Microsoft may finally have stopped trying to make "fetch" happen

Following about a month after the news that Microsoft were finally planning to stop pushing Cortana on consumers who are plainly not interested, comes the news that they're also going to let go of another of their attempts to foist a doomed and unwelcome product on users who couldn't care less. That's right, Microsoft are apparently planning to finally listen to what consumers have been telling them since 2015 about Edge.

As reported by Windows Central:

Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but it launched with a plethora of issues that resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser known as Blink. Codenamed "Anaheim," this new browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform, according to my sources, who wish to remain anonymous. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface (UI) between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.

Assuming this is accurate, Microsoft finally cutting the bullshit and doing not only the right thing, but the obvious thing, is great news. The only downside is that Microsoft have taken three years to finally get here, after years of taskbar advertising, questionable battery use statistics, and refusals to allows Google's wildly popular Chrome browser onto the Microsoft store... because Google refused to adopt Microsoft's EdgeHTML rendering algorithm, while ditching the Chromium algorithm which has become the standard for all web browsers.

No official word has yet come from Microsoft, of course, so they might still find some way to screw this up, but considering how well-received this news has been today, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won't go through with this. If once is an incidence, and twice a coincidence, we're just waiting for Microsoft to prove this to be a pattern by doing it just once more. We'll see if doing that now, after years of coercive bullshit, can win back enough good will among consumers to stop Windows' gradual-but-steady market share decline.

Don't call it a comeback

It's a little hard to believe now, but there really was a time when Mozilla's Firefox web browser was revolutionary.

Microsoft, having monopolistically driven their biggest competitor out of business (seriously, they lost the antitrust case after that one), was ruling the roost with Internet Explorer. Crucially, IE hadn't achieved market dominance by being a better product, and it actually wasn't that good; but Microsoft had successfully leveraged desktop OS dominance into a dominant position in the web browser business, and since IE's rendering engine was designed to be incompatible with other browsers, its dominance seemed to have achieved a self-sustaining state, sustained by web designers who were building web pages specifically for IE. The experience sucked, but there were no other options for Windows users, i.e. almost everybody. At one point, IE accounted for 95 percent of browser usage.

But then came Phoenix. Rising from Netscape's ashes, and bursting with innovative features like tabs and add-ons (yes, really), this early iteration of Firefox was simply better and more useful than Internet Explorer, and quickly converted a multitude of fans... to the tune of 32% of the browser market. Changing web standards, like HTML 4, spelled the end of IE-specific web page designs, and Microsoft was eventually forced to actually improve IE in response. It was too little, too late, though; the revolution had come, Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC web browser market was over, and it was Firefox that fired the first shots.

It would not be Firefox that reaped the revolution's richest rewards, though. Having made their name with breakthrough innovations, Mozilla... kinda stopped innovating. Google, meanwhile, having learned from Firefox's example, was bust building their own, innovative, new web browser. Early Chrome was not as good as the version of Firefox which was available at the time, but Chrome got better, fast, while Firefox stayed more or less the same. And now Chrome is 59.57% of the desktop browser market, and equally dominant on mobile, while Firefox holds only a 12.32% desktop share and 0.56% of the mobile market. Mozilla's former CTO declared the browser wars to be over, and Google to be the winners.

But that was way back in June, and this is August, and apparently Mozilla's current leaders are plotting a comeback, according to this piece on c|net:

Hundreds of Mozilla employees met a very different version of the Firefox mascot this June as they packed into a Hilton conference room in San Francisco for an all-hands meeting.

Gone was the blazing-orange fox snuggling a blue globe, the image that’s represented Mozilla’s scrappy browser since 2003. Instead, Firefox Senior Vice President Mark Mayo opened the event with a drawing of afox in menacing mecha armor, named Mark 57 — the same way ever-improving Iron Man suits are named.

The message isn’t subtle: Firefox 57, a massive overhaul due November 14, is ready for battle. Its main rival is Google’s Chrome, which [...] lured tens of thousands of us away from Firefox after it debuted in 2008.

But Firefox 57 could be the version that gets you thinking about returning — and maybe about saving the web, too. Mozilla began testing Firefox 57 on Wednesday, the culmination of more than a year of engineering work.

[...]

The top priority is speed. We all get subconscious pleasure with a browser that’s fast and smooth at loading websites, clicking buttons and opening and closing tabs. If your browser stutters while scrolling or makes you wait a long time for a page to appear, you’re more likely to dump it. Speed improvements in recent months already have had an effect, Mozilla says, stopping a steady stream of defections from Firefox to other browsers.

It’s too soon to tell how much faster Firefox 57 will be, but in one broad browser test called Speedometer, Firefox performance jumped significantly. Comparing the June 2016 version of Firefox with the version expected this August, Firefox performance increased 38 percent on MacOS and 45 percent on Windows, says Jeff Griffiths, Mozilla’s Firefox browser product leader.

So, that's the hype. Now for the reality check.

I have both Chrome and Firefox installed. So, out of curiosity, I tested both browsers, with the following results.

Google's Chrome:

Mozilla's Firefox:

Now, I'll admit that this is hardly an exhaustive or especially rigorous testing process, but even so... if this is 45% faster than Firefox used to be, then I hate to think how slow it used to be. With this much of a performance gap, Firefox would need to be three times faster to be worth making the switch from Chrome.

Worse yet, Firefox 57 will undermine one key feature that helped put it on the map: extensions. Again, quoting the c|net piece:

But another change in Firefox 57 will break a venerable part of Firefox — the extensions technology that lets you customize the browser. For example, with extensions you can block ads, protect your privacy, download YouTube videos, translate websites and manage passwords. Extensions were a key advantage back when Mozilla first took on IE in 2004, but Mozilla is switching to Web Extensions, a variation of Chrome’s customization technology.

The change paves the way for real improvements like a snappier response when you click your mouse or close a tab. But thousands of extensions will be left behind unless their authors build new versions for Firefox’s new foundation.

“This transition is very painful for extension developers, and many existing extensions won’t take this hurdle,” says Wladimir Palant, a developer with Firefox’s most-used extension, AdBlock Plus. Programmers had to start working with Firefox’s replacement before it was mature enough to use, he says.Google’s Hangouts extension is another casualty.

So, Firefox 57 is unlikely to be significantly faster than Chrome, it will have no mobile presence at all, and not only will it have no features that Chrome lacks (and that people want), Firefox will be actively undermining the one competitive advantage that it does have, namely its large library of available extensions. Instead, they'll allow Firefox to use Chrome's extensions, an obvious concession to Google's dominance in the browser marketplace... but if Chrome's extension library is better than Firefox's, why wouldn't users just stick with Chrome?

Seriously, with this as the pitch, how is Firefox supposed to mount any kind of a comeback?

Sorry, Firefox fans, but their former CTO was right. Barring some sort of miracle, the browser wars really are over, Google Chrome really has won, and neither Mozilla's Firefox nor Microsoft's Edge have any chance of changing the browser landscape.