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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?

#31

Post by olliej »

The problem with gecko is that it is fundamentally challenging to embed as a standalone UI element. Too much of the "I am a browser" mentality gets into the rest of the engine.

Chrome adopted the webkit model of being primarily an embeddable engine, that happened to have a browser as its primary use case. The WebKit framework is used extensively throughout macOS and iOS, across a variety of applications, precisely because the framework is designed as a content view, not as a browser.

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

#34

Post by bee_rider »

MattGaiser wrote: post #17
USA-RedDragon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're saying Google's isn't the same? Mozilla and Google are both businesses whose primary goals are obtaining money. If you think that there are engineers specifically on the Chrome/Chromium team who ARE interested in the technology, what's the chances that there are engineers on the Firefox team who feel the same? My point being companies will always have to be monetarily-biased, and the hope is that the team…

Yeah, but a good browser strongly aligns with obtaining money for Google. Google has strong performance quality driven incentives. Mozilla doesn't seem to have performance driven incentives. The remaining supporters of Firefox at this point are people who are mad at tech companies/care a great deal about privacy.

There isn't some huge performance delta between the browsers, and I've already customized Firefox to my liking, why switch?

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

#36

Post by andrewmcwatters »

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 web engine, which allows developers to deliver content and applications using web standards.

This is servo's mission, on their website, and the last time I checked, they provide absolutely no documentation on how to actually do it.

If you need embedded, just use CEF like everyone else. If you need a browser base, just use Chromium. Everyone else is dicking around.

I would have written a WebKit port[1] for my own purposes, because CEF has significant technical limitations, but WebKit has no documentation on how to do it either. They have documentation on what a WebKit port is, and what ones exist, but not actual documentation on how to create your own callbacks for view abstraction and blitting etc. It's a much more significant effort compared to just using CEF.

[1]: https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/SuccessfulPortHowTo

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

#37

Post by olliej »

f0xtrot wrote: post #16

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 view in an application.

Chromium inherited the core webkit design, so it is also much easier to embed than gecko. It requires much more work than a webkit webview, but that's largely down to exactly where they felt their API boundaries should be (e.g. a conscious design decision vs happenstance).

The end result is that forking Gecko is useful if what you want to do is make a fork of Firefox. Using gecko for anything else is challenging - there used to be a Mac browser built on gecko, and it required a huge amount of work to keep going, and would routinely fall behind due to changes that broke embedding. Just a browser, so it still had the same basic UI structure, and it was still hard to make in the first place, and hard to maintain.

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

#38

Post by olliej »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #10

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.

The aggressive advertising on many of the most popular sites on the web also helped a lot, the occasional accidental breakage of other browsers on those same google properties also worked out in their favor.

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

#39

Post by ameliaquining »

tyingq wrote: post #28
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…

>Consider funding work to make Gecko better suited to embedding 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.

I think the suggestion being made here is that if somebody else did that work, they might be willing to merge it into their tree.

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

#40

Post by andai »

contingencies wrote: post #29

Out of the blue yesterday my phone asked me to rate Firefox. I think Google is trying to create a facade of competition where there is none by stuffing the Play Store review stats.

I've heard Firefox described as Google's "antitrust insurance".
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