Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 191 posts

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

#181

Post by pcwalton »

toyg wrote: post #116
pcwalton wrote: post #20

As an engine, Chromium has overwhelming market share, so it decreases risk to build on top of it. Choosing an alternative browser engine increases risk. Embeddability has little to do with it; Chromium (as opposed to WebKit) isn't actually that embeddable. Rather, market share is king. With a high market share, the community will step up with projects like Electron and Chromium Embedded Framework that add embeddabili…

You have your cause and effect backwards. That market share was achieved in large part by ease of embedding. Google itself started the project on WebKit because it was easier to embed and manipulate than anything else, and were pretty careful to allow others to do the same one level higher up the stack (i.e. making it easy to build your own branded browser on top of Chromium).

It's never been easier to build a custom branded Chrome than to build a custom branded Firefox. Building a custom branded Firefox is very easy, which is why tons of people have done it.

Google achieved market share by taking the embeddable WebKit, wrapping it in a non-embeddable wrapper called Chromium, and eventually forking WebKit to Blink in large part to make it non-embeddable and more tightly coupled to Chromium.

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

#182

Post by BenjiWiebe »

pcwalton wrote: post #181
toyg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have your cause and effect backwards. That market share was achieved in large part by ease of embedding. Google itself started the project on WebKit because it was easier to embed and manipulate than anything else, and were pretty careful to allow others to do the same one level higher up the stack (i.e. making it easy to build your own branded browser on top of Chromium).

It's never been easier to build a custom branded Chrome than to build a custom branded Firefox. Building a custom branded Firefox is very easy, which is why tons of people have done it. Google achieved market share by taking the embeddable WebKit, wrapping it in a non -embeddable wrapper called Chromium, and eventually forking WebKit to Blink in large part to make it non-embeddable and more tightly coupled to Chromiu…

Custom branding and embedding aren't the same thing though.

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

#183

Post by pcwalton »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #182
pcwalton wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never been easier to build a custom branded Chrome than to build a custom branded Firefox. Building a custom branded Firefox is very easy, which is why tons of people have done it. Google achieved market share by taking the embeddable WebKit, wrapping it in a non -embeddable wrapper called Chromium, and eventually forking WebKit to Blink in large part to make it non-embeddable and more tightly coupled to Chromiu…

Custom branding and embedding aren't the same thing though.

Correct. And Chromium, as shipped and supported by Google (not third-party projects like CEF), is no better than Firefox at embedding (and certainly wasn't when Chromium was taking off in market share). There is a reason why Chromium-based browsers are forks of Chromium, not embeddings of Chromium.

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

#184

Post by pcwalton »

dfabulich wrote: post #42
pcwalton wrote: post #20

As an engine, Chromium has overwhelming market share, so it decreases risk to build on top of it. Choosing an alternative browser engine increases risk. Embeddability has little to do with it; Chromium (as opposed to WebKit) isn't actually that embeddable. Rather, market share is king. With a high market share, the community will step up with projects like Electron and Chromium Embedded Framework that add embeddabili…

> Embeddability has little to do with it; Chromium (as opposed to WebKit) isn't actually that embeddable. No way. I remember the bad old days of XULRunner. In 2010, pre-Electron, it was literally easier to implement my own WebKit-based app from scratch in C++ than it was to follow the documentation and use XULRunner. Firefox's embeddability was bad . Really bad.

And Chromium's embeddability is just as bad. Notice you're talking about WebKit, not Chromium. Chromium doesn't even have a XULRunner.

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

#185

Post by Dylan16807 »

smcl wrote: post #179
Dylan16807 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can almost guarantee that it's not someone with a guilty conscience believing that naming their branch differently absolves them of something they or their ancestors did. "white guilt" doesn't necessarily care if their ancestors did it. > But rather it's someone trying to follow a broader movement whose aim is to try to avoid terms they think are rooted in hatred or oppression. It's annoying and sigh-inducing to…

> "white guilt" doesn't necessarily care if their ancestors did it. Honestly don't know what you're getting at here. You're going to have to spell this one out to me. > It's annoying and sigh-inducing to be reminded that such a movement is full of people that don't understand ... that "master" has plenty of perfectly good contexts I don't disagree. See my comment about people engaging in performative outrage, it does…

> Honestly don't know what you're getting at here. You're going to have to spell this one out to me.

You said "I can almost guarantee that it's not someone with a guilty conscience believing that naming their branch differently absolves them of something they or their ancestors did." but the accusation of doing it out of "white guilt" isn't really saying they were trying to absolve themselves of something their ancestors did.

> I don't disagree. See my comment about people engaging in performative outrage, it does exist. But in this case you're annoyed at the very sight of the word "main". Like ... c'mon

Annoyance is pretty mild. If seeing it reminds me of it, what do you expect to happen? I don't think that's unreasonable.

> Are you misunderstanding that "However if you're really getting upset ..." means "However you're truly getting upset ..." and not "You're getting really upset ..."?

I understand that. By even bringing it up you're implying it's necessary to worry about people "truly getting upset" which is not saying great things about your opinion of your conversation partners. I mean look above where you said "c'mon", you're implying that it's unreasonable for me to be "annoyed".

> Additionally if you read my comment, I provide two interpretations:

And I was talking about interpretation 2 specifically.

I interpret "I have to WTF" as something akin to a double take, not "truly getting upset".

> This is a very important thing to consider when answering the question "Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?"

Shrug.

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

#186

Post by dfabulich »

pcwalton wrote: post #184
dfabulich wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Embeddability has little to do with it; Chromium (as opposed to WebKit) isn't actually that embeddable. No way. I remember the bad old days of XULRunner. In 2010, pre-Electron, it was literally easier to implement my own WebKit-based app from scratch in C++ than it was to follow the documentation and use XULRunner. Firefox's embeddability was bad . Really bad.

And Chromium's embeddability is just as bad. Notice you're talking about WebKit, not Chromium. Chromium doesn't even have a XULRunner.

Chromium Embedded Framework is Chromium's XULRunner. It was much easier to use and maintain than XULRunner, which is why it's still maintained to this day, and XULRunner is in the trash.

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

#187

Post by iamdanieljohns »

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.

where can I find this statistics?

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

#188

Post by Dylan16807 »

iamdanieljohns wrote: post #187
Dylan16807 wrote: post #66

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.

where can I find this statistics?

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2020/

All the "audited financial statements".

It should be the second full-page chart.

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

#189

Post by novok »

ipaddr wrote: post #65
novok wrote: post #58

I only use firefox because of it's multi-account container capabilities and some other better privacy features, which is more to do with it's wrapper vs. it's actual engine. Someone could make multi-account containers or better with chromium, and if they did I would just use that instead. Otherwise firefox is a slower, less secure browser and an older more crufty codebase and less webdevs test it thoroughly. Why woul…

Using those containers might be making your firefox experience slower. The very reason you use it might make you think you shouldn't use it for anything else. If you used it without containers I wonder if you would think it's faster. Each container has it's own resources. How can it be less secure and the browser you choose for privacy reasons only?

Multi-account containers are separated cookie/state jars that auto spawn on tabs based on URL rules , they don't need a lot of resources other than maybe kilobytes or a few MB of extra memory per account container. CPU wise and overall memory wise it isn't much.

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

#190

Post by pcwalton »

dfabulich wrote: post #186
pcwalton wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Chromium's embeddability is just as bad. Notice you're talking about WebKit, not Chromium. Chromium doesn't even have a XULRunner.

Chromium Embedded Framework is Chromium's XULRunner. It was much easier to use and maintain than XULRunner, which is why it's still maintained to this day, and XULRunner is in the trash.

CEF is a third-party project that isn't officially supported by Google, unlike XULRunner. Which gets back to my point about market share: when you're popular enough, then people will step in to provide embeddability (in this case, CEF) on top of your non-embeddable product (Chromium). You could easily imagine an alternate universe where Firefox was the #1 browser and someone stepped in to write a Gecko Embedded Framework. The reason why Chromium Embedded Framework exists and Gecko Embedded Framework doesn't is market share.
Post reply on HN