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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?

#111

Post by toyg »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #78
Dylan16807 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2013 Mozilla spent $197M on software development and $30M on general/administrative. In 2020 it was $242M and $137M. The future-focused servo team was not the place to cut a couple million.

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 a long time, back when EU/US had already moved on to iPhone-like products; but then consumers inevitably gravitated towards the fashionable.

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

#112

Post by toyg »

bostik wrote: post #92
jeffparsons wrote: post #24

It 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…

> 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).…

Yeah, WebKit really tilted the scale. KHTML had been built to be easily embeddable already (since it was supposed to be used across the whole KDE desktop, following what MS had done with "Active Desktop" in Windows 2000/XP), and Apple gave it the polish and popularity to make it the obvious choice. Any org or ecosystem who needed a rendering engine rushed to wrap WebKit, and that included Google.

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

#113

Post by tux3 »

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.

Empirically, Firefox falls more easily than Chrome at Pwn2Own, and the exploit chains don't need to be very long.

Good news is, there is research that finds the Rust components of Firefox have much less memory safety bugs. Bad news, moco is not investing in Rust very much at all, anymore.

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

#114

Post by toyg »

pvg wrote: post #26
jeffparsons wrote: post #24

It 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…

real killer and root cause is that Chromium is well suited to being embedded, and Gecko is not. I don't think that's really the key problem since you don't have to build a new browser out of FF by embedding Gecko. FF itself is a browser that was made out of another browser, much of the old core Mozilla technology is basically a cross-platform app-building framework with one of the 'apps' being a browser. Somewhat uno…

> Somewhat unobviously, this turned out not to be a great way to build a browser

It's actually great in the amount of flexibility and access it gives to 3rd-party developers to customize the browser itself. Unfortunately, the price seems to be complexity and rigidity in some critical areas (performance, embeddability).

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

#116

Post by toyg »

pcwalton wrote: post #20

As 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…

You have your cause and effect backwards. That market share was achieved in large part by ease of embedding. Google itself started the project on WebKit because it was easier to embed and manipulate than anything else, and were pretty careful to allow others to do the same one level higher up the stack (i.e. making it easy to build your own branded browser on top of Chromium).

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

#117

Post by Barrin92 »

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.

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.

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

#118

Post by [deleted] »

staticassertion wrote: post #69
ameliaquining wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the suggestion being made here is that if somebody else did that work, they might be willing to merge it into their tree.

Has Mozilla showed any reason to bet on them in the last decade? It seems like leadership is happy to sink the company and take bonuses paid for by donations along the way. I'd rather see a new player in the space. I have no confidence in Mozilla.

[deleted]

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

#119

Post by daoismyname »

Barrin92 wrote: post #117
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.

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 at Firefox suck (which they do not)

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

#120

Post by frankjr »

sanxiyn wrote: post #100
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…

MongoDB embeds SpiderMonkey. Embeddability of SpiderMonkey is fine. It is Gecko that is the problem.

Interestingly, MongoDB switched from SpiderMonkey to V8 only to switch back a few releases later.

https://engineering.mongodb.com/post/code-generating-away-th...

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