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by f0xtrot
1618 days ago
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It seems that it's mostly the people building those browsers and their personal preferences. With google building a track record of shady tactics, I would agree. firefox seems the better choice. It seems no more difficult to fork than chromium (though I've never tried). My 2 cents, there's nothing to stop anyone from refusing to support updates on old frameworks and I'd suspect google to pull the rug out from beneath everyone before firefox anyday. |
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The core problem is that Gecko is not easily embedded. It does not strongly separate the renderer from the application, and that means that it is very difficult to simply use in the middle of another app.
You can compare it to WebKit and the old mshtml controls: the entire engine is designed, specifically with the intention of being a content view in an application.
Chromium inherited the core webkit design, so it is also much easier to embed than gecko. It requires much more work than a webkit webview, but that's largely down to exactly where they felt their API boundaries should be (e.g. a conscious design decision vs happenstance).
The end result is that forking Gecko is useful if what you want to do is make a fork of Firefox. Using gecko for anything else is challenging - there used to be a Mac browser built on gecko, and it required a huge amount of work to keep going, and would routinely fall behind due to changes that broke embedding. Just a browser, so it still had the same basic UI structure, and it was still hard to make in the first place, and hard to maintain.