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Comment by Braggadocious | Hacker News Reader

it's literally the same engine as chrome. the only reason i use chrome is for the dev tools.

Firefox uses the Gecko engine, while Chrome uses Blink. The engines don't even have a shared ancestor.

OP may be confusing Edge/Brave/Opera with Firefox here, so I can't really blame them for having had the impression that Firefox and Chrome share the same engine.

And in at least one regard it's entirely true: on iOS, everything uses WebKit.

“Originally” if I recall correctly, Chrome was a fork of firefox right? That is a long time ago though!

Chrome was never a fork of Firefox.

If anything, it was a fork of Konqueror.

Nope. It was a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KHTML, the engine powering Konqueror. KHTML was developed by the KDE team.

Edit: It was widely speculated that Apple would use gecko for Safari and a shock when they announced they would use the relatively little known KHTML engine. The decision was based on KHTML having much cleaner code. I haven't looked at the Mozilla code in many years, but it was pretty gnarly back then. Lots of old cruft from the Netscape days. In comparison, KHTML was beautiful.

I went looking into this, and it appears that I was confused. Google was a big contributor to Firefox in the early naughties, which is the period I was thinking of. Chrome didn't come out until a good while later.

Ken Kocienda's book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs" has more details about the Safari team's evaluation of Mozilla code and KHTML. Ken was engineer #2 on the Safari team.

Chrome started out as a fork of Safari, or at least WebKit.

Safari was never opensource

Yes, but WebKit was, and "Safari" might be more widely known as a name.

FF just got web socket inspectors so I really don't know what chrome dev tools has now. Everything about ff dev tools is better. Especially looking at css layouts.

As a web dev, I find the FF dev tools a good bit less performant, but I still try to use it always without reverting to Chrome.. The one feature I have not found in FF dev tools is Search, this is very handy for find random JavaScript on a JS heavy site.

Edit: This post prompted me to Google for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_...

Move along, nothing to see.. :-\

Also, Network full-test search is now in the Network panel

Well, I need to try the FF dev tools again, it's been about a year since I did and they were missing some critical things.

Looking good, will give it another go.

This has finally allowed me to switch. I’ve been trying to since quantum came out two years ago, but this was always a deal breaker.

Firefox is generally still a little buggier and less performance in my experience, but not so much that I want to switch back. Hopefully they can stay relevant.

CSS is better in Firefox. They also used to ship a web audio api debugger. The new scratchpad is nice too. Does 80% of what I need.

But Chromes debugger and performance analysis still is a lot more capable.

The dev tools available in the Firefox developer edition are honestly way better than chrome's in every possible way (as far as I'm concerned) recently switched myself and couldn't be happier!

Have you tried Firefox's dev tools in Firefox 71? As far as I can tell they're way better than Chrome's.

No it's not.

It's better to provide facts and references rather than just making opposing statements.

The burden of proof is for the original statement ("it's literally the same engine"), not the counter.

Yes but a blunt counterstatement doesnt make for good reading. Far better is to provide some substantiation so everyone can learn as your more highly voted siblings did!

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