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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> Electron, WebKit, nope.

Electron uses Chromium. Which uses Blink, not WebKit.

Blink is a fork of WebKit.

It is a fork started a decade ago, hence not the same thing. Just like Webkit is not the same as KHTML, which it forked.

Well the worst part of Firefox is arguably Gecko.

If one could make a browser with Firefox's backend and instead render with Blink that would be pretty dope.

> a browser with Firefox's backend and instead render with Blink

Gecko is Firefox's "backend" ...

Isn't it just the rendering engine? There's more to a browser than just laying out html.

A browser is not a web app, it doesn't have a strict separation of "frontend" and "backend" in the same sense that a web app would have; the lines are drawn quite differently. The rendering engine is never "just" the rendering engine; you can't abstract or swap it without tremendous effort.

If you'd like to learn more about how a web browser project would organize its internal architecture, but are discouraged by the complexity of Chromium, Firefox, etc. I'd recommend source diving Ladybird (https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird), NetSurf (https://www.netsurf-browser.org/), or Dillo (https://www.dillo.org/).

Too bad Mozilla gave up on Servo.

Servo was a working prototype to try out the rendering changes and Rust. Those changes are being / have been integrated into Firefox.

It is Blink which drives the monoculture more than Chrome/Chromium since it is there that standards are made or broken (or flouted). What is needed is competition in this space, a new browser 'engine' to compete with Blink (Chrome/Chromium/Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc.), Gecko (Firefox/Seamonkey/etc) and Webkit (Safari/Epiphany/anything on iThings).

Maybe Servo can be rescued from oblivion? Get Mozilla to dump their activist-CEO (who is more concerned with her own remuneration and virtue signalling than with the development of their core product), use the funds thus saved to hire back all those developers which were let go under her reign and get Servo back on track. Blink is the one layout engine to rule them all after all...

   Ash Blink durbatulûk
   ash Blink gimbatul,
   Ash Blink thrakatulûk
   agh Google-ishi krimpatul

> standards are made or broken (or flaunted)

I think you may have meant "flouted" there? Though sometimes flaunting a standard might also be a thing.

Yes, corrected, flouted it shall be.

Yeah, let's feed the monopoly! Surely a good way to get better products.

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