Why we need Firefox on Talos, not just Chromium

Today's news is that apparently EdgeHTML, the layout engine for the Edge browser, is being replaced not just on mobile, not just for ARM on Windows, but even on Windows 10 itself -- with Chromium. There's more about that on our sister blog, TenFourFox Development.

This potentially allows Chromium to arrogate even more browsershare to itself, enabling Google to continue with eroding support for anything that isn't Chrome. If you're using a Talos II as I am, you of all people should recognize the vulnerabilities of an architectural monoculture. We've seen that with Intel's stagnation on x86, we saw that with Internet Explorer 6, and we're about to see it again if Chromium is successful in driving Gecko's marketshare to irrelevancy.

Chromium on POWER9 exists, and apparently works; I won't use it personally for the reasons I cited above, but I salute the work that went into it. (Too bad Google doesn't seem to.) Mozilla, on the other hand, has been willing to accept PowerPC patches even after PPC OS X was no longer a tier-1 platform (which is where TenFourFox came from), and is taking patches to repair Firefox builds on ppc64le today. They've taken some of mine, and they've even taken patches to fix big-endian PowerPC and PPC64. The irony with the current big-endian issues is that they're actually with Skia, which was written by ... Google.

Mozilla has proven willing to support platforms outside their core as long as those platforms take responsibility and the support for those platforms doesn't interfere with tier-1 builds. This is an eminently reasonable policy. Moreover, with the exception of the JIT, which I'm trying to work on between TenFourFox, Christmas holidays and visiting family, Firefox exists and works and can be built. We need to remember that after Microsoft imminently outsources their browser to Chromium, Gecko (Firefox) will be the last major rendering engine that isn't Chromium or WebKit. Nothing else has enough marketshare for any other developer to think about, least of all Google themselves. If we don't act to support and preserve its marketshare on a platform where choice and freedom are part of its DNA, we may confront a future where Chromium is the only choice. And Google's already showing us what that future's going to look like.