this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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[–] [email protected] 189 points 1 year ago (6 children)

A popular misconception is that Firefox runs Gecko. And while that is kinda true, the real problem is much more interesting when you come down to the technical details.

Because it's the other way around. Firefox doesn't run Gecko, Gecko runs Firefox. Firefox is built in Gecko. In a similar vein, Thunderbird also runs inside Gecko. It's why they look so similar despite one being a browser and the other being an email client. Gecko is, in a way, a proto-Electron.

You cannot "rip off" Gecko from Firefox and embed it inside something like you can do with Blink/Chromium (unless you're on Android and use GeckoView), which means the only way to have a "Firefox based browser" is to fork the entirety of Firefox. There are forks like the TBB or Librewolf that do this, but the embeddability of Chromium makes it much easier for devs to make something that diverges from Chromium in major ways (stuff like Qutebrowser, for example)

[–] Aux 36 points 1 year ago

You actually could use standalone Gecko back in the days, but Mozilla closed the project and made everything tightly integrated.

[–] Hextic 7 points 1 year ago

🏅

Actually didn't know that but makes perfect sense.

[–] rayman30 7 points 1 year ago
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[–] Izzy 176 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Your searching on this may be skewed due to Firefox not being the equivalent of Chromium. Firefox is not actually the browser engine. Firefox is based on the browser engine called Gecko which is developed by Mozilla. There are actually a number of other Gecko based browsers they just aren't very popular or are for niche use-cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Well sure, but I don't think it changes my question much. There's still so few active gecko-based browsers. And so many blink based.

[–] Izzy 76 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Chromium is likely more popular because Google has such a stranglehold over the development of new internet standards. They set standards and then implement them into Chromium perfectly which tends to make Chrome really well optimized and fast.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Doesn't work forever though. Used to be the same with Microsoft and Internet Explorer, but better things came along that were less terrible and not controlled by a single tech company throwing their weight around to push their own standards.

It'll happen again if Google restricts the extension store much more though. They've been attacking ad and privacy extensions for years

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

"leaks" about Google blocking ad blockers got me to switch to Firefox in October last year. Was worth the risk. Took the time to also leave googles password manager and switch to bitwarden as well.

[–] over_clox 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are still websites that work on basic HTML 1.1, even under Windows 3.11 and Internet Explorer 5.

That whole 'nothing lasts forever' thing isn't because the changing internet standards, it's because companies and websites choose to adopt those standards rather than stick with backwards compatibility.

Granted yes, a lot of it has to do with security, Google's pocketbook security by shoving ads in our faces...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That whole 'nothing lasts forever' thing isn't because the changing internet standards, it's because companies and websites choose to adopt those standards rather than stick with backwards compatibility.

That won't stand true with Google I'm afraid. They adapt quickly. Meta is probably quicker than them, but doesn't have the user base Google has, so it really can't dictate that much.

[–] over_clox 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hardly care anymore myself. I'm learning more and more about the de-googled internet and finding myself with even more options, like anonymous, shared, unlimited, protected cloud storage capacity that even works from IE5 in HTML1.1

Yes it's a series of hacks, not your everyday approach, but I'm doing my part to keep the old internet ticking and archived as best as I can, with terabytes of data archived and accessible even on ancient potatoes.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

As long as chrome is the default option on every or almost every android smartphone chrome will have the majority marketshare. People always mostly use the default.

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[–] cley_faye 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A while ago, gecko was such a mess to use that very few projects dared to use it. At some point, chromium showed up and it's the easiest thing to bundle anywhere. This probably led to a lot of the current situation.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago

Gecko (the engine that Firefox uses) isn't really meant to be embedded, and Mozilla stopped supporting that usecase a while ago. It's more like you have to design your app around Gecko, with XUL, which essentially makes Gecko both a browser engine and a UI toolkit.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

The engine used by Chromium (Blink) is easier to use for programmers, since it's designed to be "embeddable" from the start when it was still known as KHTML. Engine used by Firefox (Gecko) is only kind of embeddable as the Mozilla developers haven't paid much attention for that a long time, which makes it more difficult to use in your own browser that you develop.

[–] Tippon 27 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Another reason on top of what's been mentioned already (although probably minor), is that out of the box, Firefox doesn't let you run multiple instances.

I've been learning to write a web app and updating websites, so have been using PortableApps to launch a second instance of Chrome to double check how everything looks when I'm not logged in. I tried switching to Firefox, but it wouldn't let me open the second instance, meaning that every time I wanted to check the site, I'd have to log out. I check them in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

I might be a niche case, but I'm already finding it really annoying. I can't imagine how much more frustrating it would be to try to write a browser that can't run at the same time as your preferred browser.

[–] aaaa 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wouldn't a private window allow exactly the specific thing you want to test?

[–] Tippon 4 points 1 year ago

In all honesty, I didn't think of that 🙈

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago

Container tabs, bro.

[–] asparagapple 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you just want a separate session, container tabs will do. No need to create a new profile.

For Chrome, you can also just create a new profile.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Would container tabs work for you to test the site in a clean environment?

[–] Tippon 8 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure to be honest, I'm still new to container tabs. I'll give it a try in the morning, thanks 🙂

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[–] Postcard64 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can do this, actually. Just create new profiles. It's not very user friendly, but can definitely be done, from what I understood from your usecase.

[–] Tippon 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the reply :)

The PortableApps version is a separate installation of the program, so Firefox in this case, that's self contained so that it can be used on multiple computers from a removable device. The default profile should be completely unrelated to the fully installed Firefox's profile.

I've tried it on Linux too with an AppImage, but get the same result.

[–] Postcard64 3 points 1 year ago

I see. Maybe the PortableApps Firefox hides profiles from the user... Either way, the other comments mention containers, which are actually even more friendly than profiles. Hope you find something that works for you!

[–] yogurt 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In the Firefox Portableapps folder you have to copy other/source/firefoxportable.ini into the top level folder with firefoxportable.exe, and then edit it to allowmultipleinstances=true.

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[–] Matriks404 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why would we need any Firefox-based browser that isn't Firefox?

Customize it a bit, and it works perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same thing with chromium, that didn't stop the clones.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

For what it's worth Brave and Opera do extend the base Chromium functionality quite a bit. No idea why they couldn't have done it with FF/Gecko though.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Google has more resources than Mozilla, and Chrome has long been the most popular browser so it's not surprising others would want a piece of that pie.

[–] schwim 4 points 1 year ago

People fork what's what they're using and what's popular. Chromium has the vast majority of the market share so it's most likely to get modified and reused.

[–] kratoz29 3 points 1 year ago

I have no idea, but I can almost tell you Chromium kills old macOS and I am sick of it (I suffer from this bug too).

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