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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

built on Chromium

If only Firefox(Gecko) would get some more attention...

And that goes double for trying to bootstrap a new protocol; I can only presume the Tor Browser is built on top of Firefox for a reason

There's a reason: legitimate performance differences that exist between them.

Maybe it would if it had a more permissive license.

They’ve gotten plenty of attention. No one wants to build off a sluggish browser.

Why exactly? I honestly do not understand HN fascination with Firefox. Firefox isn't even in the top 3 browsers anymore and has about the same Marketshare as Samsung internet. It is irrelevant at this point. Blink is the standard for rendering now just as Linux is the standard for web servers.

> Firefox isn't even in the top 3 browsers anymore and has about the same Marketshare as Samsung internet

This is precisely the issue. The fact that Google has such a mass control over Internet rendering means that they are free to write their own standards with absolutely no pushback. It is essentially an Internet explorer situation, whereas if Google wants something to work a certain way, you have no choice but to adapt it least certain websites won’t work.

I don’t think a single commercial entity — let alone one with such a disastrous privacy record whose primary source of income is advertising — should be able to strongarm the Internet like it currently can.

If Firefox wasn't so sluggish maybe more people would use it.

That’s a big if, Mozilla has been declining for a long time. They don’t have the funding to progress their aging codebase. Firing everyone in the name of Wokeness hasn’t helped.

Globally, Safari is #2 on mobile, and in the US specifically, #1. Even on desktop, Safari has a fairly strong showing.

Apple and Mozilla have basically just swapped places when it comes to keeping developers in check wrt adopting chrome-only features.

I don't know that more people using FF would change much at this point, to be honest.

> This is precisely the issue. The fact that Google has such a mass control over Internet rendering means that they are free to write their own standards with absolutely no pushback.

It is an open source community driven project with contributions from, "Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Opera Software, Adobe, Intel, IBM, Samsung, and others"

There are so many stakeholders, it isn't just google dictating what occurs in blink

> Why exactly? I honestly do not understand HN fascination with Firefox.

Well, for starters, uBlock Origin works as intended on Firefox as opposed to Chromium and this will become more apparent with manifest v3.

I don't know about others but I also like how Firefox lets me choose the fonts that I want to see on the web while Chromium browsers don't.

> Blink is the standard for rendering now just as Linux is the standard for web servers.

It is THE problem. Software should not be "standard".

Without community supported and adopted standards software wouldn't have progressed all that much in the past 20 years

Standards must be standards. Software must implements standards.

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