this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
338 points (98.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35258 readers
924 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 185 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

You actually could use standalone Gecko back in the days, but Mozilla closed the project and made everything tightly integrated.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

🏅

Actually didn't know that but makes perfect sense.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 174 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] abraham_linksys 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

"leaks" about Google blocking ad blockers got me to switch to Firefox in October last year. Was worth the risk. Took the time to also leave googles password manager and switch to bitwarden as well.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are still websites that work on basic HTML 1.1, even under Windows 3.11 and Internet Explorer 5.

That whole 'nothing lasts forever' thing isn't because the changing internet standards, it's because companies and websites choose to adopt those standards rather than stick with backwards compatibility.

Granted yes, a lot of it has to do with security, Google's pocketbook security by shoving ads in our faces...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That whole 'nothing lasts forever' thing isn't because the changing internet standards, it's because companies and websites choose to adopt those standards rather than stick with backwards compatibility.

That won't stand true with Google I'm afraid. They adapt quickly. Meta is probably quicker than them, but doesn't have the user base Google has, so it really can't dictate that much.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hardly care anymore myself. I'm learning more and more about the de-googled internet and finding myself with even more options, like anonymous, shared, unlimited, protected cloud storage capacity that even works from IE5 in HTML1.1

Yes it's a series of hacks, not your everyday approach, but I'm doing my part to keep the old internet ticking and archived as best as I can, with terabytes of data archived and accessible even on ancient potatoes.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

As long as chrome is the default option on every or almost every android smartphone chrome will have the majority marketshare. People always mostly use the default.

load more comments (12 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Another reason on top of what's been mentioned already (although probably minor), is that out of the box, Firefox doesn't let you run multiple instances.

I've been learning to write a web app and updating websites, so have been using PortableApps to launch a second instance of Chrome to double check how everything looks when I'm not logged in. I tried switching to Firefox, but it wouldn't let me open the second instance, meaning that every time I wanted to check the site, I'd have to log out. I check them in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

I might be a niche case, but I'm already finding it really annoying. I can't imagine how much more frustrating it would be to try to write a browser that can't run at the same time as your preferred browser.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wouldn't a private window allow exactly the specific thing you want to test?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

In all honesty, I didn't think of that 🙈

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago

Container tabs, bro.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you just want a separate session, container tabs will do. No need to create a new profile.

For Chrome, you can also just create a new profile.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Would container tabs work for you to test the site in a clean environment?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure to be honest, I'm still new to container tabs. I'll give it a try in the morning, thanks 🙂

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In the Firefox Portableapps folder you have to copy other/source/firefoxportable.ini into the top level folder with firefoxportable.exe, and then edit it to allowmultipleinstances=true.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can do this, actually. Just create new profiles. It's not very user friendly, but can definitely be done, from what I understood from your usecase.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the reply :)

The PortableApps version is a separate installation of the program, so Firefox in this case, that's self contained so that it can be used on multiple computers from a removable device. The default profile should be completely unrelated to the fully installed Firefox's profile.

I've tried it on Linux too with an AppImage, but get the same result.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I see. Maybe the PortableApps Firefox hides profiles from the user... Either way, the other comments mention containers, which are actually even more friendly than profiles. Hope you find something that works for you!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why would we need any Firefox-based browser that isn't Firefox?

Customize it a bit, and it works perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same thing with chromium, that didn't stop the clones.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For what it's worth Brave and Opera do extend the base Chromium functionality quite a bit. No idea why they couldn't have done it with FF/Gecko though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Opera switched to Chromium. It used to be its own thing.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Google has more resources than Mozilla, and Chrome has long been the most popular browser so it's not surprising others would want a piece of that pie.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

People fork what's what they're using and what's popular. Chromium has the vast majority of the market share so it's most likely to get modified and reused.

load more comments
view more: next ›