[dubcanada]

Sadly Chromium is WAYYYY easier to development on than Firefox. Had Mozilla spent effort making the base of it as a framework in the same way Chromium is, they may have considered it.

There is a reason why Electron, QT etc use Chromium.

[Rapzid]

Kind of a shame.. There are a few areas where FireFox absolutely smokes Chrome. The way it reflows some heavy DOMs interactively is almost magical in comparison.

[mactunes]

Curious, what makes Chromium better in your opinion? I have probably just touched the surface of the dev tools on both and haven‘t used any features that I would be missing on either.

[dubcanada]

It's a blank browser, has barely any "Google" specific stuff in it ready to go. It is easy to develop for, doesn't require cross language compiling (rust/c++), builds fast, easy to understand how the different parts work (at least for a browser developer it should be), has documentation, is meant to be used to develop your own browser.

[withinboredom]

Are you sure Chromium builds fast? lol, it takes my laptop with 12 cores and 64gb of ram over an hour to compile from scratch, not counting the ~20gb of git history to download (I maintain an internal build at work).

[dubcanada]

Well lol it is a rather complex piece of software, so maybe take that one back.

Firefox is comparable in that department.

[bzbarsky]

Having compiled both: it's not. On the same hardware, Firefox takes ~4x less time to compile than Chromium for me...

[microcolonel]

Which platform were you compiling on, and when? It's been some years now, but Chromium used to build with MSVC on Windows.

[duhi88]

Then they could have chosen WebKit.

I get the Electron reason...it just sucks.

[_bxg1]

I was just thinking, "Why isn't there an Electron for Firefox?"

[kodablah]

They worked on it a bit [0] but it has been abandoned along with all the other embedding efforts over time. As someone who embeds Chromium (via CEF) only because it's easy, I would really appreciate (and have been shouting into the wind about) focus on the embeddability of Gecko.

0 - https://github.com/mozilla/positron

[the8472]

Long before positron (and electron) there was XULrunner.

[giancarlostoro]

I have a feeling this might change once Firefox is either entirely written in Rust, or mostly written in Rust.

[_bxg1]

Why?

[giancarlostoro]

A lot of legacy code is being removed. As this happens the codebase will be reworked with contributors in mind.