Microsoft and Mozilla engineers battle over Chromium adoption via Twitter

Kareem Anderson

Microsoft may have waved the proverbial flag of surrender when it announced its new direction for its web browsing development, but one of the last remaining Chromium-adoption holdouts, Mozilla, just got some help from staunch advocates of competition, when faced by offbeat pressure from Microsoft engineers to convert.

Kenneth Auchenberg, a program manager on the Code team at Microsoft responded via Twitter to a post that recently went up on the blog.mozilla.org site about the company’s decision to forego EdgeHTML development in favor of future Chromium development for its upcoming browser efforts.

Auchenberg’s seemingly flippant response was counter by both the open web crowd as well as a Mozilla engineer himself, all advocating for the persistence demand in companies offering competition in the form of web standards.

Auchenberg addresses Emilio’s concerns with a solid argument that at this point, the market has spoken and development focus for companies should be on the contribution of open source code rather than pandering to the notion of a separate rendering engine. Theoretically, focus on a single open source code should expedite innovation rather than stifle it, as every participating party is bringing new implementations constantly.

The entire exchange between web advocates, Mozilla, and Microsoft engineers are punctuated with a single ominous tweet from former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal who chimes in with “I’m afraid this will not end well,” as another Mozilla engineer levies the quitter card at Microsoft for its decision to adopt Chromium.

https://twitter.com/andreasgal/status/1089323764230189056?s=20

Gal now works Apple on undisclosed projects, but with Mozilla struggling to keep market share and as user behavior settles into a natural dichotomy of selection, the argument held by open web advocates and Mozilla engineers may become moot sooner rather than later by order of the ‘free market.’