Whatever they say about "loving the Web", the Chrome team will choose Google's ad business over everything else, web standards, user agency, security, privacy, safety, interoperability, literally anything and everything else every single time.
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The current state of the browser ecosystem is fundamentally:
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Chrome
- Apple Chrome
- Crypto-Neofash Chrome
- Microsoft Proxy Chrome
- Norwegian Chrome
- Other Norwegian Chrome
- Overtly-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many)
- Embedded-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many,many)
- Serial-Numbers-Filed-Off Chrome, and- Firefox
So.
@mhoye Safari isn’t chromium-based, it’s WebKit
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@skyfaller Yeah, Servo is the "Abandoned-On-A-Doorstep-At-Birth" cousin I mentioned. I'm not daily driving it yet but I still play with it a few times a month and it's really coming along.
@mhoye @skyfaller
There's an account for @servo on Mastodon. -
@mhoye I don't think we should ignore the tiny browser engines no one uses, because that kinda describes KHTML / Konqueror, before Apple threw a lot of dev resources at it to make WebKit / Safari. Something like Servo or even more obscure could be the basis for a real contender if they got enough resources.
Honestly my greatest fear is the LLM bubble takes too long to pop and does permanent damage to the FOSS ecosystem, including niche browsers, so such a dark horse browser becomes impossible.
@skyfaller @mhoye one thing that's different about the Chrome monoculture we have right now vs. the IE4 monoculture of the early 2000s is that Google owns both the dominant browser *and* a number of huge websites and has no qualms about making those websites unusable in non-Chrome browsers.
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Respectfully: I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for ten years. I know exactly what Librewolf is and how it's made and I will never install it.
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Respectfully: I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for ten years. I know exactly what Librewolf is and how it's made and I will never install it.
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@mhoye I'm just saying don't write off Dillo or Netsurf
@skyfaller @mhoye netsurf these days is genuinely a worse experience than just using a text based terminal browser.
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The weird paranoid uncle is the Tor Browser. Respectfully, I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for ten years. I know exactly what Librewolf and Waterfox are, I know exactly how they're made and I will never install either of them.
@mhoye @dzwiedziu I feel reservations too.
What are the other options?
I don't have a good feeling about my own ability (or resources) to yeet the bad features into the sun. -
@mhoye @dzwiedziu I feel reservations too.
What are the other options?
I don't have a good feeling about my own ability (or resources) to yeet the bad features into the sun. -
@mhoye Safari isn’t chromium-based, it’s WebKit
-
The current state of the browser ecosystem is fundamentally:
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Chrome
- Apple Chrome
- Crypto-Neofash Chrome
- Microsoft Proxy Chrome
- Norwegian Chrome
- Other Norwegian Chrome
- Overtly-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many)
- Embedded-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many,many)
- Serial-Numbers-Filed-Off Chrome, and- Firefox
So.
@mhoye Why is Safari “Apple Chrome?”
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Respectfully: I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for ten years. I know exactly what Librewolf is and how it's made and I will never install it.
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I mean, that's not entirely fair. There's also:
- Weird Paranoid Uncle Of Firefox, and
- Abandoned-On-A-Doorstep-At-Birth-But-Somehow-Surviving-And-Growing-Up-Fast-Cousin-Of Firefoxand a bunch of more seriously niche esoterica, but I think that covers it.
-
The current state of the browser ecosystem is fundamentally:
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Chrome
- Apple Chrome
- Crypto-Neofash Chrome
- Microsoft Proxy Chrome
- Norwegian Chrome
- Other Norwegian Chrome
- Overtly-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many)
- Embedded-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many,many)
- Serial-Numbers-Filed-Off Chrome, and- Firefox
So.
As much as I'd otherwise hop on the "get Firefox" bandwagon, their engine gets clobbered by most business saass platforms. Try using Firefox for more than 10 minutes with say Atlassian Confluence or Sharepoint and see how that goes -> I had to give up Firefox because we're an Atlassian shop. Yeah, a single page is 97MB (which is a lot of other unrelated wtf questions), but takes 25s to load? sigh.
True, Norwegian Chrome (Vivaldi) follows the manifestV3 uBlock drop, but at least they have their own (less functional) adblock built-in and on by default.
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Respectfully: I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for ten years. I know exactly what Librewolf is and how it's made and I will never install it.
-
The current state of the browser ecosystem is fundamentally:
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Chrome
- Apple Chrome
- Crypto-Neofash Chrome
- Microsoft Proxy Chrome
- Norwegian Chrome
- Other Norwegian Chrome
- Overtly-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many)
- Embedded-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many,many)
- Serial-Numbers-Filed-Off Chrome, and- Firefox
So.
@mhoye Safari is not chromium based.
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@jchaven I know, I get it, but we can't be asking people to buy new hardware and learn a new OS just so they can participate in the world safely.
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Whatever they say about "loving the Web", the Chrome team will choose Google's ad business over everything else, web standards, user agency, security, privacy, safety, interoperability, literally anything and everything else every single time.
What anyone on that team says they love or care about or want does not change anything they're going to do.
Get Firefox.
Yes, they're thrashing. Yes, the AI stuff is bullshit nobody wants.
Get Firefox, add uBlock Origin.
@mhoye I had a weird moment this morning when renewing my car registration. The Pennsylvania DMV kept telling me that I had to fill out the form that was just asking for my registration number, license plate, and a checkbox agreeing to terms. I double checked the info was correct, checked the box again, and resubmitted. Loop!
So I tried in Chromium and it worked. Not sure if it was uBlock, Privacy Badger, or just Firefox itself, but the DMV is doing something unfriendly.
