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0 pointszimbatm6y ago0 comments

This is one aspect that is not often talked about.

If Gecko was easier to build on top of, it would get more adoption in other markets and promote the variety of engines that we sorely need. Mozilla doesn't only win by getting more Firefox market share.

Also not everything is lost. Chromium has a bunch of weird and custom build tooling that also makes it a pain to build on top. Anyone who has tried to package v8 can see that it's mainly catering for Chrome's needs.

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Barrin926y ago

>it would get more adoption in other markets and promote the variety of engines that we sorely need.

we don't need variety of engines, we need a non-pofit alternative to google that can throw a punch, which firefox is.

An engine is a technical undertaking (of enormous proportion), and there's essentially no need to have even more of them. If anything it'd just make building websites harder. The issue isn't with blink or gecko it's with Google's control over the browser space. If Firefox was built on blink and had 50% market share I'd be happier than having a hundred engines with 2%.

matoro6y ago

Strongly disagree with this. When you build on top of Blink you put yourself at Google's mercy: every Chromium knockoff from Opera to Brave or what have you now has to make a critical choice about whether to update their core to the new version that implements Manifest v3, or to keep their base on an insecure outdated version indefinitely.