Before you come at me with stuff like Librewolf, Waterfox and IceCat; those don’t count. They are just tweaked Firefox distros with mostly basic low level changes. Not every Chromium browser is super unique either, but I feel like there are more differences between them then there are with Firefox distros. Why is that? Why there aren’t different browsers that use Firefox’s engines but provide a different UX?
I’m not rlly well-versed in this subject but from what I can tell, I think it’s got something to do with Chrome dominating the browser market share coupled with development contributions for Chromium from big-name corporations. Big buck businesses, am I right? Given that, some websites have been designed with Chrome in mind rather than the rest of the webiverse itself, possibly making Chromium a more attractive browser to base a separate browser project on (please correct me if I’m wrong).
I’m doubtful; while I can see that being a factor on browsers like Edge and Vivaldi, I think plenty of FOSS enthusiasts would prefer to base their software on Firefox given their anti Google stance and monopoly concerns.
I am not so sure if FOSS enthusiasm plays in here…privacy concerns and “dislike of big companies” might but chrome/blink is a fork of apple’s webkit which is a fork of KDE’s khtml/kjs…under LGPL. If you look at it chrome is a pretty good example of FOSS in action. If khtml hadn’t be LGPL in the first place I have my doubts apple would have made webkit public as they did…and am also not convinced that google had done the same for blink. (But has to be said that webkit adds BSD licensed parts that are not directly based on khtml…that might be a concern for FOSS enthusiasts)
If that were the case, where FOSS enthusiasts would prefer to base their software on Firefox for reasons above, then we would’ve seen more projects use Firefox and less of Chromium by now (outside of the ones listed from the original post above), no?
That’s my point. There could be something stopping them from doing so, Firefox was quite popular at one point and even than I don’t think there were alternatives to mainline Firefox, I feel like there should be a reason for this.
Above would be the primary reason. From a business strategy perspective website compatibility is better with Chromium than Firefox. While Firefox is fast now, there was a period in the mid 2010’s when Firefox was trying to diversify its income streams that resulted in it taking it’s eye off the ball and the browser experience got slower and suffered. We’re still seeing this effect even though they have improved the browser significantly over the past couple years.