<story><title>Microsoft&apos;s Three Browsers</title><url>https://textslashplain.com/2020/02/03/microsofts-three-browsers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bla3</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s almost as if there are technical reasons for not supporting the current extension api on mobile! (Battery, performance, ...)</text></item><item><author>keithnz</author><text>I agree, I think this is generally better. It feels like google needs some pressure to listen to people.  Oddly enough Microsoft didn&amp;#x27;t do some things that would be instant wins, like support plugins on mobile so you can install things like ublock origin ( biggest reason why I use firefox on mobile ).</text></item><item><author>kd913</author><text>I really disagree with this perspective. Frankly Google needs a counter-balance in the browser market.&lt;p&gt;Microsoft can easily act as Google&amp;#x27;s counter balance. Microsoft is one of the few companies that have the resources capable of maintaining a hostile fork of chromium (at a loss) and have it competitive enough that users will switch. Google has lost it&amp;#x27;s one advantage in the web-space too as now they can&amp;#x27;t exactly hamper the experience of edge without hampering chrome too.&lt;p&gt;Chromium needed this counter-balance.&lt;p&gt;If Microsoft chose a Gecko forked browser, they would dominate and take over. Like what Apple did with KHTML. This step is better.</text></item><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>The world would have been a better place if Microsoft&amp;#x27;s latest move was to adopt Firefox instead of Webkit - it would have encouraged diversity in the browser ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft &amp;amp; Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla&amp;#x2F;Netscape - one of the biggest battles in technology history, which Microsoft won following a savage no-holds-barred battle. There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox - such a move would have been truly ironic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the_duke</author><text>Ublock Origin&amp;#x2F;uMatrix on mobile significantly increase website performance and battery life on the average site, by blocking a a lot of advertising and tracking content.&lt;p&gt;Potential problems could be mitigated pretty easily by warning about or throttling extensions that use too much CPU&amp;#x2F;memory on mobile.&lt;p&gt;Not allowing extensions on Chrome for Android might have been an acceptable excuse in the early days of Android, with very weak single core CPUs. But not for years.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft&apos;s Three Browsers</title><url>https://textslashplain.com/2020/02/03/microsofts-three-browsers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bla3</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s almost as if there are technical reasons for not supporting the current extension api on mobile! (Battery, performance, ...)</text></item><item><author>keithnz</author><text>I agree, I think this is generally better. It feels like google needs some pressure to listen to people.  Oddly enough Microsoft didn&amp;#x27;t do some things that would be instant wins, like support plugins on mobile so you can install things like ublock origin ( biggest reason why I use firefox on mobile ).</text></item><item><author>kd913</author><text>I really disagree with this perspective. Frankly Google needs a counter-balance in the browser market.&lt;p&gt;Microsoft can easily act as Google&amp;#x27;s counter balance. Microsoft is one of the few companies that have the resources capable of maintaining a hostile fork of chromium (at a loss) and have it competitive enough that users will switch. Google has lost it&amp;#x27;s one advantage in the web-space too as now they can&amp;#x27;t exactly hamper the experience of edge without hampering chrome too.&lt;p&gt;Chromium needed this counter-balance.&lt;p&gt;If Microsoft chose a Gecko forked browser, they would dominate and take over. Like what Apple did with KHTML. This step is better.</text></item><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>The world would have been a better place if Microsoft&amp;#x27;s latest move was to adopt Firefox instead of Webkit - it would have encouraged diversity in the browser ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft &amp;amp; Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla&amp;#x2F;Netscape - one of the biggest battles in technology history, which Microsoft won following a savage no-holds-barred battle. There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox - such a move would have been truly ironic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asiachick</author><text>And yet extensions work on ChromeOS on machines with no more power or memory than my phone. In fact my phone beats my ChromeOS machine at many benchmarks, has the same amount of ram, and more storage.</text></comment>