/r/GeckoBrowsers

Photograph via snooOG

Your primary subbreddit for all Gecko-based browsers providing updates, news and more info for the Gecko Rendering Engine and browsers based on itself.

Where you can discuss all Gecko-based browsers!

/r/GeckoBrowsers

191 Subscribers

25

All browsers being based on one engine is like inbreeding, we know it may make sense on the surface but the next gen web will be negatively affected.

0 Comments
2021/03/14
17:30 UTC

14

I would like to find some little known gecko browsers

I have tried so many gecko based browsers and I'm still wondering if there are more so if you have a link for a very little known gecko browser for windows say in the comments

10 Comments
2021/02/26
01:16 UTC

13

Iceraven for Android

Iceraven is my Android browser of choice, and proudly runs on the Gecko web rendering engine. It's been around since this past summer.

From the website: "Our goal is to be a close fork of the new Firefox for Android that seeks to provide users with more options, more opportunities to customize (including a broad extension library), and more information about the pages they visit and how their browsers are interacting with those pages."

Try it here:

https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser/releases

It is completely useable as an everyday Android browser that you can comfortably set as your default if so desired. A lot of the features in Firefox now were in Iceraven first, and Iceraven still provides some options that Firefox doesn't.

Iceraven would like to do more, but right now is relying on one developer to get updates out there when he he isn't swamped at his day job or doing regular life stuff, which limits how many options can be added. In the past there have been more, and the lead developer welcomes volunteer coders at every level, whether you just want to submit an occasional patch or pull request, or to become a maintainer.

In the long-run, I think what the ideal would be is for Iceraven to have as many options as a desktop browser like Vivaldi for desktop or Firefox for desktop has rather than being a typical cutdown limited mobile browser. Now that it is par for the course to have phones that have very powerful CPUs, 8 or 12 gigs of RAM, and really big screens, there really is no good reason why mobile browsers have to be as limited as they usually are. I mean, Chrome for Android doesn't even offer extensions- Come on! Increasingly, a lot of people's Internet lives are spent on their phones, and, for some people, their phone has taken over or replaced a computer as their primary device- and people deserve the ability to customize their browser the way they can on desktop.

That's what I see as the long-term goal of the project, though of course it needs some more developers to really live up fully to it's potential.

Even as-is, though, it's my favorite Android browser by far.

Last summer's new Firefox still hasn't even added a user option to view protocol (http://, https://) and "www" where applicable. That was one of the first user-options Iceraven added. You don't have to use it if it's not your style, but the option is there if you want it (The code is right there and open-source if Firefox wanted to add it- it was even submitted as a patch request to Firefox first, but they haven't done anything on it all this time later last I checked, which is maybe a good example of where the goals of the two browsers diverge a bit.).

Iceraven also has stripped a lot of the proprietary telemetry out of the Fenix code. Some has to remain in "stub" form- i.e. with some bits there that no longer report back- because other code references the telemetry and just having something there is the easiest way for a small project to keep everything working right, but the underlying telemetry is gone or rerouted to report to itself or whatever. The goal is not to have it be sending any proprietary signals out, though the developer has asked anyone who sees anything going out to file an issue so he can look at it in case something has gotten past him. Some detectors go off just because the wrong words are there (i.e. the names of the telemetry bits), which are typically false positives, though.

Anyway, the more successful this project is, the better it is for Gecko. It's also all open-source code, so any Android browser based on Fenix can potentially use the code just as it borrows code from other Fenix-based projects.

Give it a try if you haven't already! :)

6 Comments
2021/02/25
23:11 UTC

20

Think this video I made of me building the source code for Firefox would be useful here. You can't simply adopt a Gecko-based browser without going deep into it!

3 Comments
2021/02/23
07:05 UTC

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