Tom Thinks Mozilla Should Join Chromium

Hey folks,

The usual updates about Seven the Dog and Tom’s Top 5 are below. But I’m starting this week’s newsletter with a little tech opinion that’s sort of a non-sequitur so doesn’t fit in any of the other places I do tech stuff.

Why I Think Mozilla Should Join Chromium

I use Firefox every day and I have for years. I’m writing in it right now. In all those years, there have been times when a particular site doesn’t work and I had to open another browser. I’m used to it and the occasional instance doesn’t bother me. But lately, it’s become much more frequent. Almost daily.

The reason this happens usually comes down to website design. Standards help but some things just don’t work the same from browser to browser so site designers have to tweak things for compatibility. And some site designers juts don’t see enough Firefox users to add it to the compatibility list alongside Chrome and Safari. Apparently that’s happening more often.

It’s happening enough that I’ve started thinking I should switch to Opera, or Brave or Arc for my daily driver. But I like Firefox. My first browser was Netscape and Firefox is the successor of that. I like the way Mozilla runs (for the most part) and I generally trust it more than the other organizations I mentioned. Not that I don’t trust them, it’s a spectrum.

So, why, you may ask, do you think it’s a good idea for Mozilla to join Google’s unholy Chromium project? For those who don’t know, Chromium is an open source project to create a web browser. You can actually run the pure open-source version of Chromium instead of Google’s version. It’s considered the “upstream” version. Google definitely controls the Chromium Project but it is an open source project and Google doesn’t own all the parts of it. Her’s why I think it might be a good idea for Mozilla to join it.

1. Chromium is used by multiple browsers and they all benefit form the compatibility of the rendering engine. When a site is designed to work in Chrome, there’s a very good chance it will work in Opera, Brave, Edge, and so on, because those are all based on Chromium.

2. Mozilla’s engine is great but at this point, there are not as many significant differences as there used to be. This is where my argument breaks down the most. There are some excellent security and privacy advantages to Firefox that don’t exist in Chrome.

3. Those advantages could be part of Chromium if Mozilla was working on them.

4. Mozilla working on Chromium would help it spend its money more wisely.

5. Mozilla in the Chromium project could push for it to be less dominated by Google.

6. I think we need compatibility among browsers more than rendering engines. A lot of people might switch to Firefox if it didn’t have the compatibility.

I have not thought this way for long. Up until recently, I thought it more important for Mozilla to exist outside the Chromium-verse to provide a counter to Google’s domination. And there are some very reasonable points to why some of you may still believe that. But as Google has become slightly less dominant with the participation of Microsoft, Opera, and others, I loosened up on that part of my objection. And I think Chromium has won on the desktop. So I think it’s important that Google not be the only beneficiary of that.

Thanks for indulging me.

Now some pictures of Seven the 7.5-month-old puppy

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Seven waiting for dinner

Seven inviting you to sit down for an important talk

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Cheers,

Tom