They likely view the idea off competing with Chrome - a key chess piece of the company keeping Mozilla around merely as a pet to ward of regulators - as impossible if not counterproductive to their mid-term survival at this point.
Which is to say, at some point they might become annoying enough for Google to not want to pay them anymore, and then Mozilla would cease to exist shortly thereafter.
So with that in mind, Firefox as a dedicated separate browser with its own engine is an albatross around their neck. A source of significant ongoing investment and cost for comparatively little return. For the Mozilla "mission" and the CEO's personal goals and purpose, a simple rebadged chromium fork skinned up with open-web platitudes is a far better idea in the long term.
Right. What would be lost if they used Chromium as well? Sure, there would be a lack of competition but at this point the browser is the fuel of the internet. We don't have multiple different type of gasoline, or home heating oil. The browser - sans Google Chrome's "spyware" - is a commodity. I'd rather see Mozilla focus on privacy, etc.
My dream is for them to add a privacy-centric email product, a robust enough office suit (e.g., Google Docs) and then a bundle with those and Relay and their VPN.
> We don't have multiple different type of gasoline, or home heating oil
We do?
Actually, this is a great analogy. We have grades of gasoline because there is a trade-off between anti-knocking and cost. Monoculturing the grade approximates the diversity of requirements worse than honing in on a few points on the curve. As with browser engines, there is a limit to this diversity since each additional grade imposes novel fixed costs in production, distribution and combustion. But I’d be surprised if something as varied as browser engines optimally solves for a single solution.
>We have grades of gasoline because there is a trade-off between anti-knocking and cost.
Similarly Chromium can be configured in many different way, see chrome://flags. It's open source and has a modular design so even further customization is possible.
Different configurations can make different trade offs to appeal more to certain user's needs.
There would still be competition among high level features for the browsers which I feel is more important for users. Reduced competiton on things like performance I don't think will be so bad as either someone will optimized it benefiting everyone, or things that are not hyper optimized will become insignificant as computers get more powerful.
> We don't have multiple different type of gasoline
We have diesel and gasoline at least.
However the key difference ethere is somewhat different: We have independent supply lines, starting at different oil fields, going through different refineries, into different distribution networks, which ensures that there is some competition (even oligopolic is better than plain monopoly) and supply chain attacks on one vendor don't havoc the complete supply chain.
For a practical example: Countries were able to massively reduce the dependance on Russian gas and oil recently.
If Google however decides to havoc chromium development all dependants have trouble.
>I wish Brave or some of the other Chromium Skins would become Firefox based.
This hurts because Firefox should have been that embedded framework powering browsers like Brave and electron apps. But that would have required them to invest in R&D to match performance but also to make their rendering engine easily embeddable (with a corresponding investment in documentation and outreach).
I believe that was a goal of servo, however it was starved for resources (just like the documentation project) in favor of foolish endeavors like Pocket, VPN Services, FireFox OS, and of course there many missteps in the world of Political Social Activism.
FirefoxOS was Brendan's project. Also, why don't you consider preventing gay people from marrying to be "Political Social Activism?" Why do you want to force Mozilla to have a leader who is a religious fundamentalist culture warrior?
> Brendan's personal political donations were his own business
Eh, a CEO is a quasi-public figure. Those weren't his personal business entirely. (Consider a gay employee at Mozilla or partner.) That said, the solution was chastisement and a public apology. Not termination.
Brendan refused to apologize for the donation or even to acknowledge that it was wrong. Instead, he doubled down on it, saying in comments posted to this very forum that the gays kept asking for more and more rights, and he wasn't OK with that. It wasn't part of the previous bargain. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15966490
Given that he refused to apologize, and that the pesky freedom of association exists, which can lead to problems for Mozilla like the Montgomery Bus Boycott did for the public transit system in Montgomery, it was overall positive for Mozilla that Eich resigned. That doesn't mean that Mitchell is a good CEO. It just means that things would have been worse.
Brave actually started out as a Gecko-based project - they were using some Gecko-based Electron equivalent, if memory serves. It was such a PITA to work with that they switched to a Chromium base.
She's always struck me as a 'style over substance' kind of person, so in this light I guess she's doing a fabulous job, as others in this thread have said.
Which is to say, at some point they might become annoying enough for Google to not want to pay them anymore, and then Mozilla would cease to exist shortly thereafter.
So with that in mind, Firefox as a dedicated separate browser with its own engine is an albatross around their neck. A source of significant ongoing investment and cost for comparatively little return. For the Mozilla "mission" and the CEO's personal goals and purpose, a simple rebadged chromium fork skinned up with open-web platitudes is a far better idea in the long term.