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Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

I mean, they all use webkit, so not really that much different from using chromium.

You'd think so (I know I did!), but I was floored the first time I started up Xombrero and saw that with only one tab, it used less than a sixth of the memory that Chromium uses. Xombrero has quickly become my favorite browser, though I only used it in the first place because I couldn't get any other browser that both 1) was not sludge on the Raspberry Pi, and 2) supports the modern Web (HTML5, CSS3, JS, ...).

It's not perfect by any means, but it is now my favorite :)

Chromium doesn't use webkit, it uses Blink.

Until a few years ago, Chromium was built on top of WebKit, then had a falling out with Apple / Safari and we got Blink.

Blink is a fork of WebKit and is still largely the same.

Depends on what you are counting as the "same".

Edge put together a really great visualization of the API surface of all the browsers. - https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor... The API surface (and bug surface) is actually pretty different these days.

Internally Blink and WebKit are also diverging reasonably rapidly. As a specific example here is the project to re-architect how blink does it's painting: https://www.chromium.org/blink/slimming-paint

EDIT: spelling

More and more it feels that corporations have discovered that with FOSS, those that do the work get to define the standard. And thus they throw manhours upon manhours of churn at whatever market segment they hope to control.

> More and more it feels that corporations have discovered that with FOSS, those that do the work get to define the standard

Not quite - those that employ the maintainers define the standard, as shown multiple times by Red Hat (multiple projects) and by Apple with WebKit.

IIRC, before the Blink fork, Google was pushing more commits into WebKit compared to Apple, but there was a - let's call it a difference in perspective - on a feature a Google employee wanted to implement, someone with an @apple.com email said "no". I can't remember what the issue was, but this development unfolded on webkit mailing list.

True. But without constant churn alternative implementations of interfaces can catch up.

Blink has diverged a fair amount. There are different new features, bug fixes and optimizations.

Most things based on Chromium also use more components of the Chromium stack than just Blink. For example, in WebKit multiprocess support and sandboxing is provided at a batteries-included level. But Blink just has the hooks for it, while the actual implementation of the process architecture is done by other aspects of Chromium.

This is not to say one way is better or worse, but rather that there's significant differences between being WebKit-based vs Chromium-based.

I know that. However, factually I'm correct by saying that Chromium doesn't use webkit. It doesn't matter if it's still largely the same, what matters is that blink diverged from webkit for variety of reasons.

It's true that they use webkit (which is certainly not ideally minimalist), but even that is much lighter than using Chromium.

Not really, the Chromium content/ layer is pretty much stuff that every browser implementor using blink (or previously, WebKit) would want. See http://www.chromium.org/developers/content-module for more info.

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