3 ms·

A lot of "third party browsers" like Opera, Vivaldi and Brave choose to go for Chromium as their engine, would they be able to use Firefox's engine the same way

A lot of "third party browsers" like Opera, Vivaldi and Brave choose to go for Chromium as their engine, would they be able to use Firefox's engine the same way? If yes, why does it seem that no one actually does it? I personally don't particularly enjoy Firefox as a browser, but I don't have anything against their engine. If there was a version of Vivaldi that implemented that I would probably choose it over the Chromium version.

syshum 7y ago
At the time they made those choices there were 3 main reasons to choose chromium over FF as a base 1. Smaller Size, chromium was just a smaller foot print with less legacy code 2. Better Performance. There was no doubt the before firefox quantum Chromium was the performance leader, Bink and V8 where superior then, today not soo much 3. Better rendering support. Like IE6 in the 90's today there are many many sites that ONLY work correctly on chrome, so if you use chrome's render you have less work to do, and will have less complaints by users blaming your browser for some websites poor code
- glandium 7y ago
  More relevant: better embedding story. Gecko is not exactly great to embed.
  - vthriller 7y ago
    No idea why you're downvoted: things like [0] are marked as obsolete, GtkMozEmbed et al. are basically dead, and there's no viable alternatives except when you use Android [1]. The only option is to dive deep into Thunderbird's mess of a source code and learn things the hard way, hoping Mozilla will not change things a lot in a road to post-Quantum future. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView
icebraining 7y ago
There are browsers using Firefox's engine; most are forks of Firefox itself, but there was Camino, Conkeror, and Galeon, plus K-Meleon which is still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon
- dTal 7y ago
  K-Meleon was a great option for Windows computers with not much RAM, since it used native GUI widgets instead of XUL. (It might still be, but I haven't touched it in over a decade.)

syshum 7y ago

At the time they made those choices there were 3 main reasons to choose chromium over FF as a base 1. Smaller Size, chromium was just a smaller foot print with less legacy code 2. Better Performance. There was no doubt the before firefox quantum Chromium was the performance leader, Bink and V8 where superior then, today not soo much 3. Better rendering support. Like IE6 in the 90's today there are many many sites that ONLY work correctly on chrome, so if you use chrome's render you have less work to do, and will have less complaints by users blaming your browser for some websites poor code

glandium 7y ago
More relevant: better embedding story. Gecko is not exactly great to embed.
- vthriller 7y ago
  No idea why you're downvoted: things like [0] are marked as obsolete, GtkMozEmbed et al. are basically dead, and there's no viable alternatives except when you use Android [1]. The only option is to dive deep into Thunderbird's mess of a source code and learn things the hard way, hoping Mozilla will not change things a lot in a road to post-Quantum future. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView

icebraining 7y ago

There are browsers using Firefox's engine; most are forks of Firefox itself, but there was Camino, Conkeror, and Galeon, plus K-Meleon which is still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon

dTal 7y ago
K-Meleon was a great option for Windows computers with not much RAM, since it used native GUI widgets instead of XUL. (It might still be, but I haven't touched it in over a decade.)