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Why do most browser companies opt for a Chromium/Blink base instead of a Firefox/Gecko one?

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 !@bdonvr 's post because it is a similar quesion. thelemmy.club/post/718914

krdo ,

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.

zyratoxx OP ,
@zyratoxx@lemm.ee avatar

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

Cube6392 ,

Blink has a younger code base that’s easier to build on. Gecko has been around since the early 90s and has some ancient evils lurking deep within. At least that was the reasoning a while ago. As Mozilla has been putting a heavy emphasis on code correctness for the last few years, that may no longer be the case. Then again, momentum is a big deal, and I still see people saying the don’t want to try Firefox because its memory inefficient even though they fixed that bug almost a decade ago now and its less resource hungry and faster than chrome now

cwagner ,

At least that was the reasoning a while ago.

Not just that, but I also repeatedly read that blink is simply easier to build on, built to be used by others, while gecko is more tightly coupled with FF.

and I still see people saying the don’t want to try Firefox because its memory inefficient

It’s kinda funny, because pre-quantum, people said they used FF on lowish-memory devices. It’s only been since quantum (==Firefox 57, released in 2017) that I (with high amounts of RAM to spare) switched back to FF because before that Chrome was much faster if you had the RAM.

American_Jesus ,

Blink is a fork of WebKit wich is a fork of KHTML, KHTML exist since the '98, the codebase isn’t that younger too. Was tweaked by Apple then by Google, with some features that don’t exist on other engines.

yoz ,

Faster than chrome ? Do you have any source ?

kick_out_the_jams ,

https://www.arewefastyet.com

YMS ,
@YMS@kbin.social avatar

Blink has a younger code base that’s easier to build on. Gecko has been around since the early 90s and has some ancient evils lurking deep within.

They both are of very similar age actually. The old Netscape rendering engine originated in the early 90s, but Gecko was a rewrite from scratch that was first used in a browser in 1998.
Blink is based on KHTML which is based on khtmlw, which was written at some point in the mid-90s, but as well saw a complete rewrite in 1999.

argv_minus_one ,

The only time I ever had memory problems with Firefox was when I tried to run it on a potato. That complaint has always been bullshit.

Edit to add: The aforementioned incident was in 2010, on a machine with only 512MB of RAM. Like I said, potato. Chrome back then was somewhat more memory-efficient than Firefox, and could support three open tabs on that machine before it started thrashing, whereas Firefox would thrash with just one. Both browsers performed abysmally under such a severe RAM shortage, but Chrome was slightly less abysmal. Slightly. I seriously doubt the current version of either browser would be usable on that machine, although I don’t have it (I gave it away soon after this incident) so I can’t check.

jeena ,
@jeena@jemmy.jeena.net avatar

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.

zyratoxx OP ,
@zyratoxx@lemm.ee avatar

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! ^^

red ,

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.

mojo ,

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

sounddrill ,

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

zyratoxx OP ,
@zyratoxx@lemm.ee avatar

Oh, interesting, thanks for the insight :)

trimmerfrost ,

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

hitwright ,

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

Aatube ,
@Aatube@kbin.social avatar

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

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