I have liked the other posts in this series, but I find the reasoning in this one confusing. (Disclaimer: Perhaps it is because I am familiar with the Chrome code.)<p>In the context of a browser fork, these statements make no sense:
"Firefox has open APIs for everything the browser does [...] Chromium on the other hand does not expose certain areas that are sensitive to Google’s business."
In the context of changing the source code, how are some APIs "open" and others not? How can the Chrome code possibly "protect" (their words) the address bar from modification relative to any other code?<p>I think what they're instead talking about is the available extension APIs from JavaScript maybe? But in that case, why call the project a fork, instead of a browser extension or something?
Does Google still provide a "significantly worse" experience if the user agent is Firefox? I recall that was true on Gmail and Youtube for a while.
The unstated motivating factor here is that Mozilla made a minority investment in Cliqz back in 2016: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#History" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#History</a>
> EdgeHTML<p>Why doesn't Microsoft open source their engine if they're not using it any more? It can't possibly still have any of the NSCA code in it.<p>Microsoft is still a scumbag, claiming to support open source, releasing some of their middle-wear and buying GitHub, yet refusing to release something that could actually make our web community more diverse.
I never heard of Clikz, so I checked out their website, and their mayor sales pitch seems to be that it is european? I mean, as an european I suppose I would rather use european products, but I'm not going to use a different search engine just because of that.<p>(Just talking about the sales pitch here, I haven't used it so I don't know if it offers anything more)
"Firefox has open APIs for everything the browser does—a majority of Firefox “application” code is written in JavaScript."<p>While it makes hacking on Firefox easier, isn't this a liability for performance? Is this, perhaps, partly why WASM is such a focus for Mozilla?
I urge the mods to take a look at how often the "0x65.dev" domain, which is just Cliqz, ends up on the front page.<p>Of special note (and I bow to them) is how they've used such a domain name to spam their services. If they had used "cliqz.com" or whatever their actual domain is, fewer people would click, but when I see this I'm inclined to think this is some personal blog of a fellow software developer, and not blogspam of a shady ads company.