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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?

#81

Post by nyanpasu64 »

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…

Interestingly there was a (never finished) Node fork based off SpiderMonkey (https://github.com/mozilla/spidernode had to write a V8 shim on top of SpiderMonkey), and GNOME Shell and some GNOME apps are written on gjs which uses SpiderMonkey. I don't know if it's bad at embedding compared to V8, but it's definitely been done.

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

#82

Post by dragonwriter »

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-split WebKit very much not suited to non-Apple platforms.

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

#83

Post by NetOpWibby »

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?

OOF

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

#84

Post by tannhaeuser »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #57

As others have said; Gecko and Servo are not easily embeddable. That was Apple's reported reason for using KHTML and making WebKit which Google used for Chrome and forked eventually. They wanted something light and embeddable. Don't blame them. Also, that software was LGPL. I was always hoping that Microsoft or Apple would fund the Mozilla Foundation to keep a competitive web engine afloat and prevent Google Chrome e…

> Safari is often the last to support new web standards

Where "web standards" are "whatever Chrome does", and written by Chrome devs. There you've also got the reason nobody starts from the FF/Gecko/Servo codebase.

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

#86

Post by NetOpWibby »

Mozilla’s priorities are questionable, I’m not sure anyone outside the company knows.

I’ve long resisted using a Chromium browser but Firefox has languished for far too long. I’ve been using Arc for maybe half a year now and I don’t plan on going back.

Without a team working on Servo, Mozilla is lost IMO.

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

#87

Post by dikei »

victorbstan wrote: post #41

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 w…

> If the end goal is standards compliance, the outcome should be the same.

The problem is Google is using Chromium dominant market share to push some questionable "features" into standards.

> The fact that Google did such a good job on early chrome compared to everyone else is really why it’s so popular.

Chrome is good, but Google being the largest advertising machine in the world also helps.

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

#88

Post by stonogo »

Donckele wrote: post #79

I’m calling bullshit to most of the comments here and to Mozilla. First, why cannot we have a multi-platform single click, no chrome/ui with fullscreen capabilities, firefox launcher that has prepackaged web app that is self contained? You think Major Tech Dudes can’t implement this? Second, it’s all probably to do with bureaucracy and politics. For all we know FAANG blocks such ad ventures otherwise its bully time.

We had it. It was called Prism: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism

It died when XulRunner died, and none of the followon attempts survived.

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

#89

Post by bryanrasmussen »

ipaddr wrote: post #65
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…

Using those containers might be making your firefox experience slower. The very reason you use it might make you think you shouldn't use it for anything else. If you used it without containers I wonder if you would think it's faster. Each container has it's own resources. How can it be less secure and the browser you choose for privacy reasons only?

I would say it means that obviously Google wants to track all your personal info but they work really hard and expend a lot resources to be sure it's safe from everyone else, also some attacks are done to not get your info but just to wreck stuff.
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