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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

Chromium is an open source project, and we should treat it like one. Google paid for most of its development, but were able to pay many open source developers less because they were excited about working on an open source project (see the thread about compensation on today's Ask HN post about working for startups). Ditto for Android. Nobody should be shy about forking these projects. We don't owe Google for them, beyond what the license says. Fair is fair.

If we can treat Chromium like an open source project, maybe we can retire Firefox.

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Excuse me?

I love Firefox. I don't want it to retire and why would you want to limit choices for other people?

Also how do you make the case that Chromium can survive without Google continuous investment in Chrome?

Mozilla got money to continue Firefox to give competition. People can say whatever they want but Firefox is a good browser and the company have made many good moves to make the internet a good and open place where as others have attacked it. To tell a company to retire it main product that bring it money is beyond reason. Especially a company that aren't doing any harm to anybody.

I'm exaggerating by saying "retire". I don't mean getting rid of it - major open source projects always live on. If things are as dire as this article, my experience trying to switch back to Firefox, and the "Through the Looking Glass" adware extension debacle suggest, a solid independent open source alternative could allow it to keep going where it unfortunately seems to be headed.

Chromium is terrible for the BSDs, though - it requires something like 300 patches to build: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/tree/master/www/chr...

Mozilla, unlike Google, is not hostile to the idea of receiving patches from BSDs.

You know why those patches haven't been upstreamed? Is the chromium project refusing to take the patches?

Some of us love Firefox and do not want webkit hegemony, even if it is open source.

It’s not even WebKit anymore.

IF that was true, then perhaps more effort should be directed towards making Gecko a drop in engine?

The big "benefit" of webkit is that it is a engine without the whole "browser" thing tagging along.

But the last time i poked at getting gecko to stand on its own, albeit some time ago, it involved grabbing Firefox and giving it some configure (or whatever that python thing that is masking as configure that Mozilla is using these days) options to have it barf out only Gecko.

I think they're working on servo for that. It'll be able to be dropped in place of Chromium: it'll support the same API.

Or so I remember.

Just from the usability and performance characteristics alone, I'd rather retire Chromium than Firefox.

Firefox is more usable and performs better than Chrome? You can’t be serious…

It definitely does. Chrome is borderline unusable on 8GB RAM - more than a few tabs open make it go into swap hell, while Firefox works well with thousands (Chrome doesn't even have the concept of unloading open tabs!). Also, you can't even disable tab shrinking in Chrome, let alone move tabs to the left border of the window, as I do with Firefox. This results in an UI that's practically unusable with the only way to navigate the tabs being the mouse wheel.

Chromium used to perform visibly better than Firefox with somewhere around one to five tabs open, so sometimes, if I didn't have the browser running and didn't want its full session to load, I've started Chromium just to quickly check one URL - however, recent versions of Firefox made it comparable in such cases, so the only use case for Chromium I have now is to deal with badly coded websites that assume it's the only browser out there.

I’m sure they have telemetry and know that almost nobody leaves hundreds of tabs open.

When you tell me you open thousands of tabs, I wonder if you’re just stress testing the browser. I expect software not to work well when I stress test it.

I'm sure nobody leaves them open with Chromium as it's impossible.

My common browser usage is to have low hundreds of tabs open - right now it's a bit higher than usual, 1086, although it's not the record. It's just regular browsing, topic research, some social media and stuff left for later. Works well - under Firefox with Tab Center Redux, that is. I've tried switching to Chromium in the past, when Firefox used to be visibly slower, but I've never could use it for longer, always went back to Firefox as Chromium's UX was horrible. With recent versions, I don't even feel the need to check out Chromium ever again.

I think this is dependent on many factors. Right now I'm on a laptop with 8GB of RAM, I have a VMWare VM running locally taking up 3GB of RAM, and Chrome with 6 tabs open. Yes, I'm getting near swap territory, but everything is cruising along nicely...

>Chrome is borderline unusable on 8GB RAM - more than a few tabs open make it go into swap hell,

I'm currently using Chrome on a 4GB system with 10 tabs open with no performance issues or fans screaming. To claim that Chrome is borderline unusable on 8GB of RAM is a lie.

> is a lie

Or maybe people have different standards/expectations?

It has been for a while now. In particular, it has been since they started going all-in on Quantum from FF 57.

Firefox is an OSS product, and has been around longer than Chromium. Why not "treat it like open source" too and contribute?

Because I agree with Theo de Raadt.

I don't supposed you'd like to expand on that response for my personal edification, would you?

It would still be terrible for the web, as a standard, to have less diversity. Chrome+chromium barely count as diversity since the standard-related code (rendering, js engine, layout, etc) is identical.

That, and Chrome tends to make some hardline, opinionated changes that aren't reciprocated by other browsers. "It works in Edge and Firefox, but it's broken in Chrome" is a a fairly common thing to hear where I work.

This includes things like weird rendering bugs, and extra "Chrome-only" features.

Amusingly, as of last week, Chrome Experiments worked fine in Edge and Firefox, but was broken in Chrome. Because of Chrome's opinionated, built in whitelisting for media content forgot to include the Chrome Experiments domain name.

Yikes. It's starting to sound a lot like old IE.

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