21–30 of 191 posts
I think Chromium’s performance contributed a lot to its dominance. Browser distributions have to build off of it to be relevant. Other than Ekioh’s Flow, I don’t know any other competitive attempts from companies building browser components from scratch.
Chrome is easy to fork, Firefox is not. It's pretty much that simple.
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 embedding.
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…
I don't think that's really the key problem since you don't have to build a new browser out of FF by embedding Gecko. FF itself is a browser that was made out of another browser, much of the old core Mozilla technology is basically a cross-platform app-building framework with one of the 'apps' being a browser. Somewhat unobviously, this turned out not to be a great way to build a browser in the long run.
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…
>since mozilla fired the servo team there is no certain future for it anymore. When did that happen? It seems the managerial class has completed their takeover of Mozilla in the last few years. A real shame, since it basically cedes the entire web to Google.
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…
Mozilla seems to choose what to do with donations though. I don't think there's any way to target funding for Gecko, Rust, etc.
One reason is that Firefox is an older browser design (compared to Chrome), in parts retrofitted. That's a difficult, laborious rut to get out of, especially if your competition has more resources and a big head start. If you're starting a new browser variant, it doesn't make much sense to also start with Mozilla's disadvantage.