Why are there many hundred Chromium based browsers, but seemingly very few Firefox based browsers?

Comments

• Izzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Your searching on this may be skewed due to Firefox not being the equivalent of Chromium. Firefox is not actually the browser engine. Firefox is based on the browser engine called Gecko. There are actually a number of other Gecko based browsers they just aren’t very popular or are for niche use-cases.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)

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  • bdonvr@thelemmy.club ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Well sure, but I don’t think it changes my question much. There’s still so few active gecko-based browsers. And so many blink based.

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    • Izzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Chromium is likely more popular because Google has such a stranglehold over the development of new internet standards. They set standards and then implement them into Chromium perfectly which tends to make Chrome really well optimized and fast.

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    • neuromancer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      [deleted]

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  • matricaria@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Isn’t Safari Gecko-based? Safari has a huge market share.

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    • reddit_sux@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Safari is webkit based. Which was also the basis for chromium, but it has diverted a lot from it. Other webkit based browsers are gnome web, KDE konqueror.

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• ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A popular misconception is that Firefox runs Gecko. And while that is kinda true, the real problem is much more interesting when you come down to the technical details.

  Because it’s the other way around. Firefox doesn’t run Gecko, Gecko runs Firefox. Firefox is built in Gecko. In a similar vein, Thunderbird also runs inside Gecko. It’s why they look so similar despite one being a browser and the other being an email client. Gecko is, in a way, a proto-Electron.

  You cannot “rip off” Gecko from Firefox and embed it inside something like you can do with Blink/Chromium (unless you’re on Android and use GeckoView), which means the only way to have a “Firefox based browser” is to fork the entirety of Firefox. There are forks like the TBB or Librewolf that do this, but the embeddability of Chromium makes it much easier for devs to make something that diverges from Chromium in major ways (stuff like Qutebrowser, for example)

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  • Aux@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You actually could use standalone Gecko back in the days, but Mozilla closed the project and made everything tightly integrated.

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  • Hextic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    🏅

    Actually didn’t know that but makes perfect sense.

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  • rayman30@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    TIL :)

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  • 0x4E4F@lemmy.rollenspiel.monster ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Or Vivaldi.

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• cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A while ago, gecko was such a mess to use that very few projects dared to. At some point, chromium showed up and it’s the easiest thing to bundle anywhere. This probably led to a lot of the current situation.

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• rumbleran@suppo.fi ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The engine used by Chromium (Blink) is easier to use for programmers, since it’s designed to be “embeddable” from the start when it was still known as KHTML. Engine used by Firefox (Gecko) is only kind of embeddable as the Mozilla developers haven’t paid much attention for that a long time, which makes it more difficult to use in your own browser that you develop.

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• Matriks404@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Why would we need any Firefox-based browser that isn’t Firefox?

  Customize it a bit, and it works perfectly fine.

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  • PlexSheep@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Same thing with chromium, that didn’t stop the clones.

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    • tristar@lemmyfly.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      For what it’s worth Brave does extend the base Chromium functionality quite a bit. No idea why they couldn’t have done it with FF/Gecko though.

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• schwim@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  People fork what’s what they’re using and what’s popular. Chromium has the vast majority of the market share so it’s most likely to get modified and reused.

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• reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Google docs compatibility. And now Office 365, since Edge switch to the same rendering engine.

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  • over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Google Docs works just fine on Firefox

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    • reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Doesn’t matter. IT departments everywhere will just mandate Chrome use for compatibility.

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    • ChatGPT@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Copy and paste is restricted to keyboard commands last time I tried plus if I’m managing an IT department I want near certainty that O365 or GSUITE will work with every update and patch Chrome and Edge basically guarantee that while Firefox’s development team lack the ability to see future changes to the software and have less motivation to do so as it’s not their product.

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• KeisukeTakatou@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Also more extentions. Both do more or less have the essential ones though.

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