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Comment by mactunes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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