefox and Safari are forced to implement those draft specs as well or users will leave in droves because Google websites are broken. Soon enough, Google's draft spec is standardized with minimal revisions because it's already out there in the wild.

The debate, revision, and multistakeholder aspects of the standards process have been effectively bypassed, a la IE6 and ActiveX, but Chrome can claim to be on the cutting edge of standards compliance. This is a case of Goodharts's law.

That is revisionism, IE only stagnated because they kind of wipedout the competition, like Chrome is today, and Microsoft withdraw most of the development resources from the team.

WPF XAML was originally designed by ex IE team members, and they were the same that a few years later proposed XAML Grid concept as CSS Grid initial design.

Many JavaScript devs have to thank their abuse of JavaScript in the browser to XMLHttpRequest introduced by IE.

> leading standards support

"Leading" being the operative word. Ship a new feature, submit it as a standard and encourage its adoption so things only work on chrome and further increase market share when people find other browsers "broken".

MS did exactly the same shit with IE - the only really difference was that the standards body (w3c) was independent, so they couldn't self declare it as a standard. Now the "standards" body (whatwg) is mostly google...

It is nice when you have replaced the original standard committee with your own committee. You can always have "leading standards support".

MS was not smart enough to do this. Google was smarter.

>Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support

Yes, Chrome has leading standards™ [1] support!

_________

[1] A so-called standard™ is a piece of source code that sits on the main branch of the Chromium repository. Not to be confused with actual standards!

Isn't part of the issue that they have a big hand in defining the standards?

leading standards support

Except no support for:

  CSS Canvas Drawings
  CSS filter() function
  Video Tracks
  Audio Tracks
  FIDO U2F API
  SPDY protocol
  JPEG XL image format
  HTTP Live Streaming
  HEIF/HEIC image format
  SVG fonts
  CSS hanging-punctuation

  CSS font-smooth
  CSS Initial Letter
  Speech Recognition API
  CSS -webkit-user-drag property
  CSS3 Multiple column layout
  CSS text-indent
  Synchronous Clipboard API
  HEVC/H.265 video format
  TLS 1.1
  text-decoration styling
  CSS display: contents
  CSS Container Style Queries
  CSS clip-path property for HTML
  CSS Counter Styles
  Ruby annotation
  WAI-ARIA Accessibility features
  Media Fragments
  autocomplete attribute: on & off values
  DOMMatrix
  SVG effects for HTML
  X-Frame-Options HTTP header
  DNSSEC and DANE
  WebXR Device API
  DeviceOrientation & DeviceMotion events
  Permissions Policy
  asm.js
  Network Information API
  theme-color Meta Tag
  Document Policy

The whole "Chrome is the leader in standards" meme is a lie.

Just to remind everyone though, Microsoft won that lawsuit on appeal.

So the history here is that Microsoft lost its monopoly on its own poor decision making.

They already did, Safari is the only one left standing, by the market share.

Plus all the Electron crap that gets shoved as "native".

An alternative explanation is they fund Mozilla to avoid a monopoly breakup. The evidence? The fact that everyone currently knows exactly how much Google pays Mozilla because of the recent attempt to do a monopoly breakup.

This is perfectly safe behavior, would you prefer it slightly corrupting the destination address when transferring money through online banking?

Did Andreas even mention anything about extensions in Ladybird?

I hardly can imagine browsing the Internet without ublock origin or other extensions like cookie autodelete, privacy badger, ublacklist

I think we're many years off it even being viable for most people

I hope that not. Or at least, get out of the control of the controversial person behind it.

If I would put all the eggs on a basket, I will prefer Servo.

Make it markdown based. It'll be like the web once was... Just documents linking to other documents, with images and videos. We just pretend web 2.0 never happened. Everybody can write markdown so we don't even need web2.0.

Tens of millions? That'd be just the palm-greasing before you are allowed to begin!

In the 1990s Microsoft “invested” in Apple because Steve Jobs allowed them to save face by giving them the option to settle their part of Apple v San Francisco Canyon Co by calling part of it—$150 M—a stock purchase that only lasted a few years. I do not know how much the total cash settlement from Microsoft was, but industry rumors went up to $1B.

I dont see how the competitiveness argument can still stand. I've been using both browsers for the better part of two decades now and chrome/chromium never was the better product. Sure it had slightly better devtools for a while but nowadays it is very difficult to argue either way. Performance was rubbish on both ends for years in a row, right now both seem to do fine. Firefox has sync, a significantly better product than whatever google comes up with every two years. So yeah, I think Mozilla has a good enough product to challenge chrome. What they don't have is comparable traffic to their site.

Oh and of course focus. Mozilla has lacked focus for almost a decade now with all the random products and initiatives they launch.

Unfortunely most people have decided it isn't worthwhile to buy software, including those whose job depends on selling software.

> Is Google actively sabotaging Mozilla

Oh, Google did sabotage Mozilla: https://archive.is/2019.04.15-165942/https://twitter.com/joh...

> is Mozilla a genuine competitor that just hasn't figured out how to build a browser that'll actually challenge Chrome

Mozilla had a browser that had huge market share and was growing, and actively destroyed it for the sake of Chrome, at the same time as they became a financial dependent of google.

> google is also just buying user traffic with their investment

Google is not buying user traffic from a browser with a 3% share and falling. Google is probably responsible for 2-300% of firefox's profits, because if they stopped paying them off, they'd have to close up shop in 6 months. Everything else they do is a failure, and if it looks like it has a chance of being successful, like Servo and Rust*, they get rid of it.

They're not going to give them money to them with a check with "Bribe to fail continually, and to never give users a feature that they would leave Chrome for ever again" written on it. Money is fungible. If they couldn't bribe them like this, they'd create an "Extensions Interop Consortium," let Mozilla host it, and fund it to the tune of a half-billion dollars. Let Google prove this "partnership" is profitable, this default search engine placement on the 3% browser used exclusively by people who are experts, know how to change their defaults, and hate google. It doesn't pass the stupid test.

But actually, they don't have to prove anything because even though they're officially a monopoly, one of the worst of the many horrible, horrible Obama judges has now affirmed that there will be no remedy, because a remedy might affect their business. He then immediately went on tour, telling audiences how the government is bullying tech companies.

[*] And maybe firefoxOS, I accidentally had one as my daily phone for a year, and it worked fine. I didn't love it and I didn't even like the idea of it, but it certainly worked.

Indeed.

It is important to try to avoid letting perfection be the enemy of good.

Firefox is at least something that is distinct from WebKit or Chromium (which is itself based on a fork of WebKit). That's good.

It's not perfect, in part because deals with Google pay for most of it, but it is still good despite its imperfect status.

Which sucks because it's not exactly fantastic as a competitor. There's still very, very noticeable performance differences and render speed/pattern differences that after you've been using a chromium based browser for a long time give firefox a feeling of being slow (it's not, it is absolutely just a perception thing, but it's enough to put you off using it)

My problem with donating to Mozilla is the donation goes into a pocket of their greedy CEO and only a small fraction to those who do the browser development. And that’s mostly why I donate to Ladybird.

You can't donate to Firefox. You can donate to Mozilla, but that money doesn't go to Firefox.

> WebKit: A closed source browser

You seem to be confusing Safari (a closed source Apple product), and WebKit (an open source browser engine used by multiple browsers).

Isn’t Safari 30% of browser share in the US?

Extensions in Firefox are required to be signed by Mozilla. If you make your own build of an open-source extension, it will not load. The setting to disable this check only works in Developer Edition, ESR and Nightly builds.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef...

I’ll do a show HN if I can actually get it working. Best case scenario will mean not only goodbye to the browser but the app stores as well.

Gopher and Finger.

Extension developers are not forced to adhere to anything from Google to build compatible extensions that work on forks such as Brave. If they want to be in the Google ecosystem, sure, but as I pointed out, you can build your own ecosystem on top of it.

If you build on top of it, you're not forced and unable to extend the ecosystem.