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Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Then they could have chosen WebKit.

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

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.

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