Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 191 posts

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

#101

Post by mijoharas »

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…

We embedded spidermonkey as the JavaScript engine for the prime video application on games consoles and smart TVs when I was at Amazon (5 years ago+ not sure if they still use it). I've not embedded any other JS engines, but it wasn't too bad to embed.

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

#102

Post by iggldiggl »

commoner wrote: post #73

While embedding Gecko in desktop applications is not as straightforward as embedding Chromium, Mozilla's GeckoView project makes it easier to do this on Android: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ GeckoView is the foundation of Firefox for Android and Firefox Focus. The SmartCookieWeb-Preview browser, which supports sideloading Firefox extensions on Android, is also based on GeckoView: https://github.com/CookieJarA…

But then again on Android the OS already provides a Webview implementation for usage by apps, so while on Android Gecko might be more easily emebeddable than on Desktop, it's then hobbled by the fact that on Android the choice for app developers is either using the default Chrome/Blink-based Webview provided by the OS at absolutely no size-penalty, or else thinking about shipping a full browser engine with your app at a size penalty of dozens of MB, at which point you might then consider possibly using GeckoView instead of shipping your own specific version of Blink.

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

#103

Post by CrzyLngPwd »

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…

I embedded it in https://digiguide.tv/products/windows.asp around 20 years ago.

Aside from thread-wrangling I thought it was trvial to embed.

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

#104

Post by sanxiyn »

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…

This is incorrect. Conflict was over multiprocess architecture, where Google added it as a WebKit port and Apple did a proper redesign and produced WebKit2. WebKit is still extremely portable and non-Apple platforms are first class.

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

#105

Post by getcrunk »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #84
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.

Yea there's no reason other than greed to not fully implement pwas, local storage over 500mb, and native share intents to pwa

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

#106

Post by causi »

On June 21st, 2011 Mozilla decided that Chrome would lead and Firefox would follow. Almost every single change to Firefox since then made it more similar to Chrome, not less. If you're making a browser, you follow the leader, not the first follower.

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

#107

Post by motiejus »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #103
thayne wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I embedded it in https://digiguide.tv/products/windows.asp around 20 years ago. Aside from thread-wrangling I thought it was trvial to embed.

> 32mb RAM and 8mb Disk Space.

I miss such numbers so much.

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

#108

Post by eb0la »

CmdrKrool wrote: post #64
dikei wrote: post #25

Firefox used to be extremely extensible: there were some software based on Gecko and Xulrunner. However, they all died out after Chromium and Electron took over.

Xulrunner specifically, died or at least is not easily revived, because Mozilla killed XUL and XPCOM.

There was even an Oreilly book about it: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-firefo...

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

#109

Post by toyg »

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…

This was the biggest fumble of the Mozilla strategy in the last 20 years. Instead of focusing on the developer market, particularly after the appearance of WebKit, they bet (half) the farm on a quixotic quest to build a mobile OS from scratch. By attempting to gain a level of control that was always unlikely, they endangered their own survival.
Post reply on HN