Mozilla

You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would bring balance to the browsers, not leave them in darkness!

Brief history (2002-) and current landscape of browser engines

(If you’re interested in this topic, Wikipedia has a more nuanced breakdown.)

I’ve been an early adopter of Firefox. Pre-1.0 early. At the time, it wasn’t just THE open source browser, it was also THE better product, especially while Opera (Presto) would show you ads, Konqueror (KHTML) was limited to Linux/BSD, and IE (Trident) was… well, IE.

The folks at Apple took KHTML and made WebKit (Safari).

The folks at Google took WebKit and made Blink (Chrome).

KHTML is dead. WebKit is still around in the Apple ecosystem and overall decent. The portable/OSS version is somewhat OK, but has its own problems - mostly performance and packaging/security response.

Opera stopped serving ads at some point, and made a really darn good mobile browser for what’s now called “feature” phones. It was good enough for me to continue using a candybar Nokia until 2015.

Opera gave up on Presto and switched to Blink.

Trident is dead. Good riddance. But before it died, it evolved into EdgeHTML. I’m not a Windows user; I overheard that it was somewhat good while it lasted, but Microsoft gave up and switched to Blink.

While all of that was happening, Gecko (Firefox’s engine) has been falling behind on performance and security (e.g. process isolation). So Mozilla made an entirely new programming language (Rust), with the main goal of building a new browser engine (Servo), to be incrementally incorporated into Gecko. Then abandoned the project.

Meanwhile the last ESR of the “old” Gecko was forked by the community, and now lacks any of the regained relevance. This is good for legacy/retro platforms via projects like TenFourFox, but on contemporary machines - it’s short-sighted at best. Browser security is an arms race.

There still are some other browsers around, but most of them are Chrome/Blink reskins (Brave, Vivaldi), use the “portable” variant of WebKit (like Epiphany, surf, and countless discontinued projects like uzbl or LuaKit), built their own “toy” engine (Dillo, NetSurf, Ladybird), there’s even a community effort to continue the development of Servo. Brave and Vivaldi have for-profit companiess backing them; Ladybird and Servo show some promise; but all of these are effectively irrelevant.

So as of 2025, Firefox/Gecko is on life support, Blink has an overwhelming share of the desktop browser market, and WebKit is still around only because Apple won’t allow anything else on iOS. Meanwhile the EU has commanded Apple to allow other engines on the iPhone & iPad, while ignoring the elephant in the room: Chrome/Blink dominance literally everywhere else; and allowing its dominance to spread even further.

What about Chrome?

Google has long decided being evil is now OK.

A single company dominates both the advertising market and the browser market. What could possibly go wrong?

So what is Mozilla doing to help the situation?

• Trying and failing to compete in the mobile phone market;
• Participating in planet-incinerating Ponzi schemes;
• Pivoting into advertising;
• Changing their TOS to enable privacy violations;
• Increasing CEO pay, while market share dwindles: again, again, and again;
• Generally, trying to ride the next hype wave rather than building a better browser.

I would much rather see a Star Trek story. (Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.)