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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

forgive my ignorance, but why are these browsers based on chromium only? cant they build on firefox codebase just like palemoon and basilisk, waterfox, seamonkey, iceweasel?

if these small browsers can be working products with bare minimum staff, why cant vivaldi or opera or whatever do the same? is it because of "oh, firefox bad" thing ? or something else?

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Vivaldi had a blog post recently that touched on this tangentially.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-vs-google-chrome/

> At the time, we found that the Chromium engine was secure and the most widely used – that was important to us. Moreover, Chromium was becoming the de facto web standard meaning that if we wanted web pages to not break, we’d have to fork Chromium.

I'll also observe that they made this decision around or before the time that Mozilla started oxidizing Firefox. So at the time, there was a lot of code churn, into an at-the-time unproven language, and the benefits had not materialized yet. If they were to start over now instead of then, the decision might be different.

They'd basically have to fork Firefox. There isn't a clear distinction between the engine and the browser. They had an embedding API at one point but dropped it because the design made it hard to evolve both.

This is on top of people wanting quick market share which requires compatibility with the "big player" :(

uh,, arent these big players usually just reskinned chromiums only? whats giving them an advantage in terms of market share?

The point is that reskinning Firefox is pretty difficult because there's no stable API between the "skin" and underlying engine. Firefox used to have an option for embedding Gecko, but it's no longer maintained.

I asked this once, and people told me it had something to do with firefox being a PITA to compile, among other things

"'Oh, Firefox bad' thing"?

You mean the fact that their security is atrocious in comparison?

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