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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] 15 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago (1 children)

It would be nice if Mozilla could make a project similar to Chromium Embedded Framework, in order to integrate the Gecko engine in apps (because currently Blink and V8 are used and the truth is that the performance is not very good) and even in game consoles Gecko could get a good market share. Servo was an step in the right direction.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago

For Android there is https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/. I don't know if there is anything similar on desktop.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago

There is still an effort going on in the Sailfish OS web browser to separate the UI from the core browser. But they're still about 18 versions behind the current Firefox version. The README of the project contains some link to useful resources about how it works.

Embedding chromium/webkit is just way easier. I honestly wonder why SailfishOS went that route. Maybe it's a continuation of some legacy project form Maemo/MeeGo?

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

I wonder if this is significantly different with Servo. Servo isn't really ready for as far as I can tell, but in a couple years it might be. (If there's some kind of significant volunteer effort, given Mozilla fired everyone working on it.)

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

I've already seen a company announcing a product that sounded a lot like Servo. But it was targeted for embedded use, so something where a limited number of supported webpages may be perfectly fine.

Actually implementing all of the web standards into Servo, that's just not going to happen. Mozilla and Google already struggle to keep up with web standards in Firefox and Chrome, and those have more than two decades of a headstart.

That's also why Mozilla ran Servo as a research project. They used it to explore a modern architecture, much of which they were able to retrofit into Firefox, but they didn't work much on web standards.
And yeah, when finances run thin, research projects are among the first things to go.

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

Servo is now funded by Linux Foundation.

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

That was my guess too, apparently I was right. Thank you for taking the time to answer :)