Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently Mozilla decided it does not want donations :) Great for woke bs, not so great for actually funding and developing browser.
Where was this headline?
Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
161–170 of 191 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#162The Mozilla rendering engine (gecko) was never meant to be embedded in the same way webkit is. It changed a little with Fennec and firefox. The engine became leaner... Yet still it isn't easy to reuse. Even spidermonkey, the javascript engine, is never reused as v8. Different design priciples
>Even spidermonkey, the javascript engine, is never reused as v8.
GNOME and Cinnamon desktops use it, MongoDB uses it, polkit, etc. It's obviously not embedded nearly as much as V8 but it does have a few.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#163We had to choose between Webkit and Gecko. For us it was primarily the license, which was GPL vs MIT. Gecko was a non starter.
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Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why was GPL better than MIT?
From what I can see its actually LGPL vs MPL which are similar in end goal, of being viral when modifying and distributing the project as is, but integrating the library into an application can allow for a licence change
> of being viral when modifying and distributing the project as is
That's not what "viral" means. MPLv2 cannot "infect" your own code like the GPL can just by virtue of using the library.
The only condition is if you want to make modifications to MPLv2 licensed code files, you do have to retain the license on all contributions.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but a good browser strongly aligns with obtaining money for Google. Google has strong performance quality driven incentives. Mozilla doesn't seem to have performance driven incentives. The remaining supporters of Firefox at this point are people who are mad at tech companies/care a great deal about privacy.
There isn't some huge performance delta between the browsers, and I've already customized Firefox to my liking, why switch?
You are already using Firefox. But Firefox needs new users too.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#166On 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.
What happened on that day? Is there more historical details?
>What happened on that day? Is there more historical details?
Not the guy but a quick search pulls up a press release for that day which was the release of Firefox v4.0 and mentions the 'new' rapid release cycle. I'm assuming it was this last that they were referring to.
Link: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2011/06/21/mozilla-deliver...
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#167Brave started in 2015 on Gecko, using Graphene (FirefoxOS multiprocess/sandboxed app framework). We switched by end of year due to too many gaps (HTML5 DRM was a big one) and incompatibilities (mobile, mostly). Big spreadsheet, most rows netted out negative for Gecko. No way to change now, and a worse bet now based on Mozilla fundamentals.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#168It 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).…
> 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 all of Chrome.
Apple (along with the rest of the technical world) recognized the benefits of multi-process, but Apple wanted to ensure that literally anyone building a WebKit-based browser could gain the benefit of multi-process rendering. So they created WebKit 2 [1]:
"WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it."
In other words, Google's main technical advantage would be baked into the browser engine itself and made available for everybody.
As you can imagine, Google was less than thrilled, and the differing natures of the multi-process implementation led to duplication and complexity. So, when Google decided that supporting multiple architectures was too much work, it had a choice.
Google could do the hard work of switching Chrome's multi-process rendering to WebKit 2, which would mean a significant browser rework, but it would mean that any and all browsers derived from WebKit would have all of the same basic capabilities, and at the same level, as Chrome itself.
Or, Google could use it as an excuse to proprietize its work by forking, thus ensuring that any future stream of enhancements made to the browser would only benefit Google and Chrome instead of everybody.
In the end, Google decided that the only thing it cared about was itself:
"However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit."
So remember, when Google made a proprietary technical leap in an otherwise open source project, it was Apple, not Google, who made sure that everyone could benefit from the same technical leap. And when it became too difficult to maintain two versions, it was Google, not Apple, who forked the engine and the community in order to proprietize improvements for their own gain.
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[1] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2010-April/012... [2] https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for...
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#169Earlier 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…
Spidermonkey is quite embeddable by itself [1]. On Linux things like polkit, couchdb, mongodb use it. Still, the compilation process seems to download the whole firefox tarball and only compiles the JS related parts [2, 3]. [1] https://spidermonkey.dev [2] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/js78/ [3] https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/js78....
And the fact that polkit uses it is why debian and ubuntu use an ancient version of polkit. And fwiw, there is an effort to replace spidermonkey in polkit with something else, like duktape.
Also js78 uses the version of spidermoneky from Firefox 78. The current Firefox ESR is 91 (released in august), but I don't see any js91 package, and https://github.com/mozilla-spidermonkey/spidermonkey-embeddi... still says to use the 78 ESR. Note that ESR78 is end of life and no longer receives security updates.
And from what I understand, there is no attempt at backwards compatibility in the spidermonkey interface, so each upgrade requires a lot of changes to the embedding program.
Yes, it is possible to embed spidermonkey, but there are a lot of challenges.
Re: Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?
#170As 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).
There is a parallel universe where Gecko was always more embeddable and approachable, and Google used it as the base for Chrome.