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

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

#171

Post by magicalist » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

darklion wrote: post #168

bostik wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> root cause is that Chromium is well suited to being embedded Bingo. Let's not forget, Chromium itself is built off a fork of kHTML, the rendering-engine-as-a-library originally developed and used by KDE project. Apple forked kHTML and released WebKit. That gave the world Safari. Not long after, WebKit became the engine powering Chromium/Chrome, but with process isolation and high-octane JavaScript interpreter (V8).…

> Then quite some time later, frustrated by Apple's control over the engine, Google forked WebKit and came out with Blink. I see you've bought into Google's historical revisionism. When Google introduced multi-process rendering into Chrome, it was a massive technical innovation, but it was built at such a low level that it was effectively proprietary to Chrome. No one else could use it without pretty much adopting al…

> In other words, Google's main technical advantage would be baked into the browser engine itself and made available for everybody.

This is a bit of a silly narrative built on what's basically different architectural decisions. Chrome embedding was intended to be through CEF (which was fully multi-process), while WebKit through WebCore.

You could just as easily say that Apple decided not to do the hard work of migrating Chrome's multi-process architecture into WebKit and instead made a hard break and just started landing incompatible changes. From the thread you posted, you can even see a WebKit embedder at KDE blindsided by the news[1].

But in reality, browsers are hard, and in a way WebKit and Chrome were always forks but with shared components. The Blink fork was just a fork of one of the biggest of those components and a formalization of what was pretty much always the case by moving to separate source control, code review, etc.

[1] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2010-April/012...

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

#172

Post by dotancohen » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:45 PM UTC

ramesh31 wrote: post #143

leeroyjenkins11 wrote: post #132

Earlier 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…

As someone whose grandfather was an actual slave, I agree with this 100%. If I pull a repo and find "main" I have to WTF and be reminded again that somebody somewhere has a guilty conscience. I would have preferred that they keep their guilty conscience to themselves and let us work without constant reminders of the chip on their shoulder.

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

#173

Post by smcl » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 8:32 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #172

ramesh31 wrote: post #143

Earlier 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. 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…

As someone whose grandfather was an actual slave, I agree with this 100%. If I pull a repo and find "main" I have to WTF and be reminded again that somebody somewhere has a guilty conscience. I would have preferred that they keep their guilty conscience to themselves and let us work without constant reminders of the chip on their shoulder.

I think I can set your mind at ease on this one. If you see "main" instead of "master" then I can almost guarantee that it's not someone with a guilty conscience believing that naming their branch differently absolves them of something they or their ancestors did. But rather it's someone trying to follow a broader movement whose aim is to try to avoid terms they think are rooted in hatred or oppression.

If you're getting harrassed by someone because you've got some repos with a "master" branch then I sympathise with you - the people giving you shit are likely engaging in a bit of performative outrage and don't really understand what this is all about. However if you're really getting upset when you clone a repo and see that someone's named it "main" then I have to say that might be on you.

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

#174

Post by novok » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 8:50 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #94

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…

>Otherwise firefox is a slower, less secure browser I'd like to see citations on that - AFAIK (my opinion is as baseless as yours) FF is plenty fast on desktop, and there is nothing inherently less secure about it than Chrome. I do use Vivaldi (based on Chromium) on Android, but I consider Firefox Mobile and Desktop to be separate products.

On perf metrics (artificial and specific websites) firefox is consistently slower than chrome and safari. It's improved a lot and on a good desktop, it's probably 'good enough', why would I not choose the faster one when I'm starting a new project when all other things being are equal?

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

#175

Post by BlackLotus89 » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 9:12 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #140

vhab wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early attempts at embedding browsers in games were based on Gecko as well. But it didn't become more widespread until a switch to Chromium was made, which made the entire process a lot simpler in both execution and distribution. And there hasn't really been a need to revisit Gecko.

Wasn't Rust specifically invented to rewrite Gecko?

Rust was a personal project of Graydon Hoare. Mozilla jumped on the Rust train 3 years after its inception. https://web.archive.org/web/20160609195720/https://www.rust-...

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

#176

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

smcl wrote: post #173

dotancohen wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone whose grandfather was an actual slave, I agree with this 100%. If I pull a repo and find "main" I have to WTF and be reminded again that somebody somewhere has a guilty conscience. I would have preferred that they keep their guilty conscience to themselves and let us work without constant reminders of the chip on their shoulder.

I think I can set your mind at ease on this one. If you see "main" instead of "master" then I can almost guarantee that it's not someone with a guilty conscience believing that naming their branch differently absolves them of something they or their ancestors did. But rather it's someone trying to follow a broader movement whose aim is to try to avoid terms they think are rooted in hatred or oppression. If you're get…

> I can almost guarantee that it's not someone with a guilty conscience believing that naming their branch differently absolves them of something they or their ancestors did.

"white guilt" doesn't necessarily care if their ancestors did it.

> But rather it's someone trying to follow a broader movement whose aim is to try to avoid terms they think are rooted in hatred or oppression.

It's annoying and sigh-inducing to be reminded that such a movement is full of people that don't understand how words work, that "master" has plenty of perfectly good contexts that don't imply "master/slave".

> However if you're really getting upset [...] that might be on you.

Nobody is "really getting upset" and that entire part of your post is needlessly insulting.

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

#177

Post by davebailey » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 9:50 PM UTC

The Firefox engine sucks. It's resource intensive, buggy, and doesn't play nice with other technologies... think Flash.

Even the former CEO of Mozilla who left and created the Brave browser decided to go with Chromium.

Right now- the only browser engines seeing a lot of action are Chromium and WebKit. Every browser is being built on one of these two engines.

I suspect even Firefox will switch over to gain the benefits of one of those engines and the number of people working on them.

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

#178

Post by davebailey » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

gilrain wrote: post #151

daoismyname wrote: post #115

It's what happens when you fire you engineer CEO for his personal opinions (that I disagree with) and replace him with a "company culture" that has nothing to do with engineering, but has the "right" opinions.

I mean, they had an internal employee revolt, since his “personal opinions”, opinions backed by cash, were that those employees should have their human rights limited. You can’t lead effectively if the people you are trying to lead justifiably view you as hostile to them.

This is actually not the case.

Because someone supports creating new laws for other kinds of marriage than traditional doesn't mean that they hate or want to limit the rights of some groups.

Eich donated significant sums of money to LGBT organizations both before and after the voter referendum.

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

#179

Post by smcl » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 10:50 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #176

smcl wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I can set your mind at ease on this one. If you see "main" instead of "master" then I can almost guarantee that it's not someone with a guilty conscience believing that naming their branch differently absolves them of something they or their ancestors did. But rather it's someone trying to follow a broader movement whose aim is to try to avoid terms they think are rooted in hatred or oppression. If you're get…

> I can almost guarantee that it's not someone with a guilty conscience believing that naming their branch differently absolves them of something they or their ancestors did. "white guilt" doesn't necessarily care if their ancestors did it. > But rather it's someone trying to follow a broader movement whose aim is to try to avoid terms they think are rooted in hatred or oppression. It's annoying and sigh-inducing to…

> "white guilt" doesn't necessarily care if their ancestors did it.

Honestly don't know what you're getting at here. You're going to have to spell this one out to me.

> It's annoying and sigh-inducing to be reminded that such a movement is full of people that don't understand ... that "master" has plenty of perfectly good contexts

I don't disagree. See my comment about people engaging in performative outrage, it does exist. But in this case you're annoyed at the very sight of the word "main". Like ... c'mon

> Nobody is "really getting upset" and that entire part of your post is needlessly insulting.

Are you misunderstanding that "However if you're really getting upset ..." means "However you're truly getting upset ..." and not "You're getting really upset ..."? Additionally if you read my comment, I provide two interpretations:

1. they exclaim "WTF" when attacked for having named a branch "master" (IMO understandable)

2. they exclaim "WTF" at the very sight of a branch named "main" (IMO a bit silly)

I honestly don't know which is the right one. It is up to the commenter if they want to tell us which it is.

Update: and just like that this part of the thread has become the farce I feared it would, we are debating whether the words "main" and "really" are offensive. This is a very important thing to consider when answering the question "Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?"

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

#180

Post by contingencies » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 11:48 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #55

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.

Have you never been asked to rate apps before? I heard about google "randomly" asking people to rate restaurants they recently visited, so "randomly" asking people to rate apps they installed doesn't seem too out of the ordinary. It's definitely not enough to think "Google is trying to create a facade of competition where there is none by stuffing the Play Store review stats".

No, I have never been asked to rate apps before. Perhaps because I am in China.