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.
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.
Always weren't been
Always been't
Firefox with add-ons. Especially, but not only, Ublock Origin.
NoScript 🤌🏻
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.
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.
This is why I've stuck with firefox through thick and thin
I made the switch to Lemmy. Time to do the same with Firefox I guess.
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
Gosh, the more I hear about Brave the worse it gets....
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.
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.
Eh, after all, they are all chromium under the hood. So I'd expect similar cpu/ram usage from them.
Problem is that someone will have to keep maintain it all. We will see how it will pan out in the end.
Vivaldi is a great browser
Google accounts for some 80%+ of Mozilla’s revenue. Firefox struck a different kind of deal with the devil than chromium browsers, but Google is the one pulling the strings.
Bit of a weird thought, but I wonder also if they see Mozilla as a sort of controlled opposition too? As in, keep Firefox around so they don't get in trouble over antitrust or something like that?
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.
Do you have any examples of how google is pulling the strings at Mozilla ?
For default search.
I'm sure you're aware Firefox isn't in the search market. They are in the browser market and need to fund browser development. They've used Yahoo in the past and will go with whatever deal gives the best value. They could go with Bing if they wanted.
Funding from them does not mean control, and your insinuation is misleading and false.
This feels weird to say.... I really think Microsoft should've stuck with trident / edgehtml.
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.
Visual studio code is chromium.
dies
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?
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?
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.
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.
Was IE for the longest time
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.
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 :/
Be sure to install AdNauseam on your Firefox to really go full "fuck you" to google.
It's uBlock, but it's fucking with their revenue
Unfortunately, if you have properly set up Firefox, i.e with arkenfox user.js or by using Librewolf, it doesn't work :/ It still blocks adds without issues, but it's not visiting them.
Or if you're running PiHole - same issue. Is there a way how to make PiHole actually go though all those clicks? I guess it would be hard to figure out what's an ad and what's telemetry.
PiHole is doing DNS resolution only, it doesn't have any way to know what the link is, its not sent that data.
I actually think AdNauseam is the cause of Google making WEI.
But... but... it's an open-source...
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.
google uses blink which is forked from WebKit
@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
From this band, I get more and more in love with Vivaldi, especially their Workspaces feature.
I tried FF the other day instead of Vivaldi and I was like, no scroll wheel to switch tabs? No quick commands? No workspaces? Ugh I am prepared to keep using a chromium engine rather than give up all the "power user" features. It's just sooo good.
Been using gestures for so long I constantly catch myself using them in other apps where it doesn't work and getting frustrated at myself.
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.
Yeah, I use Vivaldi at work. I love it.
It's not on my personal devices, but if work is going to default to Chrome anyway, I may as well be using the best version of it.
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.
Maybe apple will re-launch safari on windows, now that google is being a dickhead.
Honest question… I get that Chrome has a bunch questionable privacy practices that sends data back to Google, but do the chromium based browsers do that as well? My understanding is that Chromium is just the rendering engine. How is it bad?
Also, if Google implements their bullshit DRM features, I wonder if the derivative browsers will be able to disable it. I believe I saw that Brave said they won’t use it.
Because Google controls the Chromium source.
And when they control the vast majority of browser share (already true):
They add non-standard features, some websites use these features which locks out browsers that follow the standards.
Sure, you could maintain a Chromium fork that strips all the "bad" stuff. But that's a lot of dev time and money.... and it only gets worse with time as they add more. And why go through all the trouble to make your user's experience worse?
And now Google de-facto controls web development standards.
The more users we can get off Chromium the better. Right now it's literally just Firefox and Safari that are holding out.
The problem is largely that it gives power to Google to implement what they want (and how they want it) and everyone else just has to go along or become incompatible with 70% of all web users
Yes chromium is 100% just as bad
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.
epiphany and falkon goes away...
well,epiphany isn't really chromium. it's webkit instead
It was a sad day when Opera dropped presto.
We wanted HTML as complex as Adobe Flash. When we got it, the standard became so complex no way smaller players that didn't dedicate massive resources to keeping up could possibly keep up.
There was just no way to keep presto up to date with the ever evolving web without a massive new source of income for Opera.
Midori, Falkon, Vivaldi, Epiphany, and maybe if you have to - silk are all browsers I'd use over chrome.
Vivaldi is Chromium based too
Yeah but a bit despookified
There’s also Arc for Mac. Nice but still too chromeish for me. Thank god there’s Safari
Safari might have better performance than others but I feel like the UI is pretty clunky, and as a développer, god I HATE safari and all their differences with every other major browser.
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.
A developer friend told me the same… it’s a shame because it’s so handy with continuity between devices and all. Probably I’m just used to it
Why is steam and discord here?
Steam build-in browser is Chromium.
And Discord desktop app is a whole Chromium web browser with disabled tabs panel running only one website (https://app.discord.com).
Discord uses a framework called Electron. It uses, among other things, chromium to run the website on your desktop. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)
Steam at least uses chromium in its program for things like the store and built-in browser.
The discord software is actually a Chromium-based browser... but you can only access the Discord website with it.
Because it's chromium bruv
Discord is known for being an electron.js app but I don't know about steam
OBS should be there too.
Not sure about discord but steam is definitely a web app. Not sure what tech they use but I'd guess something electron'ish
And yet it is missing tons of electron apps.
Learned Electron is also chromium. So Foundry vtt is as well...
So just use it in a tab of Firefox? I literally had no idea of an electron version of Foundry until this instant.
It's not an electron version. Foundry the program IS electron. When you run the executable, it's running electron (chromium). This also makes Foundry run like crap in non-chromium browsers and isn't recommended.
Am I crazy for using Opera? I switched from chrome 3 years ago and have enjoyed everything about Opera even their "gamer" browser OperaGX is just a great experience.
The company's history is not that great, they've done some shady shit before. Vivaldi is where the original opera folks are at now.
Yeah, as a long standing fan of Opera - fuck Opera of today and their Chinese overlords.
Well shit...
I haven't used Opera in a long time, but I used it heavily 20 years ago. Back then you had to pay for it or there was a big ad banner on the toolbar.
It certainly wasn't always Chromium based, Chrome didn't come along until 2009 or something. Not sure when that change happened.
If I had to go back to that job I was doing (Internet Help desk) again, I'd consider Opera again. It was fast at navigating an intranet site where all the images were cached locally, but the killer feature for me was the back/forward. If you went back, all the stuff you typed in the form was still there. So you could resubmit it if the session had timed out or there was an issue.
I still use mouse gestures (an Opera thing) via extensions with whatever browser I have used since.
It went downhill when Opera was sold to China and original devs created Vivaldi instead.
Yea Opera used to be dope but that was a looong time ago
Opera is worse than Chrome for privacy.
You should try Vivaldi. It was made by the founder of Opera and is actually really very good.
Steam is chromium, in every device/OS?
well probably except on iOS, there you have to use Safari
Build in browser is Chromium and I think Big Picture mode can be too
It's so sad that Presto didn't get FOSSed.
Technically it already depended on plenty of FOSS technologies, like gstreamer etc.
We know this from the leak which allowed to compile a working browser.
If only it was legally released, it would still be alive, I'm sure of that - there were even patches for the leaked source adding functionality and fixing bugs.
Librewolf for the win !
Duck duck go browser is also very good.
Pretty sure that's chromium too. I'd rather just use Chrome though. I'm pretty sure duck duck go sells user data. At least with Google they tell you what they use your data for instead of acting like they are saving the world.
Their entire business model is just reading Google's TOS and finding some small detail to make a big deal out of that really means nothing.
Duckduckgo doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to collect data that google does, and their ads are keyword based, rather than being influenced by other data. Their search engine is really the only thing I'd recommend using however since their add-on and browser don't offer anything that others don't.
Didn't they allow Microsoft telemetry through the tracking protection since they rely on Microsoft for all sorts of stuff despite their "avoid big tech" advertising? There's so many better options, like Librewolf, Mullvad, Orion, Mull, even Brave if you really want a Chromium browser.
FREAKING UC BROWSER THE ONE I USED ON MY DADS NOKIA WHAT TGE HECK IT IS DOING HERE
Real talk, if even Steam is Chromium-based, how can I escape? Is there a non- or less-evil, but similar launcher? I'm trying to shift away, but it's really difficult since everyone I know uses at least one, usually many of those programs.
Games marked drm free on gog.com
Whats that squirrel??
Seems like UC Browser.
What does Google holding the gun in this picture imply?
I mean brave is fine. I use firefox and brave and tor browser and mullvad browser. There isn't anything too bad about brave though
Have you ever tried Librewolf?
we use it for I2P
id still probably use an chromium browser
along with firefox and stuff
Firefox died long ago.
It was an engine fight, and Mozilla decided not to participate.
Firefox? dead?! you mean the browser that peaked in user share in 2009 and has even declining ever since?? no! say it ain't so! surely if I post a few more memes to lemmy it will turn things around
Am I the only one who doesn't get the hate on chromium? I mean it's fast, it works and nobody forces you to use Google's proprietary chrome. You can use anything you want
Manifest V3 and WEI
Well they don't directly force you to use it, but when basically all of the most popular browsers (including the default browser of Windows) are Chromium based, that means that developers optimize their sites for that first and foremost. And combined with Google's amp protocol, which adds control for them, it means that they can dictate many terms for these other companies. It's like sure, you can use Vimeo to upload your video, but who the hell is gonna see it when there's YouTube? Same thing here, why use some other standard (such as what Firefox is doing) when the support for Chromium is that much greater, even though it's more restrictive in others.
Laughs in Internet Explorer 6
Google, or let say the Chromium group, can easily implement "features" that are already present in proprietary Google Chrome, and easily control the Internet and its users' personalized settings.
Indeed, Chromium-built browsers have smooth user experience and simplicity, but at what cost?
Competition will be dead.
IMHO nobody sane hates a technology.
The big problem is Chromes and Googles dominance over the internet. Even at this moment, there are sites that don't work with Firefox/alternate browsers at all.
Stating that people can use alternative browsers is theoretically correct, but in reality one is forced to have a Chromium based browser installed for the websites/services one has to access. (My main browser is Firefox and I have a Chromium backup browser on every device, not by my choice.)
Combine this with the push of Google to prevent adblocking and centralize control of the internet at one place, and we are on our way to a real shit show.
You can happily search for the history of Internet Explorer in the 2000s, for a taste of what is yet to come.
In case Googles agenda has not affected you, yet, you should really ponder if
a.) Googles agenda will never affect you negatively in the future b.) Googles agenda will never affect people you care about in the future
In the end, I don't hate Chrome, Chromium or any other browser based on this technology. I really don't like the direction things are developing and I remember the monopolies of the past in IT, which were only of benefit for the monopolists.
I use it only as a fallback if something doesn't work on Firefox ie. Google Meet. Using anything that isn't Firefox or Webkit (Safari etc) contributes to Google's dominance.
I'm watching The Spiffing Brit's exploit live stream right now. Firefox cannot handle that. Edge can. On linux
interesting
Update: Alright. Fine! Its probably extension issue
What? It's just a livestream.
You use Edge on linux?
Better than chrome on linux
This is a fucking childish take. If you don't like what Google is doing with Chrome that's one thing, but acting as if the code itself is evil is just straight-up magical thinking.
The thing is, Google has so much influence on chromium that even if you don't use Chrome, using chromium based browsers means you still help google maintain its monopoly on web. Only real alternatives are Firefox, Librewolf etc.
Chromium is controlled by Google.
Browsers down steam on Chromium will either pull from chromium or fork from it.
They hold >75% of global browser market share.
They make a change, like enforcing Web Environment Integrity API, you either comply or your competing chromium browser will.
@Spudwart @lolcatnip, wrong, Chromium is FOSS and every browsercompany is free to gutt it out and modify it to their like, it's not more controlled by Google than Gecko with several Google devs working in Mozilla on Firefox.
The Problem is Google itself with it's imperialistic behavior in internet, not which browser you use. This is precisely why he invented this WEI crap, because previous attempts to control it through Browser engine APIs didn't work.You're using a very strange definition of "control".
The code itself is a monoculture of browsers.
