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If you read that tweet, it mainly says that they made the choice based on DRM licensing. Well, plus a vague "it lost on many dimensions in a head to head compar

by sfink 5y ago

If you read that tweet, it mainly says that they made the choice based on DRM licensing. Well, plus a vague "it lost on many dimensions in a head to head comparison enumerating gaps vs. Chrome". Which I can't argue, because there are no specifics to disagree with. That said, I work on Gecko and it is indeed an old crufty codebase with numerous issues. From what I've seen of Blink, it seems surprisingly similar (overall; the specific problem areas are different). And Gecko has a surprising willingness to rewrite or revamp core aspects of the codebase -- by some metrics, it appears to be more nimble than Blink (eg, site isolation to separate processes was a massive project for both codebases, and it looks like although Gecko started and finished later, the elapsed time is a couple years less.) On the other hand, Eich was pretty well in touch with the Gecko codebase, so his opinion should carry some weight. (Somewhat counterbalanced by his seeming enthusiasm for burning some bridges behind him, but that gets into very speculative territory.) I tend to agree that Gecko isn't as good as Chromium as a foundation for forking, though. I think working with the Mozilla development community is actually quite a bit better than working with Chromium's, but Gecko is pretty unapologetically focused on Mozilla's product needs and Mozilla doesn't have the resources to properly support external embedders or forks.

toyg 5y ago
The continuous struggle to get Gecko used by any non-Mozilla project should also carry weight: there are many reasons why Apple went with the arguably-inferior KHTML engine when they started their own browser, and why the resulting library was quickly adapted all over the world - when arguably Gecko had had by then a headstart of a decade or so. Reportedly, embedding WebKit in one's codebase was basically trivial, whereas with Gecko was almost impossible.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I have heard the same from many moons ago that the blink/khtml/webkit engine was designed from the start to be embeddable.
BrendanEich 5y ago
DRM was not the main issue we faced, just one of many. I wasn't vague, Twitter limits size to 280 chars. We developed a decision spreadsheet with the data in almost all the rows weighing against Gecko. Your "seeming enthusiasm for burning some bridges behind him" is bunk. On what did you base it? Again, we started Brave based on Gecko (multiprocess sandboxed embedding via Graphene, which was developed for FirefoxOS). We did not just jump to Chromium upon founding. A startup is a no-BS/little-room-for-error setting with scarce capital. To suggest I did anything uneconomic out of spite is silly.
- sfink 5y ago
  > I wasn't vague, Twitter limits size to 280 chars. We developed a decision spreadsheet with the data in almost all the rows weighing against Gecko. Perhaps "vague" is too loaded a word? I did not mean it as an insult or complaint, I was just pointing out the fact that the reasons were unclear because they were mentioned but not described. Twitter's character limit is a perfectly valid reason for that. And the literal meaning of the word "vague" applies perfectly. > Your "seeming enthusiasm for burning some bridges behind him" is bunk. On what did you base it? > ...To suggest I did anything uneconomic out of spite is silly. I was not suggesting that. Sorry, it seems I did not describe myself well. "Burning bridges" was not a reference to making anti-Gecko technical decisions. It's about unrelated public postings that I object to, but I don't think that here is a place to get into it. I am confident that the bases for your technical choices were well-founded and I have no reason to suspect that they were made out of spite.
  - BrendanEich 5y ago
    Hi Steve, I read through https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40brendaneich%20mozilla%20since%3A2014-04-03&src=typed_query&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40brendaneich%20mozilla... and wondered which ones you meant. If I burned a bridge I should try to rebuild, let me know. If you mean the ones about Mozilla holding back tracking protection while Monica Chew was there, or the ones about Mitchell's ridiculous salary, then we must disagree on "burning bridges". I'm not going back to Mozilla, and even if I hoped to, I see no reason to lie or self-censor about bad things they did after I left.

by sfink 5y ago

toyg 5y ago

The continuous struggle to get Gecko used by any non-Mozilla project should also carry weight: there are many reasons why Apple went with the arguably-inferior KHTML engine when they started their own browser, and why the resulting library was quickly adapted all over the world - when arguably Gecko had had by then a headstart of a decade or so. Reportedly, embedding WebKit in one's codebase was basically trivial, whereas with Gecko was almost impossible.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I have heard the same from many moons ago that the blink/khtml/webkit engine was designed from the start to be embeddable.

BrendanEich 5y ago

DRM was not the main issue we faced, just one of many. I wasn't vague, Twitter limits size to 280 chars. We developed a decision spreadsheet with the data in almost all the rows weighing against Gecko. Your "seeming enthusiasm for burning some bridges behind him" is bunk. On what did you base it? Again, we started Brave based on Gecko (multiprocess sandboxed embedding via Graphene, which was developed for FirefoxOS). We did not just jump to Chromium upon founding. A startup is a no-BS/little-room-for-error setting with scarce capital. To suggest I did anything uneconomic out of spite is silly.

sfink 5y ago
> I wasn't vague, Twitter limits size to 280 chars. We developed a decision spreadsheet with the data in almost all the rows weighing against Gecko. Perhaps "vague" is too loaded a word? I did not mean it as an insult or complaint, I was just pointing out the fact that the reasons were unclear because they were mentioned but not described. Twitter's character limit is a perfectly valid reason for that. And the literal meaning of the word "vague" applies perfectly. > Your "seeming enthusiasm for burning some bridges behind him" is bunk. On what did you base it? > ...To suggest I did anything uneconomic out of spite is silly. I was not suggesting that. Sorry, it seems I did not describe myself well. "Burning bridges" was not a reference to making anti-Gecko technical decisions. It's about unrelated public postings that I object to, but I don't think that here is a place to get into it. I am confident that the bases for your technical choices were well-founded and I have no reason to suspect that they were made out of spite.
- BrendanEich 5y ago
  Hi Steve, I read through https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40brendaneich%20mozilla%20since%3A2014-04-03&src=typed_query&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40brendaneich%20mozilla... and wondered which ones you meant. If I burned a bridge I should try to rebuild, let me know. If you mean the ones about Mozilla holding back tracking protection while Monica Chew was there, or the ones about Mitchell's ridiculous salary, then we must disagree on "burning bridges". I'm not going back to Mozilla, and even if I hoped to, I see no reason to lie or self-censor about bad things they did after I left.