• BitsOfBeard@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I love Firefox, but we need more variety in browsers and Chromium is just making it worse! There has to be a way to make building browsers simpler without everyone ending up relying on the product that was designed to ruin the free internet.

    • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, the biggest problem with Firefox is that its engine is so hard to embed. Chrome has endless clones because it’s just so damn easy to embed. And Firefox just has some weak forks like Librewolf.

      I’d really rather see Mozilla focus on this rather than all their other stupid endeavors…

      • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi
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        1 year ago

        Wish this got upvoted more tbh. The devs of Pulse Browser are trying to make an environment where making a Firefox fork would be easier, but it’s not like Chromium where the engine could be easily embedded. I’ve also heard Second Life had to move to Chromium for their embedded browser after using Gecko and having problems with it.

    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      1 year ago

      What we actually need is more variety in rendering engines. There were never that many, and two or three (Presto, Trident, and Spartan if you count it) have been killed off within the past ten years. All that’s left are two lineages: Google’s Blink and its barely-threre parent WebKit (in Apple’s Safari), and Mozilla’s Gecko and its barely-there child Goanna (in Pale Moon).

      Unfortunately, the rendering engine is probably the largest single chunk of code in a browser, and writing a new one (or even forking an existing one) is non-trivial.

      • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Servo still exists, it is under the Linux Foundation umbrella now after Mozilla abandoned it. Just got some funding in January.