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Sadly Chromium is WAYYYY easier to development on than Firefox. Had Mozilla spent effort making the base of it as a framework in the same way Chromium is, they
by dubcanada 7y ago
Sadly Chromium is WAYYYY easier to development on than Firefox. Had Mozilla spent effort making the base of it as a framework in the same way Chromium is, they may have considered it.
There is a reason why Electron, QT etc use Chromium.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mactunes 7y agoCurious, what makes Chromium better in your opinion? I have probably just touched the surface of the dev tools on both and haven‘t used any features that I would be missing on either.
- dubcanada 7y agoIt's a blank browser, has barely any "Google" specific stuff in it ready to go. It is easy to develop for, doesn't require cross language compiling (rust/c++), builds fast, easy to understand how the different parts work (at least for a browser developer it should be), has documentation, is meant to be used to develop your own browser.
- withinboredom 7y agoAre you sure Chromium builds fast? lol, it takes my laptop with 12 cores and 64gb of ram over an hour to compile from scratch, not counting the ~20gb of git history to download (I maintain an internal build at work).
- dubcanada 7y agoWell lol it is a rather complex piece of software, so maybe take that one back. Firefox is comparable in that department.
- bzbarsky 7y agoHaving compiled both: it's not. On the same hardware, Firefox takes ~4x less time to compile than Chromium for me...
- microcolonel 7y agoWhich platform were you compiling on, and when? It's been some years now, but Chromium used to build with MSVC on Windows.
- I_AM_A_SMURF 7y agoI worked on both, it's no comparison. Firefox builds in about 40min on my macbook pro, Chromium takes like 4 hours?
- tim-- 7y agoI can't even get Chromium to build on my MacBook Pro, so there's that. (15-inch, 2018, 16GB RAM) What magic are you using to be able to build Chromium?
- microcolonel 7y agoAFAIK you'd need to limit the compiler threads, and hopefully the linker doesn't run out of memory. 16GiB of memory is really not enough.
- I_AM_A_SMURF 7y agoLimiting the threads as somebody elses said. For chromium no one really builds it on a laptop, everyone in my team used a build server or a 32 core monster desktop.
- bzbarsky 7y agoSometime in the last 6 months, on Mac and Linux both.
- _bxg1 7y agoI was just thinking, "Why isn't there an Electron for Firefox?"
- kodablah 7y agoThey worked on it a bit [0] but it has been abandoned along with all the other embedding efforts over time. As someone who embeds Chromium (via CEF) only because it's easy, I would really appreciate (and have been shouting into the wind about) focus on the embeddability of Gecko. 0 - https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron
- the8472 7y agoLong before positron (and electron) there was XULrunner.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoI have a feeling this might change once Firefox is either entirely written in Rust, or mostly written in Rust.
- _bxg1 7y agoWhy?
- giancarlostoro 7y agoA lot of legacy code is being removed. As this happens the codebase will be reworked with contributors in mind.
- Rapzid 7y agoKind of a shame.. There are a few areas where FireFox absolutely smokes Chrome. The way it reflows some heavy DOMs interactively is almost magical in comparison.
- duhi88 7y agoThen they could have chosen WebKit. I get the Electron reason...it just sucks.