The real death knell is that Microsoft decided not to go with Mozilla in building the relaunched version of Edge.

That would have been a very fruitful relationship, but they couldn't make it work. My understanding is - albeit its second hand - that they really didn't want to simply jump to Chromium, but Firefox proved far more complicated to do what they wanted to do.

Ultimately, Microsoft Edge went from a pretty good browser to loaded with of things I dislike, which is a real shame, but I know it would have significantly boosted usage numbers of Firefox and its engine, which in turn would drive more investment into Firefox itself.

Microsoft was (and is) interested in Electron. They used it for lots of stuff like MS Teams (which is now using their WebView2 control), VSCode, Outlook, and their Graph toolkit.

Outlook is Electron slop now? Jesus christ.

It's so fantastic that it can't even open Outlook .msg files. It boggles the mind

I really really wish they would have gone with webkit, even though they could have with some effort used gecko. Just giving up and going blink engine is awful for diversity in browser engines. I don't have much hope for efforts like ladybird, as they're just too small and browsers are a huge ecosystem now.

> Microsoft Edge went from a pretty good browser to loaded with of things I dislike

Yep. It was great. Now it's a kitchen sink with everything thrown into it and it's disgusting.

This has always been an issue with Gecko and the Mozilla codebase. It was a massive blow to the Mozilla community when Safari was released using KHTML instead of Gecko. Google then adopted WebKit (itself an evolution of KHTML) for Chrome, another slight for Mozilla. This despite prominent ex Mozilla developers like Lisa Melton, David Hyatt, Ben Goodger, and others being involved early on with Safari and Chrome development. Even Brendan Eich went with Chromium and not Mozilla technology for Brave.

I think once Apple is forced to allow alternative browsers on the iPhone and iPad, Chrome/Chromium will have won the browser wars.

At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6.

>At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6.

The only lesson Google took from the Microsoft browser monopoly was "make sure the browser doesn't suck ass". So, Chromium will continue to be technically competent, enough that they can lull people to sleep and mine their personal data in ways that should horrify us all. Whatever else Microsoft was, it wasn't a gigantic advertising company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.

> Whatever else Microsoft was, it wasn't a gigantic advertising company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.

True at the time, but spam is now baked into Windows.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/windows-11-has-made-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37208219 )

That's not going to happen in the USA. at least not in the next several years. I think as long as that's true Safari dominance on iOS will continue.

I don't think people even think about downloading browsers, swear the overwhelming majority of my irl friends only uses the default one on whatever phone, with rare exceptions.

I agree. To a large extent, the only people you'll see putting Chrome on their iPhones are the people who are cross platform on their laptops.

Microsoft's goal was to make sure the browser didn't obviate Windows.

Google's goal is to push ads and you can see that with everything their doing. Manifest v3 castrates adblockers and their attempts to remove 3rd party cookies would stifle any competition in adtech.

> Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.

Electron apps have no stake nor impact of any kind in the results of browser market share. None.

Indeed, shipping Chrome alongside each application, because developers couldn't be bothered to write cross-platform Web code for OS Web widgets or the users system browser doesn't have nothing to do with it.

None at all, those poor devs, write portable Web code is so hard.

In my experience, Safari has been the slowest to implement useful new standards and is the least transparent about bugs and development plans, so it's very hard to act like they're doing us a favor by preventing better and more open browsers from having more marketshare.

Welcome to open standards.

Same happens across OpenGroup, Khronos and ISO standards in the industry.

Apparently what is so great about them, is too much work in what concerns doing the latest shinny thing on the Web.