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Comment by yedpodtrzitko | Hacker News Reader

A brave claim from someone who adopted Google's browser engine, which goes hand in hand with their monopoly they complain about.

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You mean the one Google forked from Apple's WebKit, forked from KHTML? Stop the ritual impurity / genetic fallacy. The issue is not code provenance, it's web compatibility and the incremental fork costs.

Hoist Google on their own petard. It'd serve them right if the open source they contributed to helped speed a correction of the state of the web.

The issue is to not create a tower of Babel that can only be rendered by one specific piece of convoluted software.

I can see that being an issue if the web is centralising around one proprietary engine, but why does that apply to Blink? If Google turns completely evil that won't take away from all the webcompat, optimisations, and security in Blink, and any bad feature (ManifestV3) can be patched out easily. Mozilla could switch to Blink (and I think they should, and Apple too, they clearly don't have the manpower to maintain a whole engine and keep it modern and secure, see my other comment in this thread; there are many more 0days with Safari and Firefox than Chrome) and it wouldn't harm the web in any way, because they can just swap out bad components with their own, and still reduce their dev time requirements by orders of magnitude compared to today. You have Intel, Samsung, tons of companies contributing to Blink, to a much, much greater extent than Gecko or WebKit.

If every browser switched to Blink, that would actually benefit consumers, because right now Chrome basically has the enterprise market on lock, since nobody cares to test internal webpages on other browsers, and Chrome has better enterprise features (though I don't know how much of that is to do with the engine); and many consumers also just switch to Chrome as the first thing they do, because they've run into compatibility issues with Firefox or Safari and they just want to access the web without issues. If every browser used Blink, you'd have a lot more people using Safari and Firefox, just because most people don't want to keep two browsers around (Firefox + Chrome or Safari + Chrome) when websites break (which is not often, but often enough, trust me). I really hope we see this.

Serious question:

What specifically made you switch from gecko to chromium in the Brave browser? I know compatibly with modern web apps is frequently cited as the reason but using FF as my daily driver I never run into any issues.

Was it easier to develop BAT integration and the custom ad/tracking blockers?

I'm glad they switched to Blink, and I hope TorBrowser switches too. Blink is more secure and modern than Gecko. Brave still wouldn't have site isolation, an important security feature, if they stuck with Gecko. Whether due to bad priorities or lack of funding, Firefox is just really falling behind, but in many cases, in ways that aren't easily apparent. Sure, websites load, but Firefox didn't have sandboxing until (2017? I think), which Chrome had since 2008. It's not really defensible for a web browser with such a big attack surface. And Firefox today is still pretty far behind in security, to the point where even if I valued Mozilla and thought Firefox was the best browser ever, I still wouldn't use it and wouldn't recommend anyone else use it.

Bashing Gecko security in such ways is dishonest. Did you ever actually look at their architecture or do you just parrot a lazy blog post?

The real problem here is browser ever increasing scope. I never cared for VR or gaming in browsers. SPAs are user unfriendly garbage that I seldom see used for anything else than preventing user agency.

I don't think it's dishonest. It's easy to find areas where Chrome is ahead, and I haven't found one area (in security) where Firefox is ahead.

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...

If you ask most browser exploit researchers, this would probably be pretty much a consensus view. Very few of them that I know use Firefox.

> The real problem here is browser ever increasing scope. I never cared for VR or gaming in browsers. SPAs are user unfriendly garbage that I seldom see used for anything else than preventing user agency.

I don't care what Mozilla or the Safari team think I should be allowed to do in a web browser, I want to have the option of doing practically anything. I'm glad I can play Cyberpunk 2077 in a browser, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to, period (I don't have Windows). People complain that the web's prominence means every app uses Electron nowadays, but I'm glad I can run anything on Linux or Mac, and the "development costs" argument that kept apps Windows-only no longer applies. The web saved the desktop, it didn't ruin it. I view Google's Chrome web app push in the same vein as Steam's Proton. Decreased reliance on just 2 big, somewhat-dysfunctional vendors (Apple & Microsoft), to not be locked into a declining ecosystem.

There were a ton of issues using Gecko, starting with (at the time) no CDM (HTML5 DRM module) so no HD video content from the major studios, Netflix, Amazon, etc. -- Firefox had an Adobe deal but it was not transferable or transferred to any other browser that used Gecko -- and running the gamut of paper-cuts to major web incompatibilities especially on mobile, vs. WebKit-lineage engines such as Chromium/Blink.

> who adopted Google's browser engine

I'd love to see a "from scratch" Chrome competitor, but man, that would be expensive to put together.

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