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

  • krdo@lmmy.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    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

    • American_Jesus@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • YMS@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • ayaya@lemdro.id
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Unless I’m missing something it seems like Chromium still wins in the vast majority of tests, some by over double or even triple the speed/score.

          • foo@withachanceof.com
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Looks roughly 50/50 Chrome vs. Firefox for most of those, or a tie, to me. But looking at the Y axis for many of the test is there really a significant day-to-day difference between an execution time of 150ms and 160ms? As far as the average user is concerned, Firefox’s performance matches that of Chrome’s.

            • ayaya@lemdro.id
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              I am looking at the Linux benchmarks because that is what I use. I count 11-4 in favor of Chrome and/or V8 with one that’s a tie. For the record I use LibreWolf which is based on Firefox, but it is definitely noticeably slower in my experience.

              This is somewhat beside the point but I’d argue there’s not even a reason to use Firefox on Windows so those benchmarks are irrelevant entirely. If you’re not willing to move away from Windows (a near-monopoly that collects your data) what is the point of moving away from Chrome (a near-monopoly that collects your data). It’s extremely half-assed.

            • ayaya@lemdro.id
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              I am looking at the Linux benchmarks because that is what I use. I count 11-4 in favor of Chrome and/or V8 with one that’s a tie. For the record I use LibreWolf which is based on Firefox, but it is definitely noticeably slower in my experience.

              This is somewhat beside the point but I’d argue there’s not even a reason to use Firefox on Windows so those benchmarks are irrelevant entirely. If you’re not willing to move away from Windows (a near-monopoly that collects your data) what is the point of moving away from Chrome (a near-monopoly that collects your data). It’s extremely half-assed.

              • snowe@programming.dev
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                0
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                there are options besides windows and linux. I only use windows for gaming, mac for everything else besides server infra. but yeah I guess if you’re looking at linux you’re going to be looking at different browsers than the majority of people. as to why you would want to move away from chrome and not windows, there’s plenty of reasons. It seems pointless to argue that here though, as you seem to think it’s an all or nothing.

  • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    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@lemm.eeOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year 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! ^^

  • red@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

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

  • hitwright@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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

  • ratman150@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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”