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I think part of this discussion needs to be that Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium d

I think part of this discussion needs to be that Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does. This sort of open usage, ironically, feels very fitting to the spirit of Firefox, but they're not even close to Chrom(e|ium). I've been building a browser full time the past year+ (synth.app) and FF core wasn't really even an option. They've done very little to make the engine usable outside of Firefox. Now I'm sure there are a variety of savory and unsavory things that led here, but building that stuff out seems like a good way to grow the ecosystem. At least they would've had a chance at capturing the Brave/Opera/Edge/etc market and those seats at the committees. This isn't to say that I'm not worried about these standards merging like this. I've spent many hours working out weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome).

imbnwa 5y ago
They had that with XUL and threw it all away. I remember using a XUL music player called Songbird back in the day
gjvc 5y ago
> ... weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome). This sounds like the IE6 disaster all over again.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  Plenty of people said this would happen when chrome started dominating, but since people refused to switch browsers, here we are.
  - gjvc 5y ago
    this guy said it best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYT2se94eU0&t=1414s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYT2se94eU0&t=1414s
- parhamn 5y ago
  oh man. I need to find some time to write about how bad it is. The gnarliness spans the whole stack. From weird java-applet like API escalation behavior if chrome is detected (e.g. Google properties feature gate a ton around this) to how there is not even a clear way to get a DRM license for a custom browser without waiting for Google indefinitely [1]. Here's a challenge: fire up a chromium fork and get it to run a relaxed DRM website like Netflix. If you get that far now try loading HBOMax with their fingerprinting/DRM protection on top. I'm not even sure it'd be possible in FF (at least without some DRM piggy backing if there isn't one). [1] https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-browser/ https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
- piva00 5y ago
  Yup, as someone who worked on fixing issues with IE5/IE6/IE7 behaviours I definitely feel the slow burning fire of Chrome repeating that whole saga once again. And probably in a much more painful way given the explosive growth of the internet and browsers since the early 2000s (I started working with web dev around 2005).
Santosh83 5y ago
I wonder how difficult would be an open source community project whose explicit aim would be to take the Firefox code base and make it more modular and embeddable, like Chromium? Would it be too much work for a community effort?
- rocqua 5y ago
  Electron, but based on Firefox instead of chrome. Not the most appealing idea, but an interesting one. Might help move more people to essentially using Firefox.
  - rd07 5y ago
    Mozilla has been trying to build an Electron alternative based on Gecko, but it has been discontinued https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron
    - mook 5y ago
      They also had XULRunner… I was even lucky enough to have been using it in a professional context. Unfortunately it wasn't well supported; trying to submit patches was always painful, and framing issues as a Firefox bug was slightly more likely to get things merged. I imagine it's easier than landing changes in Chromium (because Electron is a completely separate project), at least.
- occamrazor 5y ago
  Even if possible, such an initiative could only be successful if Mozilla supports it otherwise the “new” code will quickly go out of sync with the Firefox codebase.
zesterer 5y ago
> Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks Say hello to https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  Wasn't Servo team disbanded?
- dralley 5y ago
  Servo wasn't a fork, nor was it meaningfully a "community" project - sure there were community contributors (it was a fun project to hack on) but most of the meaty work was being done by Mozilla employees.
SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
That's a real missed opportunity. Firefox would have made a fantastic embedded webview, and could have plausibly become the core of Electron. Back when webviews were IE, with atrocious Javascript support and all the usual IE quirks, Firefox was a superior product and interconnecting with other software is very in line with the open source ethos.
- berkes 5y ago
  That opportunity is still there. Enough features to distinguish on, enough political/managerial reasons for choosing an independent FLOSS engine over one controlled by Google. Sure, Edge/MS won't move to this engine anywhere soon. Nor will Brave switch over tomorrow, or electron rebuild around their tooling. But the world is full or "HTML-2-PDF renderers, headless testing toolkits, (embedded) webview-libraries or electron-alike toolkits, which are now almost all exclusively Chromium based.
- qw 5y ago
  I think that is a problem many open source programs have, and could improve. A lot of GUI based programs should think of implementing parts of it as a library others can use. I remember early Git implementations in IDEs where they just ran git commands in the background and parsed the command line output. Imagine if the same had been done with SQLite, would it still be as popular today? I don't have much experience with creating desktop software, but it seems to me that separating the GUI from the "engine" would bring other benefits too. I have often looked at OSS and wanted to use parts of it myself. An email client might have a really good mail parser that handles encoding, attachments etc. But decoupling it from the rest of the program would take too much time.
Maxburn 5y ago
As a Vivaldi user I would really like to see more growth in this area. There are some great ideas in browser forks and I would like to enable them.
foresto 5y ago
> Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does. This reminds that Wine uses Mozilla code for their Internet Explorer replacement (wine-gecko). I wonder how far behind Firefox's rendering engine that code is, and how much effort is involved for the Wine maintainers. https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko

imbnwa 5y ago

They had that with XUL and threw it all away. I remember using a XUL music player called Songbird back in the day

gjvc 5y ago

> ... weird chromium only behaviors that websites rely on these days to do things (and egregiously so if they detect an agent remotely resembling chrome). This sounds like the IE6 disaster all over again.

peakaboo 5y ago
Plenty of people said this would happen when chrome started dominating, but since people refused to switch browsers, here we are.
- gjvc 5y ago
  this guy said it best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYT2se94eU0&t=1414s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYT2se94eU0&t=1414s
parhamn 5y ago
oh man. I need to find some time to write about how bad it is. The gnarliness spans the whole stack. From weird java-applet like API escalation behavior if chrome is detected (e.g. Google properties feature gate a ton around this) to how there is not even a clear way to get a DRM license for a custom browser without waiting for Google indefinitely [1]. Here's a challenge: fire up a chromium fork and get it to run a relaxed DRM website like Netflix. If you get that far now try loading HBOMax with their fingerprinting/DRM protection on top. I'm not even sure it'd be possible in FF (at least without some DRM piggy backing if there isn't one). [1] https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-browser/ https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
piva00 5y ago
Yup, as someone who worked on fixing issues with IE5/IE6/IE7 behaviours I definitely feel the slow burning fire of Chrome repeating that whole saga once again. And probably in a much more painful way given the explosive growth of the internet and browsers since the early 2000s (I started working with web dev around 2005).

Santosh83 5y ago

I wonder how difficult would be an open source community project whose explicit aim would be to take the Firefox code base and make it more modular and embeddable, like Chromium? Would it be too much work for a community effort?

rocqua 5y ago
Electron, but based on Firefox instead of chrome. Not the most appealing idea, but an interesting one. Might help move more people to essentially using Firefox.
- rd07 5y ago
  Mozilla has been trying to build an Electron alternative based on Gecko, but it has been discontinued https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron
  - mook 5y ago
    They also had XULRunner… I was even lucky enough to have been using it in a professional context. Unfortunately it wasn't well supported; trying to submit patches was always painful, and framing issues as a Firefox bug was slightly more likely to get things merged. I imagine it's easier than landing changes in Chromium (because Electron is a completely separate project), at least.
occamrazor 5y ago
Even if possible, such an initiative could only be successful if Mozilla supports it otherwise the “new” code will quickly go out of sync with the Firefox codebase.

zesterer 5y ago

> Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks Say hello to https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/.

shp0ngle 5y ago
Wasn't Servo team disbanded?
dralley 5y ago
Servo wasn't a fork, nor was it meaningfully a "community" project - sure there were community contributors (it was a fun project to hack on) but most of the meaty work was being done by Mozilla employees.

SturgeonsLaw 5y ago

That's a real missed opportunity. Firefox would have made a fantastic embedded webview, and could have plausibly become the core of Electron. Back when webviews were IE, with atrocious Javascript support and all the usual IE quirks, Firefox was a superior product and interconnecting with other software is very in line with the open source ethos.

berkes 5y ago
That opportunity is still there. Enough features to distinguish on, enough political/managerial reasons for choosing an independent FLOSS engine over one controlled by Google. Sure, Edge/MS won't move to this engine anywhere soon. Nor will Brave switch over tomorrow, or electron rebuild around their tooling. But the world is full or "HTML-2-PDF renderers, headless testing toolkits, (embedded) webview-libraries or electron-alike toolkits, which are now almost all exclusively Chromium based.
qw 5y ago
I think that is a problem many open source programs have, and could improve. A lot of GUI based programs should think of implementing parts of it as a library others can use. I remember early Git implementations in IDEs where they just ran git commands in the background and parsed the command line output. Imagine if the same had been done with SQLite, would it still be as popular today? I don't have much experience with creating desktop software, but it seems to me that separating the GUI from the "engine" would bring other benefits too. I have often looked at OSS and wanted to use parts of it myself. An email client might have a really good mail parser that handles encoding, attachments etc. But decoupling it from the rest of the program would take too much time.

Maxburn 5y ago

As a Vivaldi user I would really like to see more growth in this area. There are some great ideas in browser forks and I would like to enable them.

foresto 5y ago

> Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does. This reminds that Wine uses Mozilla code for their Internet Explorer replacement (wine-gecko). I wonder how far behind Firefox's rendering engine that code is, and how much effort is involved for the Wine maintainers. https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko