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I think MS thinks very differently. Some months ago, one of their PMs said:

"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 five percent?" [1]

[1] : https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-guy-mozilla-should-g...



Wow, what a shitty attitude.

Standards bodies are powerless if there's only one implementation.


Beyond shitty. As if hiding behind Chromium will help them. I'm sure GOOG can't think of

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=62rAjp5Nr9g

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/02/21/google-wa...

Ways to mess with Chromium Edge. It's not like it's a company full of smart, engineers, capable of skirting around the law.


Ask yourself, why are "web standards" or "standards bodies" good? Why should they have "power"? The W3C held back the web platforms for years.

What's the point of having an extremely complex standard that nobody else will ever implement anyway? Remember, it would take billions of dollars to implement a competitive browser and then you have to give it away for free.

If even a trillion dollar company like Microsoft thinks it's better to team up with a competitor rather than implement HTML all by themselves, it really should make you think.

Consider, there's only one Linux kernel, there's no "Linux standard", just one kernel - and the world runs on it. I don't see people running around complaining about how that's a threat, even though it's much harder to switch operating systems than browsers. Sure, there's POSIX, but that's a tiny subset of Linux features.


I wouldn't call POSIX a tiny subset of Linux features. POSIX makes up the vast majority of the kernel interfaces that applications actually use. Stuff like epoll and io_uring are the exception, not the rule.


That's the view of one random person at Microsoft.


Not thinking about this too deeply, would Chromium become like Linux in this situation? Linux has heavily won the server market but many different flavors of Linux are being deployed still without a single, overwhelming winner. Maybe contributions like Stylo to Chromium could improve the web for a larger audience of people than Firefox could reach in its current state.




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