It seems that it's mostly the people building those browsers and their personal preferences. With google building a track record of shady tactics, I would agree. firefox seems the better choice. It seems no more difficult to fork than chromium (though I've never tried). My 2 cents, there's nothing to stop anyone from refusing to support updates on old frameworks and I'd suspect google to pull the rug out from beneath…
Making a fork of a repository is super easy, but you need to have a reason. The core problem is that Gecko is not easily embedded. It does not strongly separate the renderer from the application, and that means that it is very difficult to simply use in the middle of another app. You can compare it to WebKit and the old mshtml controls: the entire engine is designed, specifically with the intention of being a content…
arent they protocols? implementations of a protocol should not change.
my big gripe, chromium seems to make more analytics calls than gecko. are they grouping calls? probably.
gecko/firefox doesnt seem to have this agenda. Doh along with super-cookie controls seem to out-perform chromium in every way.
The end result seems to be privacy.
embedded?? are you using ChromiumOs?