A popular misconception is that Firefox runs Gecko. And while that is kinda true, the real problem is much more interesting when you come down to the technical details.
Because it’s the other way around. Firefox doesn’t run Gecko, Gecko runs Firefox. Firefox is built in Gecko. In a similar vein, Thunderbird also runs inside Gecko. It’s why they look so similar despite one being a browser and the other being an email client. Gecko is, in a way, a proto-Electron.
You cannot “rip off” Gecko from Firefox and embed it inside something like you can do with Blink/Chromium (unless you’re on Android and use GeckoView), which means the only way to have a “Firefox based browser” is to fork the entirety of Firefox. There are forks like the TBB or Librewolf that do this, but the embeddability of Chromium makes it much easier for devs to make something that diverges from Chromium in major ways (stuff like Qutebrowser, for example)
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Actually didn’t know that but makes perfect sense.
You actually could use standalone Gecko back in the days, but Mozilla closed the project and made everything tightly integrated.
A while ago, gecko was such a mess to use that very few projects dared to use it. At some point, chromium showed up and it’s the easiest thing to bundle anywhere. This probably led to a lot of the current situation.
Gecko (the engine that Firefox uses) isn’t really meant to be embedded, and Mozilla stopped supporting that usecase a while ago. It’s more like you have to design your app around Gecko, with XUL, which essentially makes Gecko both a browser engine and a UI toolkit.
Your searching on this may be skewed due to Firefox not being the equivalent of Chromium. Firefox is not actually the browser engine. Firefox is based on the browser engine called Gecko which is developed by Mozilla. There are actually a number of other Gecko based browsers they just aren’t very popular or are for niche use-cases.
Isn’t Safari Gecko-based? Safari has a huge market share.
Safari is webkit based. Which was also the basis for chromium, but it has diverted a lot from it. Other webkit based browsers are gnome web, KDE konqueror.
Well sure, but I don’t think it changes my question much. There’s still so few active gecko-based browsers. And so many blink based.
Chromium is likely more popular because Google has such a stranglehold over the development of new internet standards. They set standards and then implement them into Chromium perfectly which tends to make Chrome really well optimized and fast.
Doesn’t work forever though. Used to be the same with Microsoft and Internet Explorer, but better things came along that were less terrible and not controlled by a single tech company throwing their weight around to push their own standards.
It’ll happen again if Google restricts the extension store much more though. They’ve been attacking ad and privacy extensions for years
There are still websites that work on basic HTML 1.1, even under Windows 3.11 and Internet Explorer 5.
That whole ‘nothing lasts forever’ thing isn’t because the changing internet standards, it’s because companies and websites choose to adopt those standards rather than stick with backwards compatibility.
Granted yes, a lot of it has to do with security, Google’s pocketbook security by shoving ads in our faces…
“leaks” about Google blocking ad blockers got me to switch to Firefox in October last year. Was worth the risk. Took the time to also leave googles password manager and switch to bitwarden as well.
Another reason on top of what’s been mentioned already (although probably minor), is that out of the box, Firefox doesn’t let you run multiple instances.
I’ve been learning to write a web app and updating websites, so have been using PortableApps to launch a second instance of Chrome to double check how everything looks when I’m not logged in. I tried switching to Firefox, but it wouldn’t let me open the second instance, meaning that every time I wanted to check the site, I’d have to log out. I check them in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.
I might be a niche case, but I’m already finding it really annoying. I can’t imagine how much more frustrating it would be to try to write a browser that can’t run at the same time as your preferred browser.
In the Firefox Portableapps folder you have to copy other/source/firefoxportable.ini into the top level folder with firefoxportable.exe, and then edit it to allowmultipleinstances=true.
Wouldn’t a private window allow exactly the specific thing you want to test?
Container tabs, bro.
Why would we need any Firefox-based browser that isn’t Firefox?
Customize it a bit, and it works perfectly fine.
Same thing with chromium, that didn’t stop the clones.
For what it’s worth Brave and Opera do extend the base Chromium functionality quite a bit. No idea why they couldn’t have done it with FF/Gecko though.
