this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Blink has a younger code base that's easier to build on. Gecko has been around since the early 90s and has some ancient evils lurking deep within. At least that was the reasoning a while ago. As Mozilla has been putting a heavy emphasis on code correctness for the last few years, that may no longer be the case. Then again, momentum is a big deal, and I still see people saying the don't want to try Firefox because its memory inefficient even though they fixed that bug almost a decade ago now and its less resource hungry and faster than chrome now
Not just that, but I also repeatedly read that blink is simply easier to build on, built to be used by others, while gecko is more tightly coupled with FF.
It’s kinda funny, because pre-quantum, people said they used FF on lowish-memory devices. It’s only been since quantum (==Firefox 57, released in 2017) that I (with high amounts of RAM to spare) switched back to FF because before that Chrome was much faster if you had the RAM.
Blink is a fork of WebKit wich is a fork of KHTML, KHTML exist since the '98, the codebase isn't that younger too. Was tweaked by Apple then by Google, with some features that don't exist on other engines.
They both are of very similar age actually. The old Netscape rendering engine originated in the early 90s, but Gecko was a rewrite from scratch that was first used in a browser in 1998.
Blink is based on KHTML which is based on khtmlw, which was written at some point in the mid-90s, but as well saw a complete rewrite in 1999.
The only time I ever had memory problems with Firefox was when I tried to run it on a potato. That complaint has always been bullshit.
Edit to add: The aforementioned incident was in 2010, on a machine with only 512MB of RAM. Like I said, potato. Chrome back then was somewhat more memory-efficient than Firefox, and could support three open tabs on that machine before it started thrashing, whereas Firefox would thrash with just one. Both browsers performed abysmally under such a severe RAM shortage, but Chrome was slightly less abysmal. Slightly. I seriously doubt the current version of either browser would be usable on that machine, although I don't have it (I gave it away soon after this incident) so I can't check.
Faster than chrome ? Do you have any source ?
https://www.arewefastyet.com
Thanks
Unless I'm missing something it seems like Chromium still wins in the vast majority of tests, some by over double or even triple the speed/score.
Looks roughly 50/50 Chrome vs. Firefox for most of those, or a tie, to me. But looking at the Y axis for many of the test is there really a significant day-to-day difference between an execution time of 150ms and 160ms? As far as the average user is concerned, Firefox's performance matches that of Chrome's.
I am looking at the Linux benchmarks because that is what I use. I count 11-4 in favor of Chrome and/or V8 with one that’s a tie. For the record I use LibreWolf which is based on Firefox, but it is definitely noticeably slower in my experience.
This is somewhat beside the point but I'd argue there's not even a reason to use Firefox on Windows so those benchmarks are irrelevant entirely. If you're not willing to move away from Windows (a near-monopoly that collects your data) what is the point of moving away from Chrome (a near-monopoly that collects your data). It's extremely half-assed.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. A step in the right direction, even if half-assed, is better than no step at all in cases like this.
Chrome wins for 4 of those graphs, Firefox wins for 7. Two are a close tie.
I am looking at the Linux benchmarks because that is what I use. I count 11-4 in favor of Chrome and/or V8 with one that’s a tie. For the record I use LibreWolf which is based on Firefox, but it is definitely noticeably slower in my experience.
This is somewhat beside the point but I’d argue there’s not even a reason to use Firefox on Windows so those benchmarks are irrelevant entirely. If you’re not willing to move away from Windows (a near-monopoly that collects your data) what is the point of moving away from Chrome (a near-monopoly that collects your data). It’s extremely half-assed.
there are options besides windows and linux. I only use windows for gaming, mac for everything else besides server infra. but yeah I guess if you're looking at linux you're going to be looking at different browsers than the majority of people. as to why you would want to move away from chrome and not windows, there's plenty of reasons. It seems pointless to argue that here though, as you seem to think it's an all or nothing.
https://lemmy.my.id/post/70788
Gecko was probably based on early 90s code but it wasn’t out until 2000. It’s still older than almost everything else though.
Actually ff is the old Netscape navigator which was popular in the early to mid 90’s. When Netscape didn’t take off like they hoped it was retooled a little bit and turned into ff
Don't you mean "when Microsoft abused their monopoly to crush the competition it was open sourced"?
Yes. That still doesn’t change how Gecko (which is basically a rewrite of the old Netscape engine) was not released until 2000.
Ah, yeah, and it's probably too laborious to change the browser base now.
Thank you for your answer! :D