Rendering engine

[SJAnstey]

What I suggesting is something quite radical.  If Firefox continues to lose market share to the likes of MS Edge and Chrome, the answer is simple.  Change the rendering engine from the current version of Gecko to the current version of Chromium (Blink maybe?) or Webkit (As used by Apple).  Microsoft did it and they are reaping the benefits of such a change,  So, why not Mozilla?

[jokari]

I am just a user. But I see one problem, and huge one in this radical posture: Firefox is a vessel to empower the Mozilla foundation to have a say in the W3C instances (and surely others).

Mozilla is one of the few organizations that participates in the development of web standards and is not directly interested in the commercialization of its user's data, not to mention the fact that they even defend the privacy aspects of their users. They are a counter power against commercial only ideas from Google or Facebook which would love to put a streaming line from your browser into their server directly.

If Gecko disappear, Mozilla input in W3C will become less relevant. Moves by Google, like limiting anti-advertising extensions will be more difficult to challenge (they already tried).

We will come back to a de-facto monopoly (like Microsoft internet explorer 20 years ago) and all the problems it entails.

One of my harshest criticism about the web is the multi-million lines of monstrous complexity that browsers had becomes. It ensure that no competition can rise from scratch. Now we have to make sure that gecko remain relevant or the web will be the apple store of Google and Facebook.

[igorlogius]

Sorry to say, but i think this is a very bad idea for the health of the web overall.

Since Google more or less controls the development of chromium and it engines (rendering+javascript), we would then have a defacto monopoly. 

I would not want them to have that extend of influence, especially since they dont seem to have the best interest of the users at heart, or care about their privacy.

[Anonymous]

Edge had the option of adopting Gecko, and could do so in the future, but I don't see Microsoft's willingness to compete in the market these days.

[gfriedman99]

The problem is that Gecko and SpiderMonkey are dogs compared to Chromium and V8.   It's the single biggest drawback Firefox has to the competition.   Mozilla has to address this issue or it will become totally irrelevant.   What good is an open source browser if nobody wants to use it due to slow (and sometimes incorrect) rendering performance.   If Mozilla cannot or will not address the rendering and javascript issues it has then I am all in favor of dropping Gecko for Chromium.   Otherwise I will be looking to migrate to another browser platform.  I have put up with the constant slowness for years.   There have been some improvements - mostly to memory handling.  But it seems like nothing ever improves with Gecko.   I always have to have a copy of Chrome available anyway - for those instances where certain websites don't work correctly due to the poor javascript handling in Firefox.  

[trickypr]

As a firefox fork developer, this is a bad idea. Gecko, the rendering engine behind Firefox isn't just a browser engine. At the current point in time it has become an entire toolkit. Every part of the browser is written in a version of (x)html with custom widgets that add specific functionality. That, combined with apis like ChromeUtils make it practically impossible to port without discarding literally everything.

Switching to a chromium base would make UI feature iterations slower, because the entire chromium UI is written within c/c++. It would also kill the userchrome community and a growing number of forks that are being built on the firefox UI.

[MaxxC]

Using Firefox browser, we will frequently encounter problems with the various websites we used daily such as banks, stockbrokers etc. and we can only access those sites with another browser. Some sites are/were difficult to navigate in Firefox especially the top menu. Sooner or later hardcore Firefox users will throw in the towels. Firefox team needs to wake up and change course before it's too late.

[MrAlex83]

In my opinion it isn't a good idea, as I already have read above, a monopoly is always a serious problem, not an enrichment; and the Web must be as much as possible for all. Maybe a kind of collaboration with Gnome or Kde projects that are linked to empower web browser too? Alex

[Saarsk]

This is a bad idea. FireFox being independent and not simply another Chrome-like browser is more important than people realize.

You would realize this only when it was too late. Which is why FireFox needs to be alive and prosper.

Monopoly is never a good thing and no company is immune to how it alters their decision-making. Competition and openness is what limits this.