WebKit is easy but has terrible compatibility because the fruit company makes money from native apps. They do the bare minimum to keep Safari functional so that people keep buying iPhones.

Gecko has an uncertain future and is perpetually at risk of dying.

It's at least possible to switch from Chromium to WebKit if necessary so the risks of building off of Chromium are not that big.

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pjmlp 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Rather the fruit company doesn't want to implement ChromeOS Platform APIs that never made it into Web standards.

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hnlmorg 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Gecko is too big to die. Even with Firefox’s market share being a shadow of its former self, it’s still used by millions.

The real problems with Gecko is just that it’s harder to fork and has less compatibility with the web (that last part is largely just due to Chromium being the de facto standard so fewer people test their sites against Firefox).

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leenify 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> The real problems with Gecko is just that it’s harder to fork

That goes contrary to my experience. I'm a maintainer of a Firefox fork (with rather extensive changes to a lot of the internals), and it is pretty manageable to maintain. We manage to keep it roughly up to date and add new features without financial backing or folks working full-time on it.

If all you do is change the branding and apply some superficial stuff, Chromium might be doable, but that is hardly a new browser. Everybody who forked Chromium from the folks I know (mostly research/security testing people) gave up due to the constant churn.

For this reason, from my experience, Firefox forks are much easier to maintain once you start applying changes to internal things. Firefox is changing at a slower pace, making keeping up to date much more manageable, but that also has its drawbacks, as it does not support every crazy feature Google pushes out, e.g., WebUSB. But, for example, folks I know maintained a v8 fork that was shelved as the introduction of Torque (which has spotty public documentation, to be very kind) means it is a complete rewrite.

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hnlmorg 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Thats interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Why do you think that very few projects adopt Gecko then?

	▲	leenify 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm somewhat uncertain personally about the future of Mozilla myself, as well as compatibility issues and a lack of mindshare. Also, I feel working with the Chromium codebase is easier if you only apply superficial changes, e.g., the linked browser. The patch files are all very simple, so the fact that Chrome is generally less crufty (Mozilla is working on cleaning up a lot of ancient stuff, which causes us a lot of pain but is probably great in the long term), simply due to being newer, might make it easier to get started. Although I always felt the most significant hurdle (if you know C++ and JavaScript sufficiently well to patch a Browser) is getting the stuff to build, Mozilla is doing reasonably well on that front. Building Firefox always felt less annoying than building Chromium.