Um actually… Opera and Edge weren’t always based on chromium!
Chrome was not always based on chromeium. Chrome was based on Apple WebKit until 2013 when they forked WebKit and made the Blink engine.
Chromium was still the base before the WebKit/Blink fork. Chrome and Chromium were released simultaneously in 2008.
Chromium has always existed. Originally it was wrapping web kit and later they forked web kit into blink and diverged from Web kit. Chromium is a level above the engine.
Pre-Chromium Edge wasn’t even that bad. Sure, the engine had its issues and there was probably a bit of Edge-specific JS on some websites, but I’m sure they would’ve eventually got there.
But seeing that even Microsoft abandoned making their own browser engine, it goes to show how complex it is to make one nowadays and with new web APIs/features coming out every few weeks it feels like, it’s almost impossible to keep up.
Opera was the shit back in the early days. It could pretend to be any other browser.
Can’t you do that with any browser by changing the user agent?
Yeah:
Sent from Internet Explorer 9
I’m not sure how long you’ve been able to change the user agent in config pages tbh, I just remember Opera had it as an option in the GUI settings and even the right click menu.
I have an installer for Opera 12.18, the last one to use their Presto engine. Every once in a while I test it out to see how it has aged.
It’s not pretty haha. It barely works.
I miss pre chromium Opera so much lol, lot of nostalgia
My favourite browser, abandoned it when they went chromium. RIP in peace Opera.
Always weren’t been
Always been’t
But they are now…
Right but that meme says ‘always has been’.
For the majority of current users, that’s the point. For them it always has been.
Firefox with add-ons. Especially, but not only, Ublock Origin.
NoScript 🤌🏻
I love it in theory… but it just broke so many websites I needed to use. And not always in obvious ways.
uBlock does this occasionally as well. Still worth it.
UBlock is much more reliable than no script in my experience. It’s also usually obvious when it breaks; no script sometimes isn’t obvious until you hit submit and notice none of what you typed actually got sent.
Then just put those sites on your trust list?
You can go through all the sites the initial HTTP request calls out to and decide which ones get a pass. This is how I ensure sites like gstatic, googletagmanager, etc. don’t collect data even though the rest of the site works.
If that’s too much, just open the flood gates for that site and trust everything there. At least it isn’t just sending all your data out by DEFAULT.
That still breaks a lot of sites. For example, Wikipedia gets broken if you click any link and then navigate back. NoScript is just crap. If you want to actually block scripts for something without breaking everything else, use DevTools.
You can use Wikiless, an alternative frontend for Wikipedia which doesn’t have JavaScript, and LibRedirect.
I call bs. I am not experiencing that on mobile or desktop this behavior you’re describing. NoScript does not break Wikipedia.
Yeah these days literally every website uses JavaScript in some format as modern reactive design is easier to do if you can execute client side code. Blocking JavaScript is a sledgehammer solution to the problem.
You can use Ublock Origin in advanced mode, which allows you to block, blacklist/whitelist scripts.
uBlock Origin can act as adblocker plus NoScript combined if you enable advanced mode.
Add-ons are a pretty huge security risk, though. Someone was just posting an article about how tempting it is to sell out with your extension, and how many offers you actually get.
And I’ve already been burned once, and it’s not pretty. Also nothing you can do against this.
The best solution is actually not Firefox, but Mullvad. No need for extensions, based on Tor Browser and can be bundled with a VPN that’s full of other people using the same browser - so you have exactly the same fingerprint, and they can’t tell you apart. Not by extensions, not by IP.
Based on his history it seems unlikely that gorhill, the creator of uBlock Origin would sell out.
And if something did change, there would be enough news about it to notify you. (Like the extension Avast bought a while ago)Really? The whole story about uBlock and uBlock Origin is shady AF.
Which is why I think he won’t ever risk it again.
Really?
It’s pretty shitty to lump uBlock Origin in with those other, shittier ad blockers blindly. After all, anyone who knew the first thing about ad blockers even back then knew that there were plenty of bad ones around but that uBO wasn’t one of them.
How about crowdfunding for adblockers? Now THAT is something I’d gladly pay money for.
So you mean Librewolf
IMO any of the forks are inherently weaker than the main and there’s nothing stopping you from making Firefox work exactly like whichever flavor of fork you prefer, but with security updates the day they come out.
I also just like to support Mozilla where I can. They’re not perfect, but they’re doing a lot more good for the internet than Google are.
This is why I’ve stuck with firefox through thick and thin
Been using FF for about 2 decades now and I have never seen a single good reason to switch.
Ditto. As much as people pretend Firefox is niche, it is the only browser with lineage back to the start of the web.
Truly. I don’t get this new “switch to Firefox!!” hype, are the people writing this very young, or am I missing something? I’ve been using Firefox since beta, I’ve never seen a reason to switch since it’s always been the superior browser, why have people been running anything else in the first place?
I made the switch to Lemmy. Time to do the same with Firefox I guess.
If they ever fuck up big time I’ll go with the next obscure option.
What else is there that is not Chromium/Webkit based?
Now that KHTML is dead, not very much at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines
The SerenityOS browser! /s kinda
Brave, Vivaldi, Edge and other chromium browsers are forks of the main chromium project. They can decide whether to include or exclude features from mainstream chromium.
As far as I know, Brave and Vivaldi will keep Manifest V2 extension support and said that they will not ship WEI (Web Environment Integrity).
Discord uses a modified version of electron, and it’s also probably an outdated fork as well, although I am not sure about that.
Steam, in the other hand, uses CEF, which they use as a way to render it’s interface and as a replacement of VGUI (a good example of this is the steam game overlay), I don’t know if they will ship WEI if it ever releases in chromium as there isn’t a statement from Valve yet.
Sources:
- ARSTechnica, Chrome’s “Manifest V3” plan to limit ad-blocking extensions is delayed, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/chrome-delays-plan-to-limit-ad-blockers-new-timeline-coming-in-march/
- GHacks, Brave confirms it will support Manifest V2 extensions like uBlock Origin even after Chrome drops them, https://www.ghacks.net/2022/09/29/brave-browser-manifest-v2-extensions-after-v3-update/
- Valve Developer Community Wiki, Chromium Embedded Framework, https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
- Github, Discord’s Electron Fork, https://github.com/discord/electron
If I missed something, please tell me!
Brave has an entire contingent of the FOSS community up in arms. They claim that it is doing more data harvesting than Alphabet, and the EULA prevents anyone from finding out what they are doing with all that data scraping.
I don’t have a dog in the fight, other than as a windows user I would like to see FOSS adopted as quickly as possible since they have predicted all this shit for the last 30 years at least.
ETA: I know basically nothing about Vivaldi, though having used it, it seems to function as lightweight as chromium did back in the day. I have no comments on Edge.
I mean, brave is an Ad company, I think they’re just using an ad blocker to stop other ad services other than their own from competing
Vivaldi is filled with bloat and feature creep to the brim now. They abandoned that “lightweight” philosophy ages ago.
Only if you want it (yes you still need to download a larger package).
Vivaldi is created by the former creator of Opera, with sort of the same goals it used to have: care for the power user. They are up for adding any customization and power user tool if people want it. It has never tried to be as lightweight as possible. Instead, it should be one of the most customizable and feature rich browsers out there.
It’s great, as I can add and remove features so it’s tailored to me.
Gosh, the more I hear about Brave the worse it gets…
Discord’s electron still hasn’t received the patch for spectre/meltdown mitigation in the browser, I doubt they will ever have to deal with manifest V3 or WEI.
they will not ship WEI
I don’t really understand how this could work.
The whole outcry around WEI is that most of the web wouldn’t work if you didn’t have a browser that supported it.
Not shipping WEI would seem tantamount to just discontinuing.
@DogMuffins @amycatgirl, it is not so simple, there are a huge number of third-party pages that also depend on certain Google services, directly or indirectly. This is what happens when you depend on sponsors, because with this you lose your freedom of decision, especially if you make a pact with the devil, sorry, Google.
Mozilla has already suffered this in its own flesh, becoming a Google mascot from an independent platform, even with Google devs working on Firefox.
You probably missed a part where Chrome, Chromium, and CEF are practically the same thing when it comes to resource consumption. Man, I can’t even make Steam consume less than 1 gb ram at any time anymore, even when minimized. CPU consumption, the amount of processes, loading times are also problematic. I wish companies would rely on a labor of programmers, not just web programmers.
I don’t think that Steam would consume less resources if it wasn’t a web app. Most of the resources usage there comes from crap loads of high quality images. You can’t have hundreds of images in a single window without eating loads of RAM.
Bullshit. Steam works well when CEF isn’t working right, like no internet connection. Images are still loaded. It’s 100% thier storefront.
Wut?
Reading comprehension level: 0
Eh, after all, they are all chromium under the hood. So I’d expect similar cpu/ram usage from them.
Vivaldi is a great browser
Problem is that someone will have to keep maintain it all. We will see how it will pan out in the end.
This feels weird to say… I really think Microsoft should’ve stuck with trident / edgehtml.
Why? Because you liked the greater browser diversity or because you think it made a better browser?
It was actually one of the most W3C compliant browsers there is, more so than chromium based ones. Unfortunately google’s near monopoly has made websites focus on working in chrome, not on standards.
As a web developer, EdgeHTML was the source of so many bugs, including a few that were regressions, and it didn’t seem like Microsoft dedicated enough resources to the Edge project.
Wait STEAM AND DISCORD ARE CHROMIUM?
Yep, just like slack, spotify, and anything else looking fancy while wasting few gigs of ram to just open. They’re built on electron, which is practically chrome without tabs.
I wish they could bring back mozilla prism. Like all this electron web app shit is popular, so we don’t we use the faster and more efficient browser engine and use gecko!
Speaking of Mozilla, the project they dropped and fired all of their employees working on it all while giving CEO a million dollar raise, the same one that provided most of the performance improvements in the Quantum update, Servo is targetting being an embedded solution. https://floss.social/@servo/110780173168763670
Nice, I didn’t know Servo was still being developed!
This whole Chromium fiasco is partially Mozilla’s fault, they let Google grab the embedded browser monopoly by making Firefox hard to componentize and letting Electron take all the market share. No competition.
Do I still use chromium when I visit the steam website via firefox?
No, its the steam app that runs on Chromium.
Visual studio code is chromium.
dies
Yeah, just wrappers. Steam wasn’t untill fairly recently, but they were slowly switching to it for some time.
So that’s why it runs worse now.
It all makes sense
Not a good idea if Google be pulling some shit
Yeah, it’s weird for them to rely on Google considering how hard Valve has worked to make Steam independent from MS.
It probably doesn’t matter for what they do. There isn’t really much need for an ad blocker on a browser that’s going to a store page which is essentially an ad for a product in and of itself. A steam user actually wants that store page to load, why would there be a need for a store page?
And they could transition to something else if Google does something that affects them.
Chromium isn’t technically Google
Still serves googles goal of control over the internet.
It’s maintained by Google, which is pretty much the same thing - in the end, they get to decide what features get implemented and what doesn’t make the cut. Sure we can fork it, and we can make our own, but in the end as long as their code is the main base, they have a lot of control over all the different forks, as usually the forks will have to keep rebasing their code off of new updates to stay as secure and up to date as possible.
It is, good luck hard forking such a huge codebase.
I mean what would stop a company from doing that? I get why they don’t, because a lot of changes and fixes get implemented into the code from various companies/individuals, but if you had enough manpower and money, it could be done.
Exaclly money and manpower. Noone is going to do it.
I don’t think it’s too weird. So many apps today are just Chromium wrappers. It’s just easier to use a premade base, plus you don’t have to develop the web and desktop version independently, they can literally be the same code.
While that’s fairly typical and good practice in dev circles, we’re talking about a company that’s single handedly elevated an entire OS to prevent a big company taking too much power. I think the key here is they don’t really compete with Google.
Anything that uses the electron framework uses chromium.
Although in the case of steam they are using the Chromium Embedded Framework(CEF) to embed the steam store into their interface, as well as to power the steam overlays browser.
The worst part is, the CEF really is the only way to implement browsers inside other interfaces. OBS uses it too for it’s browser source. There really isn’t any alternatives - if only FF could create it’s own Firefox Embedded Framework to compete, but that’s probably not in the cards due to costs. Mozilla is a not for profit relying on donations and grants.
And electron is a method for creating desktop app interfaces using website code, it’s used for the interfaces of Discord, slack, teams, Streamlabs (yeah they ripped out the OBS Qt interface and replaced it with electron), and sooo many other modern applications that it’s hard to make track of. And it uses essentially the same thing as CEF at its heart.
Basically any website can be wrapped in an electron wrapper to produce a standalone desktop app.
Yeah, but Google putting their fuckery in it is the issue.
Mozilla doesn’t make it as easy to use the Firefox / Gecko engine in other projects, which doesn’t help for adoption.
I’m way out of the loop, but is the issue that they actively make it difficult to use the rendering engine or is it that the cost to modularize it isn’t worth the payoff to Firefox itself? A subtle but important distinction IMO. I always felt it was the second, but maybe I was being dense?
Back in the days it was possible to use Firefox engine to create apps. It was called XUL. Heck, Firefox itself was just a XUL app! But then they decided it wasn’t worth it for whatever reason and now their engine is tightly integrated.
I believe it might be still possible with UXP - a hard fork made for Pale Moon project.
Pale Moon is based on a derivative of the Gecko rendering engine (Goanna) and builds on a hard fork of the Mozilla code (mozilla-central) called UXP, a XUL-focused application platform that provides the underpinnings of several XUL applications including Pale Moon. This means that the core rendering functions for Pale Moon may differ from Firefox (and other browsers) and websites may display slightly different in this browser.
They don’t try to make it difficult, but they make code changes that make it clear they have no concern for anyone who might be trying to use the engine anywhere other than in a retail build of Firefox, without providing things like deprecation warnings or upgrade paths.
wait, the steam browser is chromium? no way
Basically every in app browser is.
How the fuck has everyone so easily allowed so few tech companies to dominate?
That’s just late stage capitalism.
No, that’s just people don’t want to pay for anything and expect everything to be free.
The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.
When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.
Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.
The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?
What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That’s why they switched to Chromium.
Oh… so to answer your question no one is “allowing” a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You’re free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you’ll do it you’ll probably just use Chromium.
And if you were to actually create an innovative or competing product, Google would just buy you out like Android, Waze, Nest, etc
Not on browsers, probably. It’s one of the areas where antitrust still has some echoes. They’ll probably pay you to stay afloat.
Tech giants are buying everyone left and right because people don’t want to pay for these innovative products. Imagine paying a monthly subscription for Waze! Who would do that? Literally no one. Innovative products can’t exist without paying customers.
Have you tried developing your own web browser?
The Web has become so complex, you need a huge team of talented developers to keep up with it, and for that you need a lot of money.
How hard can’t it be just put scrum on GitHub and let it work from there
Strange that nobody’s doing that, then. Especially since so many people want more competition for Google.
Robert Bork:
He also became an influential antitrust scholar, arguing that consumers often benefited from corporate mergers and that antitrust law should focus on consumer welfare rather than on ensuring competition.
…What the fuck?
Yeah, it’s fine if you drive all your competition out of business, as long as the consumer "isn’t harmed"TM . But, of course, how are you going to prove that the consumer isn’t harmed?
Software development is very expensive. And everyone just wants free stuff. Imagine the outcry if Firefox would drop revenue from Google search and switched to a subscription model a-la Adobe! People would literally lose their minds and call Mozilla Nazis.
Chromium/Electron is just super easy to integrate. Afaik Mozilla wanted to make Firefox more easily embedable as well, but that project was killed.
Closest these days is an extension for Firefox that enable progressive web apps.
deleted by creator
Not only the browser. The whole app was built with CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
It used to be only the browser/store. Now it’s the whole app.
Firefox is kept alive by Google default search money AFAIK otherwise why don’t they sue google for showing different search results page in firefox
It’s sad. Google basically owns the internet
I don’t believe this has been the case for years?
It’s still the case, at least for Firefox on Android
They do have an extension that forces the new search results page, but I’ve noticed it freezes the browser if I tap on an image result, so I have it disabled.
I completely forgot I had added that extension (back when Google actually looked ugly on Firefox on Android without it) just disabled and oh my god not only does it not freeze it actually feels usable again (I hate the weird AI suggested tabs at the top in the chromium UI).
Ah yeah, seems not in every country! Had to go through 2017 bloomberg articles to find out lol
I just wish Mozilla didn’t just tread Gecko as part of Firefox, the few who tried developing on it came to the conclusion that it’s not sustainable if the engines developer doesn’t give a fuck about you! :/
Damn, that sounds like a real missed opportunity. Hopefully they come around on that one.
Well, they always did it like that and basically cut all their bigger projects in the massive layoff so I wish they did too but I doubt it :/
Laughts in LibreWolf
Techically an FF fork !
Firefox or Netscape? I only ask since Firefox has its own roots in Netscape, and I understood that the Scape apps were ported from Netscape, not Firefox. Libre was a Scape app a decade ago.
Totally firefox , librewolf is rather a hardened firefox , with few features we can tweak in FF already !
Firefox, it’s only been around for a few years. It works as a soft fork where they pull in all the upstream releases after hardening their privacy
This is the way
It gets worse. All Electron applications are Chromium, too.
Chromium is everywhere…
Safari still uses the WebKit engine… right?
Google Chrome used to use WebKit before switching to their own weird engine that a whole bunch of other browsers now use.
When Google forked from WebKit to create Blink, they had genuine reasons for it.
Apple was stalling any progress of web by stalling new features in WebKit. They wanted to push their native apps and get big cut from developers’ money.
Google had to fork and progress web dev further.
And unfortunately for us, Google folks are greedy assholes who stop at nothing to own everything web even if they have to bend everything.
WEI is a perfect example.
I never expected to fall down a rabbit hole.
Apple was stalling any progress of web by stalling new features in WebKit. They wanted to push their native apps and get big cut from developers’ money.
I mean, whatever their reasons, for World Wide Web of hypertext pages the list of necessary features shouldn’t be so long.
So a good thing.
Anyway, that battle is long lost, so I’m just slowly moving my “internet reading” needs into Gemini. Friends I can’t move, though.
If most of what you want out of the web is browsing static web pages, halting development of standards is fine. But if you want to expose capabilities through the browser like location that are available on new platforms instead of relying on platform-specific apps, you’re going to need new features.
I don’t want that. WWW is not intended for that.
If you want that, there’s been Flash and Java applets at least allowing whatever you’d like.
That was the correct way to put cross-platform applications into webpages.
Don’t tell me about security problems in those, these are present in any piece of software and fixed with new versions, just like with the browser itself.
I don’t want that. WWW is not intended for that.
Okay, then links awaits you. I’d rather use something that enables powerful in-browser web applications while not relying on a host of proprietary bug ridden plugins.
google uses blink which is forked from WebKit
Named as such because, like Weeping Angels, if you blink you’ll be sent back to a society without enforcement of antitrust laws
actually the name of Blink engine is quite interesting, it was named after the non-standard html
blinktag and ironically it never supported it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)#NamingI don’t understand this argument about antitrust laws. As far as i know Google hasn’t done anything to block other companies from making their own search engines or browsers. Nor does Value and Steam, nor Microsoft and Windows.
nor Microsoft and Windows.
Come on, this is ridiculous.
WEI checks if your browser and system is “genuine” and “unmodified” before letting you access any content “protected” by it, which inevitably leads to smaller and custom mods that don’t fit their predetermined criteria for “genuineness” being locked out, which in turn forces you to use Google (and Microsoft and Apple, they’re in on it too) products in order to access certain content and eventually the entire internet, just as surely as it’s almost completely impossible to avoid their Google Analytics malware.
And before you say “that’s a ridiculous slippery slope fallacy! That’ll never happen!”, Logitech is already requiring you to go to a website that will only open in Chromium browsers in order to pair devices with the Logitech Unifying Receiver.
@notenoughbutter @Resol, and WebKit is a fork from KHtml made by the German KDE.
Blink is the most used engine, because it’s the most compatible with current web standarts, even somewhat more than Gecko. If Apple’s Safari insist in it’s WebKit, the most outdated engine, it’s become the new IE in a near Future.Thanks for reminding me of what the hell it was called
But… but… it’s an open-source…
Edge wasn’t always chromium. It was their own engine and it was great, but too many people complained essentially that it wasn’t chromium so they switched to chromium.
it was great
Is this some Mandela effect speaking?
Yeah, it might have been “fine” at the normal web browsing part, but Microsoft kept trying to push their proprietary extension store. Also, didn’t they not support extensions for the longest time? I think that was the biggest reason they switched to chromium, so they could use all those existing chrome extensions?
Same with Opera, I miss old Opera with stackable tabs and before they got sold off to some shady company
Wasn’t old Edge just ie, revamped?
Yes but it was changed quite a bit, it supported way more standards and was getting way more updates to keep it up to date. The issue is that was expensive and also people complained that it some websites didn’t work on it, so it made more economical sense to switch it to chromium. I really wish they had kept it though.
Sorta, sorta not. Looking at the wiki page, it used “EdgeHTML” as the browser engine, which was a fork of ie’s engine (MSHTML). But it was a massive overhaul removing a bunch of legacy code and rewriting parts to fit modern standards and to make it compatible with webkit. It was maintained alongside ie11.
I remember testing it out and it being a lot faster than ie was when it first came out, but I’ve always been a ff user so I didn’t switch to it.
