this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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You're right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn't.
If Mozilla really wants to take back the web (and I honestly don't think they actually do), then what they should really be doing is making gecko as easy to embed in a new browser as blink is. They don't do this, and I suspect that they have ulterior motives for doing so, but if they did, I think we would be much closer to breaking chrome's grasp on the web.
Because let's face it: Mozilla makes a pretty damn good browser engine. But they don't really make a compelling browser based off it. Ever noticed how Mozilla has been declining ever since they deprecated XPCOM extensions? It's because when they provided XPCOM, it enabled users to actually build cool and interesting new features. And now that they've taken it away, all innovation in browser development has stagnated (save for the madlads making Vivaldi).
They need to empower others to build the browser that they can't. That's what would really resurrect the glory days of Firefox in my opinion.
Building a free (as in beer) engine for others to build great browsers on, is a pretty thankless task. Individuals may take pride in such a task, but for a company that needs to pay their staff, it's a fruitless endeavor. I assume it's much harder to earn money, if people are not using your software itself, but the forks that add all the cool stuff.
I chuckled a bit while reading this, because what you wrote is exactly where Blink came from. It was a fork of webkit, which in turn was derived from KHTML. Then again, the fact KHTML was discontinued does support your point to an extent too, I guess.
But the point is, Chrome is doing exactly this - providing the engine free as in beer and letting people embed it however they like. And yet, what you're predicting, ie. not using the original but just using forks instead, doesn't seem to be happening with Chrome - they still enjoy a massive fraction of the market share. There's no reason to believe that this couldn't happen at Mozilla as well. People usually want the original product, and it's only a small fraction of people that are really interested in using the derivatives.
Hold on, why are we talking about this like it's something that's not happening? There's all kinds of forks of Firefox.
The difference is how you interact with the browser engine. Blink is very easy to embed into a new browser project. I've seen it done - if you're familiar with the tools, you can build a whole new browser built around the Blink engine in a few hours. You can write pretty much whatever you want around it and it doesn't really change how you interact with the engine, which also makes updates very simple to do.
With Firefox, it's practically impossible to build a new browser around Gecko. The "forks" that you see are mostly just reskins that change a few settings here and there. They still follow upstream Firefox very closely and cannot diverge too much from it because it would be a huge maintenance burden.
Pale Moon and Waterfox are closer to forks of Firefox than Librewolf for example, but they've had to maintain the engine themselves and keep up with standards and from what I've read, they're struggling pretty hard to do so. Not a problem that Blink-based browsers have to deal with because it's pretty easy and straightforward to update and embed the engine without having to rewrite your whole browser.
Unfortunately, since Google controls the engine, this means that they can control the extensions that are allowed to plug into it. If you don't have the hooks to properly support an extension (ie. ublock), then you can't really implement it... unless you want to take on the burden of maintaining that forked engine again.
That said, Webkit is still open source and developed actively (to the best of my knowledge - I could be completely wrong here). Why don't forks build around Webkit instead of Blink? Not really sure to be honest.
Webkit is the engine used by Safari (among a few others) and, though I think the project is controlled by Apple, it's licensed LGPLv2.1 and BSD 2-Clause
According to the wiki, it's also used in PlayStation, Kindle, Nintendo devices, and the Tizen mobile OS... Additionally, it's apparently the rendering engine used by the default browsers provided by both the KDE and Gnome projects
Honestly, though, I want to see something that's not part of the Mosaic or KHTML families be made and gain at least some foothold...I hate having the Internet basically controlled by one or two mega corporations.
I still wish Opera hadn't abandoned Presto...
Okay, but khtml was part of KDE, so I guess it wasn't developed by a company that needed to make money from it, was it?
And neither is chrome. Google doesn't need it to create revenue. They need it to control the channel with which people access their main product - advertising on the web. And for that goal it is beneficial to have it as widespread as possible, even in the form of derivatives.
Rather than guessing at the motives of others, let's remember Hanlon's razor.
Okay, that's an interesting point. I mean, there are forks galore of Firefox so I'm not entirely sure I understand. But certainly chromium-based browsers have been getting more traction.
But wasn't the original point something about how hard it is to make a browser?
And if I have this right you're suggesting that it would be achievable for Firefox to make an accessible browser tool kit but they're not due to ulterior motives?
I'm not sure I understand that, either in terms of motive or just impractical terms what it is you think they're doing to make it hard to develop.