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Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#131

Post by zdkl »

elevaet wrote: post #126
toyg wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the biggest fumble of the Mozilla strategy in the last 20 years. Instead of focusing on the developer market, particularly after the appearance of WebKit, they bet (half) the farm on a quixotic quest to build a mobile OS from scratch. By attempting to gain a level of control that was always unlikely, they endangered their own survival.

I would have made that same mistake if I was making decisions for Mozilla at the time. It's such an elegant, logical and tempting ideal to turn the browser into the OS. Too bad it didn't work out.

Well, now we have PWAs. I'd be more than a bit bitter if I was a mozilla dev tasked with making those work on android/ios instead of on firefoxOs.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#132

Post by leeroyjenkins11 »

smcl wrote: post #127
dotancohen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2013 Mozilla spent $197M on software development and $30M on general/administrative. > In 2020 it was $242M and $137M. > The future-focused servo team was not the place to cut a couple million. Wasn't it just after 2013 when the replacement politically-correct CEO got quadruple the pay of the not-politically-correct engineer CEO?

That's a bit of an oversimplification, it's not like they had a choice between adequately funding R&D projects or Doing Political Correctness and chose the latter. Besides, remember that Eich was appointed in 2014 and had only a short stint at CEO, so I don't think you can attribute the 2013 figures to him I think all of us on HN are a bit saddened about Mozilla cutting back on the Rust and Servo teams, but political…

They did give like a 10k grant for people to remove master/slave terminology from docs, so who knows what other PC work they were funding.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#133

Post by elb2020 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #66
YPPH wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it basically cedes the entire web to Google Refocusing on making Mozilla a viable entity without the need for cash splashes from Google is doing precisely the opposite. By diluting Google's financial control it ensures decision-making is both actually and ostensibly impartial. Gecko is still a perfectly functioning browser engine. It's far easier to keep Gecko up to date with modern web standards than reinventing th…

In 2013 Mozilla spent $197M on software development and $30M on general/administrative. In 2020 it was $242M and $137M. The future-focused servo team was not the place to cut a couple million.

It seems to me, that once a company reaches a tipping point of more than 50% non-engineers in upper management, it's the demise of the company as an engineering company, and it will slowly drift in the direction of being a technology holding company only.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#134

Post by edoceo »

causi wrote: post #106

On June 21st, 2011 Mozilla decided that Chrome would lead and Firefox would follow. Almost every single change to Firefox since then made it more similar to Chrome, not less. If you're making a browser, you follow the leader, not the first follower.

What happened on that day? Is there more historical details?

Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#135

Post by edoceo »

tylerchilds wrote: post #71
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #36

I had a conversation here with people about Servo and it was immediately clear that it was a collection of people who wanted to play around with Rust and not actually solve a problem that people have while saying that they did. They were way more concerned with bullshit like governance than meat and potatoes like writing a getting started article. > Servo’s mission is to provide an independent, modular, embeddable we…

The documentation on how to run it is in the readme. They've only got pre-release builds available on their website, since the tech isn't production ready yet. I've been compiling it locally and playing with it. I run it like: $ servo https://news.ycombinator.com To do that, I've got an alias set up to point to my dev build. alias servo='f() { /home/tychi/SourceCode/servo/mach run --release $1 };f'

The question was how to Embed servo, not how to Run servo

Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#136

Post by thematrixturtle »

toyg wrote: post #111
lifthrasiir wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be this cynical if everyone said the same thing to the Firefox OS back then. It turned out that Firefox OS did have much potential to countries with less mobile penetration, as observed from KaiOS's success in India. Was the Firefox OS less future-focused than Servo? I don't think so, and given that Servo actually did survive long enough to give back to the mainline Gecko (in the form of WebRender and so o…

Well, many claimed that back when decisions were being taken. They could have scrapped FFOS much sooner than they did. > Firefox OS did have much potential to countries with less mobile penetration, as observed from KaiOS's success in India. Such "success" is inevitably fleeting. Eventually a "developing" market develops to demand more established and desirable products. Nokia had those markets under lock and key for…

Not if the platform can leverage its position to move upmarket, as Japanese, Korean and now Chinese manufacturers have.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#137

Post by vhab »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #8

Gecko and servo are both not easily embeddable. Servo isn't a finished rendering engine yet and the browser I saw that could exclusively use servo was not compliant enough and since mozilla fired the servo team there is no certain future for it anymore. Projects that tried to make servo embeddable are all dead and gone (see https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example for example) So yeah last time I tried t…

Early attempts at embedding browsers in games were based on Gecko as well.

But it didn't become more widespread until a switch to Chromium was made, which made the entire process a lot simpler in both execution and distribution.

And there hasn't really been a need to revisit Gecko.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#138

Post by jcmontx »

jeffparsons wrote: post #24

It seems like everyone has reached much the same conclusion: there may be many factors, but the real killer and root cause is that Chromium is well suited to being embedded, and Gecko is not. So hey, any companies out there interested in bringing back a little diversity in browser engines? Or just making a tiny dent in Google's dominance for the greater good? Consider funding work to make Gecko better suited to embed…

Could someone explain what _embedding_ means in the context of web browsers? Thanks

Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#139

Post by nicoburns »

jcmontx wrote: post #138
jeffparsons wrote: post #24

It seems like everyone has reached much the same conclusion: there may be many factors, but the real killer and root cause is that Chromium is well suited to being embedded, and Gecko is not. So hey, any companies out there interested in bringing back a little diversity in browser engines? Or just making a tiny dent in Google's dominance for the greater good? Consider funding work to make Gecko better suited to embed…

Could someone explain what _embedding_ means in the context of web browsers? Thanks

Including as a library rather than running as a complete program.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

#140

Post by amelius »

vhab wrote: post #137
BlackLotus89 wrote: post #8

Gecko and servo are both not easily embeddable. Servo isn't a finished rendering engine yet and the browser I saw that could exclusively use servo was not compliant enough and since mozilla fired the servo team there is no certain future for it anymore. Projects that tried to make servo embeddable are all dead and gone (see https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example for example) So yeah last time I tried t…

Early attempts at embedding browsers in games were based on Gecko as well. But it didn't become more widespread until a switch to Chromium was made, which made the entire process a lot simpler in both execution and distribution. And there hasn't really been a need to revisit Gecko.

Wasn't Rust specifically invented to rewrite Gecko?
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