this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Do they ever?
Moving from a shitty proprietary web renderer to participate in Chromium development was an improvement.
I disagree. Doing so reduced the amount of diversity in rendering engines and reinforced the idea that lazy site owners don't have to test against more than one browser. That's a loss for the Web as a whole.
Microsoft: Kills crappy, insecure browser no one used and everyone hated.
Lemmy: BAD!
And now they moved to another crappy engine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ what changed? Nothing much, except that they are locked in with Google's bs.
Nothing changed going from IE Edge to Chromium Edge. Say that with a straight face next time.
At the time people welcomed it; Trident really was terrible. However, since then Gecko's marketshare has fallen into the single digits on account of Mozilla's terrible governance. WebKit isn't exactly a big alternative, either (and is often regarded as the new Trident in terms of web standard adherence). Opera used to have Presto but nope, that's also Chromium now.
That means we're now stuck in a situation where an advertising company controls how the web works for 75% of all users. And they're happily abusing that power.
I'm rooting for Servo and Ladybird as new entrants into the market but both are small projects trying to challenge a multi-billion dollar industry titan who wants the web to be as complex as possible so that only they and their token competitors can exist.
We might actually have been better off with Microsoft trying to keep Trident relevant.
It killed the last proprietary engine. It made the web more free.
You're wrong.
I mean the choice between only two browser engines isn't what I would call "free" though, especially since Firefox is also pulling more and more bullshit.
He made a good overall point. Just saying he is wrong doesn't actually make him wrong.
What about WebKit? That makes 3 browser engines although it’s primarily used on Apple devices.
WebKit-GTK is fine, Ladybird and Servo also exist.
The vehement defense of a shitty, proprietary Microsoft browser here is astonishing.
Gecko and Chromium are both fully free software. Old Edge isn't.
No. It was a very weak defense of proprietary software.
Just saying that doesn't make it wrong but the "argument" is wrong.
Less diversity isn't good, the argument wasn't in favour of proprietary software, it was against platform monoculture.
Less proprietary crap is good. Free software is always preferable to fake diversity through proprietary Microsoft products.
Except that isn't what we have, we still have proprietary crap that is just open core now and that open core is dominated by a single corp that can dictate what standards it wants just like when IE was on top.
"fake" diversity with an obviously proprietary option is substantially better than a fake "open" environment where the only web browser options are either made by a single for-profit company, a reskinned derivative of that for-profit company's work, or a semi-not-for-profit whose main funding source is that same for-profit company.
In a very real way, web standards beyond "whatever chrome does" died when Microsoft tossed edge's HTML engine for chromium.
Tried that browser on Linux. It crashes when you save a file. It doesn't let you click on the URL bar to edit it (only keyboard works). "If it compiles, it ships, no testing needed"
The company was literally founded on the principal of “thanks for all the free software I learned on, from this point forward, everyone needs to pay (me) for everything and sharing is bad”. Sort of paraphrased from Bill Gates email to the hobbyists. Then it got big by selling vapourware based on nepotism and then nearly stealing a product to fill the order. Then they got their fingers into legislators and it got worse for everyone.