A list of recent hostile moves by #Google’s #Chrome team;
handy for sharing with your entourage, to explain why they should stop using #Chromium / #GoogleChrome and use #Firefox or #Epiphany as their main #web #browser :
- The “Manifest v3” sabotage of content blocking extensions: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/10/23131029/mozilla-ad-blocking-firefox-google-chrome-privacy-manifest-v3-web-request
- The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/chrome-banishes-jpeg-xl-photo-format-that-could-save-phone-space/
- #WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
Never used Chrome, and strongly suggest to other people not to use Chrome. However, I’ve not had the hate for chromium browsers (so far, the killing of extensions might drive me away) - I’ve really enjoyed Vivaldi for a lot more features and having the engine that works on websites (yes this sucks). My mom OTOH is a Firefox person, and I just had to help her get onto her insurance website - she had tech support on the phone, and Firefox just would not let her set a password and just kept looping and using up the reset link. Finally I tried in Vivaldi (Chromium) and it worked first try. Of course, I’ve had the same experience in the opposite direction. So I have to keep using both.
Also, Vivaldi anyway has a much better UI IMHO for what I want than Firefox does, and is faster. As an IT person, I much prefer semantic versioning which Vivaldi also has.
Anyway, at this point Chromium is like IE was - you can’t not have access to your health insurance website, and they don’t apparently test in Firefox so it doesn’t work. You can’t drop your provider cause you don’t pick it, your work does. The upshot of Chromium is that there are rebuilds and it runs on other platforms than Windows - so… there’s that at least.
Honestly, I’d like to see someone fork Chromium and keep web extensions etc, but no one wants to write a browser engine anymore - even Vivaldi, which was the old Opera team that wrote 2 browser engines over the history of the browser through v12 - can’t afford to make their own engine. What I don’t get is why so many browser makers have chosen chromium vs gecko - almost no one wraps gecko in the last 10 years. (Maybe Firefox is different now? I know it in some ways started getting crappy wrt extensions back in v28? whenever Pale Moon forked.)
Then let me brighten your day a bit: https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform-browser-project/
Time to learn some c++, it’s a good cause to help with
And subset of C++ they are using is easily understandable, just take a look at some easier part.
I strongly suggest against using any Chromium forks. I already explained why in another post. I’ll put the link to that here: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/282011/Why-do-most-browser-companies-opt-for-a-Chromium-Blink-base#entry-comment-1301554
We did have people developing a new browser engine. It was called Servo and Mozilla went and killed the project.
Maybe it just wasn’t going anywhere and they didn’t think it was right for Firefox, maybe it was experiment for experiment’s sake, maybe it was always destined to be a side project. I don’t know.
It’s still being developed, but doesn’t have nearly as much manpower and funding as it did at Mozilla.
Honestly, my very uninformed opinion is that there should be more browsers developed using WebKit.
It’s still FOSS (despite Apple’s best efforts) and it’s widely supported due to Safari’s market share (particularly on mobile).
I’m just not familiar with how easy it is to implement outside of Apple (I know GNOME Web uses a GTK port), or how well current popular extensions can integrate with it.
Then again, I assume we’d be having the same argument, except complaining that it’s Apple, rather than Google, that has too much control over the web.
Servo was an experimental browser engine for Mozilla that they were using as a testing ground for their investment into the Rust programming language; the project did bear fruit as components were slowly integrated into Firefox starting at version 57 with Project Quantum. They did eventually complete that transition and everyone using an up-to-date version of Firefox is using various Servo components (I’m personally a big fan). Unfortunately, when COVID devastated the economy Mozilla axed some of their side projects, which included Servo itself. Maybe we’ll see further investment in the future, but they did already do what they wanted to with it for the most part.
Also as a long running Firefox user, I don’t get these incompatibilities at all. And if you start using Firefox and increase the usage numbers the incompatible sites would need to reconsider their stance.
The problem is just we have to use the sites. There’s no real choice ( we have some of this for work too). I’m not losing my job or impacting my medical care for a browser war. If I can fool the site with an extension or something, then if I know that I’ll do it. But this idea that you can just avoid browsers when you need a website is not really true. I will say - I very rarely see these problems compared to back in the day. But I have contacted tech support and they just say use the working browser. I can’t report a bug, they don’t even understand why I’m being a PITA.
I just use Firefox until it definitely doesn’t work, then I use a chromium browser because of course I can’t not have access to a crucial website for my life.
That’s really unfortunate and a bad service provider for you. If there is nothing that can be done for that service, you don’t need to use that browser as a daily driver, but can just use for the services that you mention. And you need to keep nagging the service provider for support.
This is not just a browser war. It’s a war over your rights, your control over your choices, your privacy, what software and hardware you can use. You are already feeling how that affects your life daily, consider this in a mass attack on you.
WEI will enable service providers to decide what firewall you can use, what addons you can have, what version of the browser you can reach their websites, what antivirus software that you need to have, what cpu architecture, which tablet … This list can go on.
sure this won’t start in this manner right away. But I can assure you it will evolve towards more control service providers have on you.