A popular misconception is that Firefox runs Gecko. And while that is kinda true, the real problem is much more interesting when you come down to the technical details.
Because it’s the other way around. Firefox doesn’t run Gecko, Gecko runs Firefox. Firefox is built in Gecko. In a similar vein, Thunderbird also runs inside Gecko. It’s why they look so similar despite one being a browser and the other being an email client. Gecko is, in a way, a proto-Electron.
You cannot “rip off” Gecko from Firefox and embed it inside something like you can do with Blink/Chromium (unless you’re on Android and use GeckoView), which means the only way to have a “Firefox based browser” is to fork the entirety of Firefox. There are forks like the TBB or Librewolf that do this, but the embeddability of Chromium makes it much easier for devs to make something that diverges from Chromium in major ways (stuff like Qutebrowser, for example)
Your searching on this may be skewed due to Firefox not being the equivalent of Chromium. Firefox is not actually the browser engine. Firefox is based on the browser engine called Gecko which is developed by Mozilla. There are actually a number of other Gecko based browsers they just aren’t very popular or are for niche use-cases.
Well sure, but I don’t think it changes my question much. There’s still so few active gecko-based browsers. And so many blink based.
Chromium is likely more popular because Google has such a stranglehold over the development of new internet standards. They set standards and then implement them into Chromium perfectly which tends to make Chrome really well optimized and fast.
Doesn’t work forever though. Used to be the same with Microsoft and Internet Explorer, but better things came along that were less terrible and not controlled by a single tech company throwing their weight around to push their own standards.
It’ll happen again if Google restricts the extension store much more though. They’ve been attacking ad and privacy extensions for years
there is no real upside to picking Gecko apart from Google = bad.
AdBlock works better on Firefox. Firefox takes fewer resources. Firefox is open source. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Google = bad
Isn’t Google trying to embed DRM into webpages to avoid track blocking as we speak?
That makes a lot of sense when you are looking at the two today, but Firefox is older than Chrome. So they managed to become more advanced and take all the browser marketshare in some way.
A while ago, gecko was such a mess to use that very few projects dared to use it. At some point, chromium showed up and it’s the easiest thing to bundle anywhere. This probably led to a lot of the current situation.
Gecko (the engine that Firefox uses) isn’t really meant to be embedded, and Mozilla stopped supporting that usecase a while ago. It’s more like you have to design your app around Gecko, with XUL, which essentially makes Gecko both a browser engine and a UI toolkit.
The engine used by Chromium (Blink) is easier to use for programmers, since it’s designed to be “embeddable” from the start when it was still known as KHTML. Engine used by Firefox (Gecko) is only kind of embeddable as the Mozilla developers haven’t paid much attention for that a long time, which makes it more difficult to use in your own browser that you develop.
