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A comment on Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by thayne on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @02:12AM (#29903316)
That non embeddability is probably also a major reason why there isn't a significant node competitor based on spidermonkey. I get wanting to focus on Firefox as a whole, and that making components more independent can add quite a bit of work. But at the same time, if it was easier to use gecko in other browsers, and spidermonkey as JS environment outside the browser, I wonder if that would increase usage of and interest in the underlying technology.
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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by kunagi7 on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @06:11AM (#29904846)
Spidermonkey is quite embeddable by itself [1]. On Linux things like polkit, couchdb, mongodb use it. Still, the compilation process seems to download the whole firefox tarball and only compiles the JS related parts [2, 3].

[1] https://spidermonkey.dev

[2] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/js78/

[3] https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/js78....

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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by thayne on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @11:59AM (#29909415)
And the fact that polkit uses it is why debian and ubuntu use an ancient version of polkit. And fwiw, there is an effort to replace spidermonkey in polkit with something else, like duktape.

Also js78 uses the version of spidermoneky from Firefox 78. The current Firefox ESR is 91 (released in august), but I don't see any js91 package, and https://github.com/mozilla-spidermonkey/spidermonkey-embeddi... still says to use the 78 ESR. Note that ESR78 is end of life and no longer receives security updates.

And from what I understand, there is no attempt at backwards compatibility in the spidermonkey interface, so each upgrade requires a lot of changes to the embedding program.

Yes, it is possible to embed spidermonkey, but there are a lot of challenges.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by donatj on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @06:37AM (#29905018)
Another helpful link for your stack

https://github.com/mozilla-spidermonkey/spidermonkey-embeddi...

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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by mijoharas on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @04:10AM (#29904050)
We embedded spidermonkey as the JavaScript engine for the prime video application on games consoles and smart TVs when I was at Amazon (5 years ago+ not sure if they still use it). I've not embedded any other JS engines, but it wasn't too bad to embed.
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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by mijoharas on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @10:10AM (#29907351)
Actually, I just realised what I said above was slightly inaccurate, we also built an application that embedded CEF, so I technically have embedded another js engine (that was 7+ years ago though, and my memory is spotty).

CEF was also relatively straightforward to use. Both times we were embedding them in C++ applications.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by toyg on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @05:15AM (#29904474)
This was the biggest fumble of the Mozilla strategy in the last 20 years. Instead of focusing on the developer market, particularly after the appearance of WebKit, they bet (half) the farm on a quixotic quest to build a mobile OS from scratch. By attempting to gain a level of control that was always unlikely, they endangered their own survival.
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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by elevaet on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @06:50AM (#29905109)
I would have made that same mistake if I was making decisions for Mozilla at the time. It's such an elegant, logical and tempting ideal to turn the browser into the OS. Too bad it didn't work out.
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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by zdkl on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @07:09AM (#29905283)
Well, now we have PWAs. I'd be more than a bit bitter if I was a mozilla dev tasked with making those work on android/ios instead of on firefoxOs.
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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by toastal on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @09:05AM (#29906417)
Good luck getting Apple to allow basic features like storage without weird limits, notifications, and the rest of the list. They killed Flash in favor of HTML5+JS and then decided for the walled garden.
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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by toastal on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @06:04AM (#29904807)
KaiOS though has had success. If anything FxOS was ahead of its time and targeting a market too small.
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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by nyanpasu64 on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @02:33AM (#29903444)
Interestingly there was a (never finished) Node fork based off SpiderMonkey (https://github.com/mozilla/spidernode had to write a V8 shim on top of SpiderMonkey), and GNOME Shell and some GNOME apps are written on gjs which uses SpiderMonkey. I don't know if it's bad at embedding compared to V8, but it's definitely been done.
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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by sanxiyn on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @04:05AM (#29904016)
MongoDB embeds SpiderMonkey. Embeddability of SpiderMonkey is fine. It is Gecko that is the problem.
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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by jiripospisil on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @06:02AM (#29904783)
Interestingly, MongoDB switched from SpiderMonkey to V8 only to switch back a few releases later.

https://engineering.mongodb.com/post/code-generating-away-th...

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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by CrzyLngPwd on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @04:44AM (#29904263)
I embedded it in https://digiguide.tv/products/windows.asp around 20 years ago.

Aside from thread-wrangling I thought it was trvial to embed.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firef... by motiejus on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @05:11AM (#29904444)
> 32mb RAM and 8mb Disk Space.

I miss such numbers so much.

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