this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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222
Why do most browser companies opt for a Chromium/Blink base instead of a Firefox/Gecko one? (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
37 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I mean, I like Firefox, but I'd love to see Vivaldi based on Firefox/Gecko. There's Floorp, which is similar in some ways but it's more like an Edge built on Firefox than Vivaldi.

Edit: Thank y'all for your answers. :D

I want to link !@[email protected] 's post because it is a similar quesion. https://thelemmy.club/post/718914

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The code is already prepared very well to be embedded into something. I remember trying to embed the javascript engine SpiderMonkey into a project (I needed C bindings which I then could use in Erlang). After a week or so trying and extending, etc. we gave up and tried V8 which we had running within one hour with good documentation great APIs and so on.

I myself have been Firefox user since Firefox came out but trying to embed it myself and failing I kind of get why others choose Chromium/Blink as their base.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago

Oh, I see. I had an internship last year where I developed a WebApp and I only got a slight glimpse of the differences between Blink & Gecko but even that already influenced my code so I can kinda imagine the struggle :')

Thank you for your answer! ^^

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The main reason I've heard is that chromium is far easier to embed than Gecko. Gecko isn't something you embed like a library. It's something you build upon. Detaching Gecko from Firefox UI (or Thunderbird for that matter) is supposedly really hard.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

I don't know if I'd say separating Gecko from Firefox is all that difficult. About a decade ago I worked on a project at the tail end of my internship at Mozilla to separate Gecko from Firefox Mobile. The idea being to create a sort of GeckoView Android component that could be used like a WebView component to give devs the option to embed Gecko in their app rather than (at the time) WebKit and for Firefox Mobile to become a UI wrapper around a GeckoView component as well. I only had a few weeks to work on it and in that time I had a rough proof of concept running which was an independent Android app that ran Gecko through this new GeckoView component and had a super basic UI to control it. Unfortunately being an internship project I didn't have time to take it through to completion and being the Firefox OS days at the time the team had other priorities so I don't believe it ever got fully finished. But point being is that it's not terribly difficult to separate the two; I did it as an intern in a few weeks a decade ago.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Ah, so it isn't really built do be adapted by others the way Chromium is. Well that's too bad. At least there's Floorp although I don't really have the knowledge to actually check whether their code is fine or not (as they are quite unknown yet) so I'm not so sure whether to trust them.

Anyways, thanks for your answer! :D

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 years ago

I'd imagine because they want as little compatibility issues with their product as possible so they just copy what's already popular.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

KHTML/WebKit/Blink has always been built with the intention of many browsers (or anything else that needs a rendering engine) integrating it, thus it's very easy to do so.

Gecko hasn't been built with the intention of being integrated into any browser at all. Gecko isn't integrated into FF either. You integrate the browser into Gecko, not the other way around. It's closer to building a browser in Electron than to building a browser with the Blink engine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Oh, thanks for the interesting insights :D

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I asked a similar question a week ago

https://thelemmy.club/post/718914

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Oh, thanks for linking it. Gonna read the replies you got too :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Link seems to lead to a us politics post for me rn

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

The link is fine - what client are you using? I tried to look at it on your instance and it pulled up fine.

[–] zerbey 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Chrome and its derivatives are by far the most popular browsers, it's simply easier to go with the most common for maximum compatibility.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

And that's the problem. It gives full control power to Google. That's the reason that popularity needs to be broken.

[–] zerbey 8 points 2 years ago

Yep, hence why I don't use Google browsers.

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

This is a genuine question, asked by someone willing to learn.

Why does it give control to Google to use Chromium? It’s open source? Are all the decision makers Google employees? Wouldn’t one assume that forks would occur if a decision was taken as chromium level that was detrimental to, say, Microsoft’s Edge?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Google is the maintainer and biggest contributor to chromium.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser) and they've already introduced wei into chromium without any pushback.

https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/255346/Google-is-already-pushing-WEI-DRM-Webpage-into-Chromium

There are forks of chromium already like Vivaldi. You can still use them. Unfortunately using them is not a guarantee that Google can't use their usage numbers as leverage while politicing or advertising bad behaviour to other parties like social media.

Worse yet, maintaining a fork is a huge undertaking for a project in the size of chromium. This means in time the fork may struggle to keep up. Or upstream may introduce functions that depends on the bad behaviours and the fork be forced to either adopt both, or adopt none.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Seems fair, tho 99,99% of websites are working just fine

Thank you for your answer :)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Once upon a time internet explorer dominated the web. The web bowed and catered to the jank that was internet explorer...at least until other browsers gained traction. To this day there are some websites that are only designed with internet explorer in mind.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

We can go further. Just recently I saw a website that supposedly "is best viewed full screen, 800x600 or better, in Netscape"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Link? Would love to take a trip down memory lane.

I can still remember firing up Netscape for the first time in 1994.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

fenrir.com

The only reason I stumbled upon it was because I wanted to check if the domain was available.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Do you think I'll still be able to view that website after I've time traveled to 1995 to use my Netscape? This seems like some kind of paradox.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Check local and state government websites. Its gotten way less common but a lot of them haven't seen human eyes for 20 years let alone an update.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Fair point!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

It’s now been replaced by “no message, but sort of only works with Chromium”. As a full-time Firefox user I unfortunately see an increasing trend of “not working right with FF”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

As a web dev and firefox user, I really wish more devs tested in Firefox by default. Almost always if it works in FF it works in Chrome, but that's very much not the case the other way around. I've never run into a situation where there's not an easy pre-existing solution to any compatibility issues, but you'll only know there's a problem if you actually see it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What makes floorp more like edge than vivaldi? I love floorp

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Fair point. I compared it to Edge because Floorp tries to mimic their UI, it is miles ahead of Edge when it comes to customizability tho. Maybe not as customizable as Vivaldi but it's very close.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

The jiophones and nokias with kaiOS are based on a fork of gecko, which is a common phone in rural India and goes by different names, sold and made by different companies in different regions all over the world

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Oh, interesting, thanks for the insight :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Programmers are not immune to fads or the network effect

[–] hitwright 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Gecko was pretty shit performance wise until Firefox quantum in 2017. Back then even Apple decided it's better to use webkit for it's browser.

It's difficult to say exact reasons for each browser. But for Chrome enjoying the dominant position before that, it was better to jump on Chromium as base just for better compatibility with most websites.

Tooling followed soon after

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Apple didn’t “decide it’s better to use webkit”, they MADE WebKit (from forking KDE). Back when they started WebKit Gecko was only out for a year and heavily associated with Netscape, while KDE’s was already mature

[–] hitwright 0 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the correction. This doesn't disregard my argument. Netscape codebase was bloated and underperformant. It was a bad choice for a basis for a new browser.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

Performance, long term assurance. Sorry my brain's not working RN. That's all I can think