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Firefox is not based on the chromium codebase, it is older.

Well if we're talking ancestors that's technically true, but not by that much - Firefox comes from Netscape, Chrome/Safari/... come from KHTML.

> ... on August 16, 1999 that [Lars Knoll] had checked in what amounted to a complete rewrite of the KHTML library—changing KHTML to use the standard W3C DOM as its internal document representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML#Re-write_and_improvement

> In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for its popular Netscape Communicator suite under an open source license. The name of the application developed from this would be Mozilla, coordinated by the newly created Mozilla Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite#Hist...

Netscape Communicator (or Netscape 4) was released in 1997, so If we are tracing lineage, I'd say Firefox has a 2 year head start.

AFAIR, KHTML was/is not related to Netscape/Gecko in any way.

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