this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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It's too bad making a decent web browser is such a massive undertaking so there aren't literally thousands of alternatives to choose from. :/
And they're all chromium under the hood. The illusion of free choice.
As it stands today Mozilla is the only thing keeping google from being labeled a browser monopoly, but man can Mozilla let go of the footgun for once.
Mozilla and Safari.
Ah Safari, the IE8.5 of modern browsers...
As a web dev, screw safari. Apple just randomly decides to not follow web standards some time so I spend tons of time debugging random safari issues that I CANT EVEN TEST MYSELF because I don't pay for apple products
The "best" argument I've heard recently for that heap of shit? The extensions have the best UI integration! Lol
People do so much bending over backwards to excuse every shitty thing apple does.
Safari is more energy efficient on macOS compared to other browsers.
But like it or not the (artificial) hold Safari has over the iOS/iPadOS ecosystem is the only thing stopping a complete Google hegemony over the web browser market.
Mozilla is circling the drain and the few nascent new browser projects are years away from technical maturity and may never establish any meaningful market share anyway.
Lol so I should appreciate that apple is preventing browser choice because they chose not to use chromium for the only option they provide?
Fuck Apple. This situation is on them. Preventing other browsers should have triggered governments to rip them apart for monopolistic practices. I cannot say "fuck apple" enough.
Mozilla is not "circling the drain". Firefox is great, haters can hate all they want.
Yep definitely. I can open 100+ safari tabs but my shitty old laptop will crash if I have 20 on chrome or firefox or brave
Having more than 20 tabs open is a bad idea. And yeah it's going to be a faster browser when you deeply tied it into the OS you also built. Doesn't make it better in the least.
Never said it was a good idea or that safari is better
The nicest thing I can say about it is at least they killed Flash.
No, not Safari. While it's technically true that Safari's WebKit engine isn't based on Chromium's Blink engine, that's only because the genetic relationship goes in the other direction: Blink was initially forked from WebKit (which was itself forked from KHTML, by the way).
Point is, Mozilla's Gecko is the only major browser engine that's fully unrelated to Blink.
What about the Ladybird project?
I feel like you'd be interested in Ladybird. It's a fully independent web browser under development, it's still in its very early stages but they seem serious about it.
We need a better funding model for open source.
Praying that people will donate enough to support your browser isn't exactly great and really doesn't work for most open-source projects.
Unless they are doing something new in that space, it'll just he smooching up to big donors in back rooms.
At least Firefox is open about their deal with Google.
I've always said "give everyone a software voucher they can spend on whatever software developer and the government assigns grants based on vouchers"
The challenge for Ladybird and other independent browser projects is the enormous size and scope required of modern browsers, which is also still growing. Web browsers are now probably second only to operating systems in complexity in the personal computing space.
Plus even if they do reach technical maturity, they still have to convince people to use it. That’s not been going very well for Mozilla, and they already have a working browser.
We need the Swiss gov to step in and start developing their own browser lol
What's a good alternative that isn't chromium? I'm on Mozilla mobile
LibreWolf is a Firefox fork that is not affiliated with Mozilla.
Here's the problem: there are three web browsers.
Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko - that's it.
A "fork" that depends on the same browser engine and rendering engine is not really a fork, it is just a UI flavor. For the sake of security, privacy and data handling, this choice is as meaningful as changing your desktop environment on Linux.
If you access anything financial or personally identifying (taxes, banking, credit cards, medical services, driver's license, an email that is linked to any of those accounts, etc) you should use the browser distributed by the engine's primary developer (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). If you use something else, you are dependent on a downstream third-party developer to properly implement the engine and ensure that its data handling is properly integrated with the browser application and the OS, and you are dependent on their keeping the engine in their knockoff version up to date. You will always be behind the security patches of the main branch, even if the downstream developer is doing everything correctly. On the internet, this is an extreme risk.
Sure, sorry if fork wasn't the right term, I was just saying LibreWolf is Firefox sans Mozilla. The LibreWolf team is very privacy focused.
Full disclosure I use Vivaldi - which is chrome - because I'm a filthy heathen.
Vivaldi is chrom_ium_. Been trying out the last month on macOS. Great browser, although it’s funny how for some settings you get taken to a different page that looks 100% like Chrome except with Vivaldi branding.
Vivaldi on iOS doesn’t feel as great though – less ‘native’. Certain gestures and animations just don’t quite fit.
Shoutout to Webkit-based Orion for both platforms. Slowly gravitating to that
i will peep Orion - thanks for the heads up.
It's not though, unless they're building their own engine.
I mean by that logic Nextcloud is just a rebranded skin of Owncloud and Libre Office is just a rebranded skin of Open Office. I'm sure someone can chime in with a more damning real world example but the important distinction with a fork is not "do they entirely replace most of the codebase" but instead it's "how well do they maintain the project" and "how much value do they add through improvements and features"
Blasphemer!!
No, there are only two. Blink (Chromium's engine) was forked from WebKit initially; they're related.
Thanks
Sorry, I missed the mobile part of your statement
For mobile I would recommend duckduckgo private browser.
Which is chromium
Pretty sure it's Webkit?
You're wrong, but chromium uses a fork of webkit
welp, thats that. oh well. i can be wrong - all good.
it doesnt matter really because i cant develop a browser and i have to use what exists - i choose duckduckchrome.
It does matter, because Firefox exists, and you're free to choose that one too. If you know about the underlying tech your decision is more informed.
im not going to pretend im smart enough to understand the backend difference between safari/chrome/firefox - firefox mobile hasnt been a great experience for me, but i dont use the browser on my phone all that much. at home, its vivalidi because it works well. im not knocking firefox, its been my go to browser for over a decade - but its been seemingly backed by google this whole time? i dont know.
Google paying Mozilla for search placement is the same as Google paying Samsung and Apple for search priority on their phones.
It doesn't mean that Google is backing Mozilla, Apple, and Samsung.
Mozilla has to take a much smaller cut compared to Apple because of their size, nothing else.
If you're on iPhone there is no difference in the tech under the hood, because apple only allows webkit. Anything besides Safari is essentially Safari with a skin. The difference in tech is rarely the issue though. It's the monopolistic practices of Google and apple that should concern us
100% agree and what I was trying to get to - it's the tech monopolies that are the issue here.
And I'm on pixel6a - so it's Google anyway.
At this point, Safari lmao
If you want to remove all choice from your phone, spend several hundred dollars for the privilege, and get a heaping pile of shit pretending to be a browser.
What’s hard to do is the engine, you can just take gecko or webkit and make your own browser. I doubt Mozilla’s AI ventures will affect gecko, probably just the browser itself.
What would it actually take? Google did it. Apple did it with WebKit.
Do you have to be as big as google, apple, or microsoft to make a browser? Is a browser as labor intensive as a whole-ass operating system? Or does it have to do with proprietary/patented tech roadblocks?
Please remember that Webkit is based on KHTML, the browsing engine that Konqueror, the webbrowser in the KDE suite, used.
So Apple forked KHTML, made WebKit, Safari, Chrome and loads of other browsers used it and improved it, then Google forked WebKit, and made Blink, their current browsing engine
You could technically fork Blink but the question is whether you have the resources to keep up with web standards. The Web is effectively the universal UI toolkit these days and the pace of development reflects that.
Why fork? Aren’t all of the major engines open source? People can choose one and build a browser around it and leave out the cruft.
You'd need to fork if you decided that you don't like the direction an engine is moving towards. Other than that there's no real reason.