Wasn’t chromium based in WebKit? Same as Safari. Basically Apple forket webkit to make safari and Google forked WebKit to make chromium. I really don’t see what the hubbub is about trying so hard to have gecko, webkit, etc. rendering engines out there. If the end goal is standards compliance, the outcome should be the same. The fact that Google did such a good job on early chrome compared to everyone else is really why it’s so popular. Ultimately it’s open source. I think chromium could become more popular than it is, if they upped their marketing and made access to up to date binaries as frictionless as possible for as many platforms as possible.
Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
41–50 of 191 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#42As 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#43Chromium embeds the Blink browser engine which is a fork of WebKit which is a fork of KHTML.
You can read Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda to get the backstory on why they chose KHTML over Gecko. You can also Google for podcasts that Don Melton has been on.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#44Security.
The world class team that is responsible for protecting the iPhone protects Chromium.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#45Earlier 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…
Technically Mozilla is non-profit and thus technically not in the business of obtaining money.
But the people controlling them are. Charity vultures find a way to divert the revenue stream into their pockets.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#46Gecko 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.
I really hope that does not end up being the case because Firefox is better than ever in my opinion
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically Mozilla is non-profit and thus technically not in the business of obtaining money.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#48I'm wondering, Tor [1] is a Firefox based browser in the same sense as Edge/Brave/+ are based on Chromium?
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#49Out 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.
They funded Mozilla as far as I know for many years for exactly this reason
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically Mozilla is non-profit and thus technically not in the business of obtaining money.
But the people controlling them are. Charity vultures find a way to divert the revenue stream into their pockets.
The big difference though is that they are not beholden to shareholder demands. Other peoples demands, sure