Why do you think they moved to Chromium then? They switched because they could not support a competitive engine by themselves.

Because no amount of money was going to solve the problem of people saying they think Microsoft's browser is slower/worse/etc. Switching to Chromium negated that in a way nothing else could.

When Microsoft beat Netscape with IE, it was by building a far better browser. Google is a stronger competitor than Netscape ever was though. Without Google dropping the ball (like Netscape), Microsoft would never exceed Chrome's performance by enough to be the fastest, most compatible (with Chrome), etc.

It is also just classic Microsoft when they are hungry. Like making Word use WordPerfect files and keyboard shortcuts. Only today it is that their browser is mostly Google, Linux is built into Windows 11, SQL Server ships on Linux, and their most popular IDE is open-source built on open tech (Electron) they didn't create.

When they get threatened, nothing is too sacred for Microsoft to kill or adopt.

We have enough people of working age now that hasn't lived through the Microsoft of old and don't remember what they can/could do.

Microsoft firing on all cylinders, when they want to, is a terrifying force.

I feel like they burnt enough browser goodwill with IE that no one who was on the internet back then wants to touch a microsoft browser regardless of the engine

They are on the record about why they switched to a chromium based browser. It’s been a while, but if I’m remembering correctly, at the time Google was making changes to YouTube to make it actively slower, and use more power on IE. Microsoft realized that while they could compete as a browser, they couldn’t compete and fight google trying to do underhanded things to sabotage their browser.

Because they could archive the same product using chromium with less cost. Should that change their investment in that area would probably increase as a consequence.

No, because using Chromium was the only way the could stay relevant in the browser space. They were just unable to build the same product with their own stack.

Unable is not the right reason, more like management wasn't willing to fund the team as it needed.

Just like management doesn't a F about the state of UWP, WinUI and anything related to it.

They were facing the same problem that everybody is—Google adds features too fast to keep up. If Google went in a bad direction with Chrome, they’d Microsoft would just have to keep up with Mozilla and Apple.

PostmarketOS seems to have decent support for the Fairphone 5: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp...

Are you sure about that? There are Android Go targets that are 32-bit to reduce memory usage, even on 64bits CPUs.

Main is described as "The most supported devices, with all the features and stability you'd expect from a regular OS."

Unfortunately there was/is no device supported by postmarketOS that fits that description. You'll need at least good telephony support including 4G features like VoLTE, proper camera support (not potato polaroid from the 80s quality), Wifi, Bluetooth, geolocation, working GPU acceleration, media hardware decoders, decent battery life. And I'm probably forgetting a few things.

Let's hope that initiatives like https://liberux.net/ will help make a fully working, long lasting device available!

at:// urls were unfortunately mis-designed as explained in https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-website/issues/417

Ladybird is extremely slow, it's far from being competitive at all.

They're prioritizing correctness to the spec over speed and are still 'officially' in pre-alpha. It's still to be determined how well they can bridge the gap there.

For casual web browsing it's plenty fast enough already to do a lot of things, but they're a relatively small team fighting against decades of optimization.

All browsers are fast enough once you block all the useless web bloat.

But Ladybird's explicit goal is to work on the "real web", i.e. without blocking all that bloat

What? No one is expecting Ladybird to be fast at this stage. No one is claiming that it is. Ladybird is competitive because of the speed of which it is improving.

Very unfair to look at ladybird and call it slow, when its not even alpha and shouldn't be used yet

Remember you're experiencing a debug build of pre-alpha software.

Which meant having garbage collection working accross the WASM/JS barrier. This is now possible, but was not exactly trivial to design. It's a good thing that this was not rushed out.

It is possible to create a new foundation that works on a new browser product based on Gecko indeed. You just can't call it Firefox because of trademark ownership.

It would be interesting to see how it collaborates / competes with the origin project, how fast and how far they diverge etc.

You can if you arrange with Foundation to license the trademark under non-profit terms. Not that this is likely to be done by anyone, but if anyone could do it, I’d like to think the Servo group could.

You are probably looking at a debug build. On Linux, a release build (cargo build -r) is ~4.3M, and down to ~3.5M once stripped. This could be reduced further with some tricks applied to the release build profile.