Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 16, 2017 7:28 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: The Brave web browser

I find it interesting that even someone with deep knowledge of Firefox internals chose to start by forking Chromium instead of Firefox. Is the Chromium code so much easier to work with?

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 16, 2017 15:16 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (7 responses)

One of the strongest reason for using Chromium was web compatibility. Too many sites assume something related to WebKit especially on mobile.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 17, 2017 12:52 UTC (Sat) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (6 responses)

Do you have first-hand information that this was their reason?

> Too many sites assume something related to WebKit especially on mobile

I've been using Firefox for Android ever since I got my first Android phone and don't remember any issues with websites. And then there are the hordes of mobile Safari users.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 17, 2017 15:51 UTC (Sat) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

Brendan Eich (he was my boss when I worked for Mozilla few years ago) has mentioned it either it his tweets or on HN or similar.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 17, 2017 15:52 UTC (Sat) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (3 responses)

Safari is WebKit.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 23, 2017 16:25 UTC (Fri) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link] (2 responses)

> Safari is WebKit.
Safari is currently the 'Internet Explorer 6' of contemporary browsers. Someone has to be the most-quirky and least-easy to use. It's also the one from the vertically-integrated-ecosystem company.

K3n.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 23, 2017 20:01 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Safari is the new Opera; it seems to serve its users instead of third party companies, and there's a very vocal minority fanbase, but the price of admission will forever keep them a minority.

This generation's IE6 is Chromium, no room for doubt. Beneath that surface veneer it's horribly buggy, it claims to support web standards but half-asses them (the *first* css-grid layout I tried didn't work in 60.0), and it crashes both itself and graphics drivers frequently. If not for the massive speed difference it brings, I wouldn't put up with any of that at all.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 29, 2017 19:01 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Also, Google + Chrome has office apps that break in subtle, not subtle, always annoying ways in any ecosystem not their own.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 17, 2017 18:13 UTC (Sat) by MattJD (subscriber, #91390) [Link]

>> Too many sites assume something related to WebKit especially on mobile
>I've been using Firefox for Android ever since I got my first Android phone and don't remember any issues with websites.
It's been somewhat rare (and especially rare of late), but I have seen sites broken/not render as mobile because it wasn't Webkit. I've also had a little trouble getting both Chrome and Firefox to behave on Android for a site I was developing, though nothing major and nothing like dealing with IE.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 16, 2017 16:31 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

It's more likely due to Blink being the only embedding API in town. Nobody else wants people to use their browser as much as Google does.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 19, 2017 9:30 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

But here they are not embedding a web control into something else, but making a whole browser. That could be done by forking Firefox as well as by forking Chrome.

Chromium versus Firefox

Posted Jun 20, 2017 6:55 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Projects that try to build on Firefox as a base have historically turned out badly: most of them just tweak the branding, settings and addons.

The only real forks left are Pale Moon, which is lagging years behind on web standards support due to how much it's diverged; and Seamonkey, whose volunteer maintainers are already struggling to keep up. With the impending death of XUL neither are likely to survive the winter - not a very good advertisement for the platform.