Because Chrome has bigger market share, webdevs test their stuff only in Chrome, as a consequence their stuff works only in Chrome. Browsers have to be based on Chrome or suffer incompatibility problems, and sometimes even that doesn't help as some sites block browsers based on user agent strings if they detect it's not true Chrome.
Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
141–150 of 191 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#142sometimes I feel like it would be better for everyone if we had one engine that all browser makers contributed to.
This would mean that there is only one engine that needs to keep up to date with the html/JavaScript spec and then browsers would then be competing on features rather than if a web site will render correctly.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit of an oversimplification, it's not like they had a choice between adequately funding R&D projects or Doing Political Correctness and chose the latter. Besides, remember that Eich was appointed in 2014 and had only a short stint at CEO, so I don't think you can attribute the 2013 figures to him I think all of us on HN are a bit saddened about Mozilla cutting back on the Rust and Servo teams, but political…
They did give like a 10k grant for people to remove master/slave terminology from docs, so who knows what other PC work they were funding.
>They did give like a 10k grant for people to remove master/slave terminology from docs, so who knows what other PC work they were funding.
As a black person in tech, I can't tell you how much that whole debacle drives me insane. I never once in my life ever made the association between "master branch" and "slave master". But now every single time I pull a repo with a "main" branch instead of "master", I have to think about it and play along to assuage someone's white guilt. I absolutely refuse to ever make the switch.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit of an oversimplification, it's not like they had a choice between adequately funding R&D projects or Doing Political Correctness and chose the latter. Besides, remember that Eich was appointed in 2014 and had only a short stint at CEO, so I don't think you can attribute the 2013 figures to him I think all of us on HN are a bit saddened about Mozilla cutting back on the Rust and Servo teams, but political…
They did give like a 10k grant for people to remove master/slave terminology from docs, so who knows what other PC work they were funding.
This is a silly conspiracy theory if you think about it even a little bit. The grant you're referring to was $15K grant to Buildbot, which Mozilla has used heavily for years, and that was both to update terminology and “also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud” — guess which one is more work? — and $15K is a big amount to an open source maintainer but tiny when you're talking about budgets measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. You don't solve major budgetary issues by going after tiny fractions of one percent when there are individual people making orders of magnitude more money.
Mozilla is also one of the most open companies in our field — given how often we read about far less significant events there, it seems incredibly unlikely that there's some sort of substantial but well-concealed dark funding of “PC work” which has remained secret even after, say, lots of people being laid off or leaving especially when such work would by necessity have visible impacts.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox became competitive again on a technical level after the overhaul with 57 long after Eich was gone, and under Eich the browser was already in a steady state of decline for a long time both technologically and in terms of usershare. Trying to ride old stereotypes about engineers and management that has nothing to do with facts is pretty cringeworthy.
Guess which one is better in 2022, Firefox or Brave? (except maybe containers) Firefox was born in 2002 (under Eich management) as Phoenix, it's kinda obvious that 16 years later (57 is from 2018, Eich left in 2014) it needed a technological upgrade. In ~2009-2010 Firefox was used by 33% of the web users. Today it's at ~6%. I blame management, the alternative is believing Firefox just had bad luck or that developers…
> I blame management, the alternative is believing Firefox just had bad luck or that developers at Firefox suck (which they do not)
There are other factors at play than managerial incompetence:
- the entire iOS part of "all web users" uses WebKit because Apple doesn't allow other engines. For Android, most devices ship either Chrome or a WebKit wrapper (the default Android WebView), and many users don't bother switching browsers from the default. As ever more Web usage moves towards mobile, the disadvantage towards Firefox only accelerates - which is part of the reason why Mozilla tried to build a competitor.
- Many users also don't bother very much to switch their desktop browser. Apple users, especially on mobile, tend to stay with Safari as not even Chrome can keep up with the battery life optimizations Apple did, much less Firefox (not to mention Apple probably doesn't even grant non-Apple apps access to entitlements, but that's just guesswork).
- Netflix and other DRM content. A lot of people went to Chrome back in ye olde days when getting Netflix to run in HD resolutions (or at all) was a nightmare on everything sans Chrome (and Internet Explorer), and thanks to inertia (see above) they stayed on Chrome. And I'm not even wishing to fault Mozilla's management for resisting DRM for as long as they did, but in the end customers voted with their download buttons for convenience.
- The desktop users that do switch their desktop browser switch mostly to Chrome because Google blasts out tons of ads to switch to Chrome, not to mention website developers suggesting their users to move to Chrome or outright announcing that bugs involving browsers other than Chrome won't get addressed.
The last thing is undoubtedly the biggest issue - it is impossible to counteract the advertising and other financial firepower of Google. In ye olde times, regulatory agencies should have stepped in long ago to ban the cross-promotion that Google did (similar to the MS judgements), but they didn't and now we're living in a browser duopoly that is rapidly devolving into WebKit monopoly.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't be this cynical if everyone said the same thing to the Firefox OS back then. It turned out that Firefox OS did have much potential to countries with less mobile penetration, as observed from KaiOS's success in India. Was the Firefox OS less future-focused than Servo? I don't think so, and given that Servo actually did survive long enough to give back to the mainline Gecko (in the form of WebRender and so o…
Well, many claimed that back when decisions were being taken. They could have scrapped FFOS much sooner than they did. > Firefox OS did have much potential to countries with less mobile penetration, as observed from KaiOS's success in India. Such "success" is inevitably fleeting. Eventually a "developing" market develops to demand more established and desirable products. Nokia had those markets under lock and key for…
> Nokia had those markets under lock and key for a long time, back when EU/US had already moved on to iPhone-like products; but then consumers inevitably gravitated towards the fashionable.
“fashionable” is the wrong word: it should be “functional”. Those old Nokia phones were very good at being phones but that's it — maybe a minimal messaging app, but anyone who used one knows just how limited those old mobile OSes were.
I think FirefoxOS was an interesting idea but there are really important thresholds you need to be able to hit and that was the critical error they made. There was no plausible way to grow the low-end feature phone market into a large enough business to get there when competing with cheap knock-off Android devices. If they'd started years earlier or gotten a major vendor on-board, maybe, but at their funding levels there was no way to make the numbers work and it was pretty clear at the time that this was a low-probability gamble.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#147It 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.
If a 501(c)(3) non-profit receives a donation for a specific project, by law they cannot direct the funds toward anything else unless the donor releases the funds for another purpose. This is more of a thing with large donations than, say, a recurring $10/month. If a small-dollar donor tried to restrict their funding, the non-profit would probably ignore the restriction because the donor has no leverage to find out if their instructions were followed.
If anyone with a ton of money wants to focus Mozilla specifically on Gecko, Rust, whatever, then that person can probably get them to do it.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did give like a 10k grant for people to remove master/slave terminology from docs, so who knows what other PC work they were funding.
>They did give like a 10k grant for people to remove master/slave terminology from docs, so who knows what other PC work they were funding. As a black person in tech, I can't tell you how much that whole debacle drives me insane. I never once in my life ever made the association between "master branch" and "slave master". But now every single time I pull a repo with a "main" branch instead of "master", I have to thin…
I think changing the default in Git was fine — it's such a small amount of work and doesn't affect existing projects — but what I really wish was that more people had taken this as the cue to ask what “master” even meant for their project. I've tried to switch my projects to names which actually describe what we use them for — e.g. tracking branches like development, staging, production representing what is currently being deployed to those environments — and that's been far more worthwhile because it brings clarity to discussions and simplifies things like CI/CD scripting.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#149As one who inserted numerous test instrumention points through out SpiderMonkey JS executable, I can vouch for the extreme nastiness build procedure made by and of Modzilla Firefox build team, not only code-wise but interaction-wise.
It’s a bit easier nowadays but still in no way portable for suitable embedded use.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox became competitive again on a technical level after the overhaul with 57 long after Eich was gone, and under Eich the browser was already in a steady state of decline for a long time both technologically and in terms of usershare. Trying to ride old stereotypes about engineers and management that has nothing to do with facts is pretty cringeworthy.
Guess which one is better in 2022, Firefox or Brave? (except maybe containers) Firefox was born in 2002 (under Eich management) as Phoenix, it's kinda obvious that 16 years later (57 is from 2018, Eich left in 2014) it needed a technological upgrade. In ~2009-2010 Firefox was used by 33% of the web users. Today it's at ~6%. I blame management, the alternative is believing Firefox just had bad luck or that developers…
I prefer firefox to brave