Why do all use Chromium

[publisher]

why actually all are going to chromium and not to Gecko (Firefox engine)?

[publisher]

@gwen-dragon: Yes, I know, to change is impossible. But why they decide for chromium/Blink? Vivaldi is not a exception... Yandex Browser, SRWare Iron, Opera. Microsoft is creating Edge with chromium... why always Chromium?

[sirfredrick]

@publisher I've heard somewhere that Firefox was going through the Quantum changes when Vivaldi was being worked on. Since it was a major rewrite it would have caused a lot more regressions than working with the more stable Chromium.

[LonM]

I think part of the blame lies with webmasters that claim their sites only work with chrome. It's more of an incentive to go with the chrome engine as you can match more "compatibility" that way.

[Ayespy]

@sirfredrick Firefox was not only going through Quantum changes (complete engine switch) when Vivaldi started, but it was also losing users at a pretty high rate.

[Hadden89]

@publisher I always felt (user feeling) blink is faster then gecko.
Obviuosly is not the only reason, as google used a lot of its adversting power to make it default on the desktops and mobiles (with android).
When V started, gecko was still a bloated engine (especially on performance side) and only one company to develop it (Mozilla and maybe a bit of optimizations from its forks) whereas chromium already had google and a lot of other companies which enhance the engine, included Vivaldi and several other chromium browsers.
About switching engine now, would mean to rewrite huge parts of Vivaldi.
I left Firefox for Chrome, and now for Vivaldi, for this reason. I was a big fan of gecko on Mozilla 1.x / Firefox 0.8 - 3.5 era.
Now is really better, but lost its userbase in the meantime as they focused more on "simplifing the UI" firefox users loved than optimizing the severe performance issues it had during gecko development (on windows, which is a critical platform for a browser; I guess on linux it worked really better).

[mossman]

Random thought for Jon: if Opera had continued on it's original independent, user-oriented path (and therefore didn't lose those core developers and users who felt betrayed), would it have been possible to maintain Presto as a modern engine or was it simply overwhelmed by changes to the web? Was Opera inevitably going to change engine in any case?

[LonM]

@mossman I don't think the engine would be totally out for the count, but from what I can see retrospectively they were fighting a lot of uphill battles. I guess it would have been difficult to compete.

[hitskey]

I guess it's a license issue.

Chromium: BSD license
Firefox: MPL license

Since BSD license is permissive, Chromium based browsers can go to proprietary; They don't have to disclose any codes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License

[QuHno]

@2635599 After trying out Cent, I can only say that Cent is nothing but an lightly extended Chromium too, the difference is marginal, e.g. in the "memory optimization" settings they only exposed some non recommended command line switches which might have an impact on security because Chromium needs the process isolation to avoid cross site scripting. The same goes for all extensions in the same process.

Additionally they don't say that they use a Google services to "resolve navigation errors" (was default on) and for "safe surfing" etc. pp.

The power drag function is basically a pre-installed extension and some other things look like mandatory installed extensions too, not sure if the mouse gestures are one too - at least the implementation looks very familiar to me.

What is possibly "unique" is the tab management, and the "safemode.bat" (which is basically the same as --user-data-dir="some relative or absolute path") - but I don't know why they put it into the install directory and not into %localappdata%\Temp

Exposure of the command-line (editable) for the startup is a nice touch though.

[QuHno]

@2635599 Now I could be offended, but I am a peaceful guy who doesn't spill his rage against everything and is willing to pay for good things, so I let your history and reputation speak for itself.

[greybeard]

@LonM said in Why do all use Chromium:

I think part of the blame lies with webmasters that claim their sites only work with chrome. It's more of an incentive to go with the chrome engine as you can match more "compatibility" that way.

Quite true!

And on top of that many government departments and businesses are tuning their systems to Chrome and Google services... There are many I know who work for such and are now almost totally dependent on Chrome as a browser to do their work.
Analogous to when I worked IT and our company's intranet was based on Windows ans IE.

[datacenter]

@publisher
Well, my question goes beyond and I would very much like to see a Gecko/Quantum version, the engine is way better in my experience.

I have already switched to Vivaldi as my main browser, but there are a lot of places where the chromium is sluggish at best, not to mention the video playback issues and the SSO "feature".

I have to keep Firefox constantly running in the background to cope with the problem, that is why I do not recommend Vivaldi to the people around me, especially to casual users.

[mepqfilho]

I was asking myself the same question recently, interesting to see that there is a discussion on this around the same time.

It would be interesting if Vivaldi was based on Gecko, I believe Chromium's dominance in this market is not healthy. But I also understand by now how costly it would be for the developers to build on Gecko during that time and the costs of switching to it now.

Then again, the developers were working at Opera, which by that time was already Chromium-based, so it would only be natural to continue using their engine to create Vivaldi

[icubud]

@2635599
Novice here, as for lingo and all so plz overlook if a stupid question...

I've read the posts/replies to this thread hoping it would be an answer to my own ? which is why I see ref to Google Chrome if I am using Vivaldi but looking to add an extension or something.
Is there no way to get a good browser experience and also be free of Google? I have serious privacy concerns and am confident Google doesn't have my best interest at heart.

[TbGbe]

@icubud said in Why do all use Chromium:

which is why I see ref to Google Chrome if I am using Vivaldi but looking to add an extension or something.

The reason is because Vivaldi uses the same Chromium Base as Google Chrome.
Additionally, the main source for extensions to this Base is on the Google (Chrome) Extension Store.

[jaish]

@datacenter
Actually I'm a casual user and very pleased after switching over from Firefox/Google combo. Being non-technical, my reasons are more intuitive than evidence based.

One, I have around 8 to 10 tabs open anytime & so far have not run into 'captcha'.

On political news search: In this short period (2 months), a search for say latest on Trump; I get a wider spread rather than being corralled by Google to Leftist sources. With Google, if I searched for general or right tilted sources, and had more than 4 tabs opened, invariably I would run into 'captcha'.

Speed: Browser seems faster and that can also be a problem. Mouse hovers over a field / topic and bingo, I'm there. Maybe it's my imagination but i feel there's some sort of friendly AI embedded in.

What the heck, if the browser is listening to me who needs a gf? I would definitely recommend Vivaldi to casual users, not all ...., just friends.

[ldexterldesign]

@jaish said in Why do all use Chromium:

FYI Vivaldi has nothing to do with CAPTCHAs (that's website specific) or search results (that's search engine specific)

Regards