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Comment by techsupporter | Hacker News Reader

I wish they had thrown in with helping Firefox instead of handing even more web influence over to Google. A percentage of what Microsoft spent on EdgeHTML contributed to the Firefox project—ideally as employee time—would go a long way, along with the counterbalance of putting the Firefox engine and code base front and center of more Windows users.

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Sadly Chromium is WAYYYY easier to development on than Firefox. Had Mozilla spent effort making the base of it as a framework in the same way Chromium is, they may have considered it.

There is a reason why Electron, QT etc use Chromium.

Curious, what makes Chromium better in your opinion? I have probably just touched the surface of the dev tools on both and haven‘t used any features that I would be missing on either.

It's a blank browser, has barely any "Google" specific stuff in it ready to go. It is easy to develop for, doesn't require cross language compiling (rust/c++), builds fast, easy to understand how the different parts work (at least for a browser developer it should be), has documentation, is meant to be used to develop your own browser.

Are you sure Chromium builds fast? lol, it takes my laptop with 12 cores and 64gb of ram over an hour to compile from scratch, not counting the ~20gb of git history to download (I maintain an internal build at work).

Well lol it is a rather complex piece of software, so maybe take that one back.

Firefox is comparable in that department.

Having compiled both: it's not. On the same hardware, Firefox takes ~4x less time to compile than Chromium for me...

Which platform were you compiling on, and when? It's been some years now, but Chromium used to build with MSVC on Windows.

I worked on both, it's no comparison. Firefox builds in about 40min on my macbook pro, Chromium takes like 4 hours?

I can't even get Chromium to build on my MacBook Pro, so there's that. (15-inch, 2018, 16GB RAM)

What magic are you using to be able to build Chromium?

AFAIK you'd need to limit the compiler threads, and hopefully the linker doesn't run out of memory. 16GiB of memory is really not enough.

Limiting the threads as somebody elses said. For chromium no one really builds it on a laptop, everyone in my team used a build server or a 32 core monster desktop.

Sometime in the last 6 months, on Mac and Linux both.

I was just thinking, "Why isn't there an Electron for Firefox?"

They worked on it a bit [0] but it has been abandoned along with all the other embedding efforts over time. As someone who embeds Chromium (via CEF) only because it's easy, I would really appreciate (and have been shouting into the wind about) focus on the embeddability of Gecko.

0 - https://github.com/mozilla/positron

Long before positron (and electron) there was XULrunner.

I have a feeling this might change once Firefox is either entirely written in Rust, or mostly written in Rust.

Why?

A lot of legacy code is being removed. As this happens the codebase will be reworked with contributors in mind.

Kind of a shame.. There are a few areas where FireFox absolutely smokes Chrome. The way it reflows some heavy DOMs interactively is almost magical in comparison.

Then they could have chosen WebKit.

I get the Electron reason...it just sucks.

I suspect that their work in using Electron for things like VSCode made switching Edge over to Blink more enticing. I wonder if they ever considered looking at the Mozilla frameworks

Unfortunately historically there was a history of Mozilla not being a very stable platform to develop on top of (though I have no idea if Chromium was worse). There had been at least two separate embedding APIs that have been abandoned (the original one in the ActiveX control era and the external one after they moved to Hg), at least three Electron-like things (prism, XULRunner, and positron), and the field of corpses of Mozilla-based apps (I've worked for two, there were lots more).

Maybe they're better at API backwards compatibility now? Not sure; I'm unlikely to try again given previous experience. Which is a shame; I still use Firefox since it was called Phoenix…

If anybody has more recent experience working on their stack, I'd be happy to be correctly though. Preferably with examples of projects that _haven't_ been burned.

Interesting, I thought FF being a XUL app should've been easier to customize.

I don't think FF is using XUL anymore or at least not as much as they used to.

Even their docs for XUL shows it all as archived:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...

Firefox is actively moving away from XUL.

I thought they finished that recently when they announced the UI was no longer XUL based. Is there still more work to go?

I guess they are moving towards web standards? (like Vivaldi). I don't think they will ditch XUL in favor of native (C++) tech.

AFAIK Pale Moon and Basilisk are the only XUL-based browsers left.

https://www.palemoon.org/

https://www.basilisk-browser.org/

Cynical thought: in no way am I claiming this was the only reason for Microsoft choosing Blink, but it’s probably easier to find and replace Google analytics APIs with Microsoft endpoints than it is to add them into a code base after the fact.

Can you link to a Google Analytics API call in Chromium? It's OSS.

Edit: Chromium connects to Google servers to update extensions and for captive portal detection. Firefox does pretty much the same.

Search for UMA metrics.

Firefox does something similar, but calls it Firefox Health Reports. See https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/fhr-faq/

(note that I think there's nothing wrong with this at all, just pointing out that this isn't chromium-specific)

Chromium is not the same as Google Chrome. Chromium is open source and vendor neutral. Google Chrome adds the Google stuff on top of it.

Both chromium and Firefox can be customized and vendor branded (see the countless privacy oriented browsers built on top of Firefox).

> Chromium is...vendor neutral.

That's pretty misleading. When you want to sync state across Chromium installs, you use a Google account, and that's really just scratching the surface.

Chromium comes with quite a bit of Google baked-in.

Chromium still has Google endpoints.

Iridium was developed specifically to degoogle all attempts at phoning home.

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