Firefox is built on a similar level of effort. Brendan Eich is talking about the effort required for a company to develop a new, full-featured browser engine to complete with Firefox and Chromium.

It may be true that starting from scratch would be impractical, but it might be practical to take Firefox/Chromium and make deep changes, to the point that it's effectively another browser.

Mozilla themselves have been doing this with Firefox. They've been replacing C++ by Rust (with the Servo rendering-engine project). They've replaced the JavaScript JIT more than once, if I recall correctly.

We've already seen WebKit give rise to two divergent major browsers: Chrome and Safari.

The problem is keeping pace with the upstream: it's not that it's impossible but that it's very expensive — when Google forked WebKit they dedicated a large and very talented (i.e. expensive) engineering team to the project. The same could be done again but you're looking at companies like Microsoft, not startups.

The resources needed to maintain a Gecko-based or Blink-based browser will depend on the amount of customisation. Vivaldi/Opera/Brave are doing fine, but they make relatively shallow changes over Chromium.

I just discovered Goanna on Wikipedia, a fork of the Gecko engine, presumably with relatively thin resources. Don't know how well it compares to mainstream engines though. [0]

I suppose the short version is that the workload is a function of the goals.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software)

That’s the point: if you’re not customizing Blink, you’re not changing the huge influence which Google has over de facto web standards. If you want to make more than simple customizations you need a significant commitment just to keep pace with the upstream – Microsoft can afford that, Samsung can, etc. but it’s not clear that Brave or Opera can.

Mozilla is rebuilding much of an engine with Servo and related (e.g. the CSS bits that are now actually integrated into FF) projects. I can really see them replacing more and more of FF with Rust in the future, because Mozilla really seem to be doubling down on trust, in all forms. For example, they recently announced that the UI is web component based - which means that using Servo for the window chrome is in the realm of possibility.

Edit: at that point I wouldn't really consider it "FF of yore." A rewrite is really a new product.

Firefox has been using Gecko for chrome since before it was even called Firefox. It's pretty much the reason why the Google browser has the name that it does. Anyone contributing to Firefox leading up to the birth of Chrome, including major contributors on Google payroll, dealt with chrome:// documents (or bindings, or scripts, or...) on a daily basis.

Yeah, but that was via XUL, not via web standards.

That's orthogonal to the comment I was responding to.

Your response to my comment isn't only orthogonal, it isn't even in the same realm of what I was talking about. I was referring to "the window chrome." I never once mentioned "Chrome."

The comment you called out is directly related to what I was talking about, it is not orthogonal.

You can't rewrite history. SahAssar's comment moved the goalposts away from being about the browser engine and towards whether XUL was standardized. Whereas your comment is undeniably about using the browser engine to handle the Firefox UI—which yes, I grasped—although you seem not to have grasped my (incredibly straightforward) response to it, which contained an aside about how Chrome got its name.

I'll repeat myself: Firefox is already using the browser engine for its own UI, and that's been the case—I'll repeat again—since before it was even called Firefox.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say, but the parent comment said

> they recently announced that the UI is web component based - which means that using Servo for the window chrome is in the realm of possibility

IMO some of the key words there are "web component" and "Servo":

1. IIRC you can't render XUL strictly with web components or anything that would be called "web", since that usually refers to web standards or something you would use from a webpage but not included as a standard (non-standardized extensions, flash, silverlight and so on).

2. Regarding the Servo part, I don't think that Servo ever included XUL support at all. Servo isn't used wholesale as the rendering engine in firefox, but the parent comment talks about the possibility to use it and web standards for the browser chrome.

I feel like you are responding to a comment that never was and then responding to a comment on that comment by saying the original comment was something you thought it was, but it wasn't.

Funny, I feel the exact same way.

> IIRC you can't render XUL strictly with web components or anything that would be called "web"

> use [Servo] and web standards for the browser chrome.

Geez, this is excruciating.

If you want to use web standards for the browser chrome, this is not a new development. Because Gecko supports web standards. And Gecko has been used for the browser UI for years. There is nothing particular to Servo here. There's nothing particular to Rust.

Using standardized web tech for the "window chrome" is not "in the realm of possibility". It is possible. Full stop. It has never not been the case.

I'll happily "loose" this whatever this discussion is if I'm wrong (but the "win" reference is now removed from your comment) but the basic idea is:

1. Servo supports many web standards, not XUL

2. The firefox UI used to be built in XUL

3. The firefox UI is now not built on XUL, but rather on web standards

This means that the firefox UI can now be rendered by servo or similar components.

That's basically the parent comment. If you disagree with any of those facts that's an interesting discussion, but I think you think that somebody said that the firefox UI could not be built on gecko previously, which nobody said.

So what we're dealing with here is Mitch Hedberg's "I used to do drugs" bit, only you're not joking.

Android put Chrome over the top.

Firefox worked great for a few months after the big fuss over Quantum coming out and then went right back to just being a browser for enthusiasts and privacy activists. And that's after that whole dumb advertising push they did with billboards reading scary stuff like "Big Browser is watching."

If anything, Firefox is a good example of why it's probably better for aspiring browser competitors to start off by just spinning off from Chromium like Brave did. Not that Brave is perfect either, especially not on desktops, but the saved resources let them focus on finding ways to surpass the competition like improving the mobile ui.

Turning Firefox into a Chrome copycat* with built-in blocklists and Tor Browser Bundle features certainly didn't make it gain more users. Mozilla should've left Brave occupy that space. Brave, Pale Moon and Vivaldi deserve praise.

* References:

1. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-suckfest.html

2. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-disable-australi...

3. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-directory-tiles....

[Edit (fixing link)]: 4. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-addons-future.ht...

The thing costing Firefox users is the billion-dollar advertising push and heavy promotion on Google properties. That won’t be changed by trying to satisfy a small number of critics who are not exactly jumping to contribute significant effort to the project, whereas the Mozilla team inevitably has solid answers about maintenance costs bashing their decisions.