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Why no projects use Firefox as a base and prefer Chromium instead? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Before you come at me with stuff like Librewolf, Waterfox and IceCat; those don't count. They are just tweaked Firefox distros with mostly basic low level changes. Not every Chromium browser is super unique either, but I feel like there are more differences between them then there are with Firefox distros. Why is that? Why there aren't different browsers that use Firefox's engines but provide a different UX?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

This is probably not an answer to your question but apple faced such a decision 20 years ago already...and picked khtml/kjs over the firefox engine gecko back then because:

When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects.

...

...How did we do it? As you know, KJS is very portable and independent...

( https://marc.info/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197092318639&w=2 ) (Sorry, it's a long time ago, best post I could still find from that time..but why they picked khtml over gecko was discussed extensively back then)

Of course I have no real clue (and firefox changed the engine in the meantime) but a project based on a portable library in the first place then forked into chrome/blink might have something to do with people finding it easier to integrate in their solutions than an engine specifically written for a single browser.

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

Yeah, I have heard before that one reason is Chromium being more modular.

I also assume Google put somewhat of a focus on that, after Node.js chose Chromium as a base. If I remember correctly, it was initially not possible to run Node.js in a headless mode, which it is now.

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

So the Chromium is more modular, I always guessed that it was but not certain. Thank you for your answer

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

These days, yeah, I'm pretty sure that it is. One of the stated goals of Servo was that it should have a well-defined API to allow embedding into Node.js and similar.

But a few years ago, when people started embedding browsers into everything, that difference might've been less big between Firefox and Chromium.
So, maybe there was another motivation, for example Chromium's JavaScript engine had much better performance around that time, which might've been rather important to Node.js.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Not. Google put effort in making WebKit less modular in blink. In WebKit you can chose the renderer, while in blink you ate stuck with skia.

Blink is a black box widget you van interact only via we extensions API. WebKit is a set of libs you can meddle with.

For instance, there is no way to render a web page to a PNG file in blink, while it's trivial with WebKit.

EDIT Alas, the first chromium was WebKit with the js engine replaced by V8. Not sure if you can chance blink js engine.

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

So the portability is a factor, understood. Thank you for takig the time to answer.

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

I would say so..but please don't take my word for it. It's really not like I have a clue. It's just what I gathered.