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@thelemmy.club 's post because it is a similar quesion. https://thelemmy.club/post/718914
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 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.
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! ^^
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
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.
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.
Firefox ate my RAM joke is ridiculous. Nokia N900 has 256MB RAM. Fennec for Maemo had electrolysis (multiprocessing) turned on. In version 4. Years before the desktop Firefox. You really need to go old-school embedded for Firefox to eat your RAM.
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.
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.Faster than chrome ? Do you have any source ?
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.
Chrome wins for 4 of those graphs, Firefox wins for 7. Two are a close tie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Performance, long term assurance. Sorry my brain's not working RN. That's all I can think
I'd imagine because they want as little compatibility issues with their product as possible so they just copy what's already popular.
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.
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”
