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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?

#91

Post by eloisant »

cosmotic wrote: post #47
readthenotes1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure all non-profits are in the business of obtaining money.

Many non-profits will obtain money, but they purpose of the business is mainly things other than obtaining money. There definitely do exist non-profits that obtain more money than you would hope for a non-profit. Mozilla doesn't smell like such an organization to me.

Mozilla clearly exists to make as much money as possible for their employees (and in particular the leadership).

I know, they claim their goal is to promote the Open Web and so on... But that ideal from the 2000's is long gone at Mozilla, when you see how the leadership is acting.

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

#92

Post by bostik »

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…

> root cause is that Chromium is well suited to being embedded

Bingo. Let's not forget, Chromium itself is built off a fork of kHTML, the rendering-engine-as-a-library originally developed and used by KDE project.

Apple forked kHTML and released WebKit. That gave the world Safari. Not long after, WebKit became the engine powering Chromium/Chrome, but with process isolation and high-octane JavaScript interpreter (V8). Then quite some time later, frustrated by Apple's control over the engine, Google forked WebKit and came out with Blink.

Sometimes the only difference between provenance and history is the written narrative.

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

#94

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

>Otherwise firefox is a slower, less secure browser

I'd like to see citations on that - AFAIK (my opinion is as baseless as yours) FF is plenty fast on desktop, and there is nothing inherently less secure about it than Chrome.

I do use Vivaldi (based on Chromium) on Android, but I consider Firefox Mobile and Desktop to be separate products.

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

#95

Post by shp0ngle »

dragonwriter wrote: post #82
shp0ngle wrote: post #77

That's simple. Gecko is awful to embed and use independently of Firefox. Now my question would be why not WebKit, as that is also easy to embed. There are browsers that use WebKit, just not that many.

> Now my question would be why not WebKit, as that is also easy to embed. There are browsers that use WebKit, just not that many. Wasn’t part of the WebKit/Blink split that Google cared about supporting non-Apple platforms and Apple didn’t want to anymore, (and the reverse on a number of Apple-priority features), and both sides purged their post-split engine codebases of the stuff they weren’t supporting, making post…

Ah, that might be it.

Quick googling (not any in-depth knowledge) tells me that WebKit is for Linux too, I cannot find out anything about Windows.

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

#96

Post by Ygg2 »

jppope wrote: post #68
zucker42 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happened when Mozilla laid off 25% of their staff. Servo was probably part of that because it was more of a research project than part of the core business.

Isn't their core business just helping google avoid anti-trust issues by being the "other" browser?

Well. Can't step on Google's embedability then.

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

#98

Post by ptman »

luka-birsa wrote: post #80

We had to choose between Webkit and Gecko. For us it was primarily the license, which was GPL vs MIT. Gecko was a non starter.

I thought mozilla projects, including firefox and gecko are GPL/MPL dual licensed? Where MPL is close to LGPL https://tldrlegal.com/license/mozilla-public-license-2.0-(mp...

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

#99

Post by conradludgate »

anhner wrote: post #90
luka-birsa wrote: post #80

We had to choose between Webkit and Gecko. For us it was primarily the license, which was GPL vs MIT. Gecko was a non starter.

Why was GPL better than MIT?

From what I can see its actually LGPL vs MPL which are similar in end goal, of being viral when modifying and distributing the project as is, but integrating the library into an application can allow for a licence change

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

#100

Post by sanxiyn »

thayne wrote: post #75
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…

That non embeddability is probably also a major reason why there isn't a significant node competitor based on spidermonkey. I get wanting to focus on Firefox as a whole, and that making components more independent can add quite a bit of work. But at the same time, if it was easier to use gecko in other browsers, and spidermonkey as JS environment outside the browser, I wonder if that would increase usage of and inter…

MongoDB embeds SpiderMonkey. Embeddability of SpiderMonkey is fine. It is Gecko that is the problem.
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