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Browser Wars, Latest From Mozilla Firefox

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 4th of February 2021 04:25:26 AM Filed under
Moz/FF
  • The endless browser wars

    The term "browser wars" typically refers to Microsoft's attempts to dominate the World Wide Web with its Internet Explorer browser in the 1990s. That effort was thwarted by antitrust efforts and the rise of the free browser now known as Firefox; ever since, the web has been defined by free software. Or so some may have thought. In the 2020s, the browser wars continue with the growing dominance of Chrome and, it would seem, the imminent removal of Chromium from many Linux distributions.
    Chrome, of course, is Google's proprietary browser, bundled with Android and widely installed on other systems as well. The Chrome browser, though, is built on top of Chromium, which is an open-source project; in theory, anybody can build Chromium and get a browser of nearly equal capability, minus perhaps some proprietary DRM modules. In practice, Chromium users are a tiny fraction of the browser-using population, while Chrome becomes increasingly dominant. Current estimates suggest that 60-70% of web users are running on Chrome.

    Chromium users do exist, though, and many Linux distributions package a version of the Chromium browser; it's a way to deal with the increasing number of "only works on Chrome" web sites without having to run proprietary code.

    Or so it seems. Much of what appears to be Chrome (or Chromium) functionality is, in truth, provided by servers in Google's data centers. These include bookmark synchronization, the safe-browsing feature, search suggestions, spell-checking, and more. These features are not part of Chromium, but Google has long provided API keys for distributors of Chromium builds to use, ensuring that Chromium users had equal access to them.

    That era is coming to an end, though. On January 15, the Chromium blog carried this brief notice that, as of March 15, non-Chrome builds of Chromium would lose access to these APIs. The loss of the bookmark-synchronization API, in particular, has drawn a fair amount of attention, but there are quite a few others that, it seems, will be restricted as well. After that date, users wanting to use those features will have to run Chrome to do so.

  • Hacks.Mozilla.Org: Improving Cross-Browser Testing, Part 2: New Automation Features in Firefox Nightly

    In our previous blog post about the web testing ecosystem, we described the tradeoffs involved in automating the browser via the HTTP-based WebDriver standard versus DevTools protocols such as Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). Although there are benefits to WebDriver’s HTTP-based approach, we know there are many developers who find the additional functionality and ergonomics of CDP-based test tools compelling.

    It’s clear that WebDriver needs to grow to meet the capabilities of DevTools-based automation. However, that process will take time, and we want more developers to be able to run their automated tests in Firefox today.

    To that end, we have shipped an experimental implementation of parts of CDP in Firefox Nightly, specifically targeting the use cases of end-to-end testing using Google’s Puppeteer, and the CDP-based features of Selenium 4.

    For users looking to use CDP tooling with stable releases of Firefox, we are currently going through the process to enable the feature on release channels and we hope to make this available as soon as possible.

    The remainder of this post will look at the details of how to use Firefox with CDP-based tools.

  • Will Kahn-Greene: Socorro: This Period in Crash Stats: Volume 2021.1

    In 2020q3, Roger and I worked out a new Breadcrumbs crash annotation for crash reports generated by the android-components crash reporter. It's a JSON-encoded field with a structure just like the one that the sentry-sdk sends. Incoming crash reports that have this annotation will show the data on the crash report view page to people who have protected data access.

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