Firefox is the only way.

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.

Wha- hold up... I'm not sure I understand...

Chrome was based on WebKit?

I'm not aware about the old stuff as much so if someone could fill me in...

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.

No, Microsoft is just historically bad at making browsers. It was not until Internet Explorer 7 that they finally implemented HTML 4 and CSS 2 without major glaring bugs.

Can't you do that with any browser by changing the user agent?

I miss pre chromium Opera so much lol, lot of nostalgia

Always been't

Right but that meme says 'always has been'.

I love it in theory… but it just broke so many websites I needed to use. And not always in obvious ways.

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.

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)

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.

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.

Ditto. As much as people pretend Firefox is niche, it is the only browser with lineage back to the start of the web.

What else is there that is not Chromium/Webkit based?

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

Gosh, the more I hear about Brave the worse it gets....

Vivaldi is filled with bloat and feature creep to the brim now. They abandoned that "lightweight" philosophy ages ago.

Just to add the missing comment about Edge - MS is turning into the Microsoft version of Chrome. They removed Google's ad bs and replaced it with their own ad and monetization bs.

@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.

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.

Eh, after all, they are all chromium under the hood. So I'd expect similar cpu/ram usage from them.

Mozilla.org is the corpse of Netscape that Google keeps animated so that it looks like they have competition when they really don't.

The existence of Firefox is something they can point to to say they're not a monopoly. The fact that 80% of the revenue Firefox receives is from Google means that Google effectively controls them. Mozilla has to weigh every decision against the risk that it will cause Google to withdraw their funding. That severely restricts the choices they're willing to consider.

Firefox is only 5% of browsers, so it really doesn't matter to Google if that 5% of users considers using a different search engine. Because of the Firefox user base, many of them will have already switched search engines, and because Google is such a dominant player, many others would switch back to Google if the browser used a different default. So, maybe 10% of that 5% would permanently switch search engines if Google stopped paying. Is that really worth billions per year? Probably not. But, pretending like you have competitors in the browser space and using that to push back on antitrust, that's definitely worth billions per year.

Google pays Mozilla in exchange for google being Firefox's default search engine

For an example, Mozilla being forced to use Google Location Services as default even though Mozilla has its own. I am also a Firefox user but it always makes me wonder what other TnCs forced on Mozilla as part of the search deal.

What narrative? Firefox is the only browser google doesn't fully control. It's the only choice if you don't support the google monopoly.

Diversity. MS had made great strides with EdgeHTML, but it was still pretty bad

But at least opening the browser didn't take all my ram.

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!

Do I still use chromium when I visit the steam website via firefox?

dies

So that's why it runs worse now.

Not a good idea if Google be pulling some shit

Yeah, but Google putting their fuckery in it is the issue.

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.

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.

It's still the case, at least for Firefox on Android

That's just late stage capitalism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Closest these days is an extension for Firefox that enable progressive web apps.

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 :/

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.

Netscape was amazing

There's a Phoenix metaphor here somewhere

PiHole is doing DNS resolution only, it doesn't have any way to know what the link is, its not sent that data.

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.

@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.

Named as such because, like Weeping Angels, if you blink you'll be sent back to a society without enforcement of antitrust laws

Thanks for reminding me of what the hell it was called

Up to date chromium is 100% just as bad. Forked and selectively maintained version (like brave) aren't 100% just as bad, but varying degrees well below up to maybe even slightly above this hypothetical 100% marker. Not advocating for Brave (I don't personally use it), but the way they update is my main point here.

Not all of chromium's constituent components are required for a functional browser. At the end of the day, Firefox is just easier to trust and better supported than any of the chromium forks, personal opinion.

I know, right?

I’m currently using both browsers, and I've been with FF for a very long time. But the things that come with Vivaldi from the very beginning make it my daily driver.

I went whole hog. The sync features are great between computer and phone app (phone app is excellent!) and they actively disable all the terrible shit from chrome. It works with bing/chat gpt too which is nice. They have been very vocal against Google proposed changes and I'm confident they will work around them if at all possible. If not, hell yeah, I'm jumping ship, but I give Vivaldi a lot of credit for what they've done this far. I'm hanging in there for now.

Yeah but a bit despookified

Everything on iOS uses Safari tho, Apple doesn't allow other browser engines but at least they don't nerf the Webkit version for third parties anymore!

There's Orion browser, which is made by the Kagi search people. It is based on Safari, has vertical tabs, has built in ad blocking, and supports Chrome and Firefox extensions so you can install uBO. It doesn't fix the developer issues, but you might like it better than Safari, and it's not Chromium based like Arc browser.