A nail in the coffin for Firefox? Mozilla struggles to redefine browser - CNET

Mozilla is still staunchly backing Firefox and its core technology. But the fact that the Tofino team decided it could work faster with Electron shows how hard it is to keep up with Chrome. That's worrisome because although Firefox's glory days of ruing rings around Microsoft's Inteet Explorer are long gone, Firefox still has an important role to play driving progress on the Web. The Firefox team helps create and spread new technology standards that make the Web faster to use and give it new abilities with online chat, video games and virtual reality. Even if you primarily tu to apps on your phone, the Web remains fundamental to phones and PCs.

Mayo knew the Tofino decision would be controversial, leading some to worry that Mozilla would ditch Gecko the way another browser maker, Opera Software, largely abandoned its own technology to move onto Chromium.

Inteal resistance to Tofino was fierce, he said.

"God knows the last month of stop energy should have killed it," Mayo said. "Years of fear of hurting Firefox, by rights, should have never even let the idea germinate."

As a measure of Chrome's power, consider the list of browser makers besides Opera that decided to build atop Chromium: electronics giant Samsung, Russian search leader Yandex, Chinese Inteet giant Baidu, Norwegian startup Vivaldi, and perhaps most tellingly, Brave Software, the startup founded by Mozilla co-founder and former Chief Executive Brendan Eich.

Chrome accounts for 47 percent of browser usage, with Safari in second place at 13 percent and Firefox in third at 9 percent, according to measurements by StatCounter.

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Mayo's aouncement displeased one Mozilla engineer, Kyle Huey, who blasted him in an email to all Mozilla employees for jumping the gun and bungling the news. In another project called Positron, Mozilla is adapting Gecko so Tofino could move off Electron and Chromium, but Mayo didn't make that clear.

"Many people have spent a lot of time figuring out how to tell this story in a way that can't be mistaken as a vote of no-confidence in Firefox or Gecko," Huey said in the email seen by CNET. "It's hard not to see this as a mockery of both the legitimate conces that were raised inteally and the efforts of many people to address them before we aounced this more widely."