We are currently witnessing the fallout from monopolization in the browser space. Back in 2007, Internet Explorer received much criticism for its phishing protection mechanism which transmitted all visited websites to Microsoft servers. Mozilla paired up with Google and designed a different system which performed most checks locally and preserved users’ privacy. That’s what healthy competition looks like.
Fast forward to 2023. Almost all web browsers in use are either Chrome or based on the Chromium browser engine. With the competition pretty much eliminated, Google is now pushing its “Enhanced Safe Browsing” down everyone’s throats – which is a nice sounding name for “every website you visit is sent to our servers.” The Internet Explorer approach from 2007 all over again, only that now it’s Google getting all this data. And they certainly won’t do anything evil with it. Yeah, sure.
Reminder: Firefox and Safari are the only remaining browsers worth noting which are not using Google’s browser engine.
@WPalant I always encourage (actually force) my family to use Firefox instead of that evil Google's product cuz I'm afraid to see the fall of Firefox and other non-chromium browsers.
@WPalant Is this not specific to Chrome, and not necessarily to any Chromium derivatives? I get wanting more competition, but it seems very non-trivial to build a browser. Leveraging Chromium enables some enhancements while getting benefit of fairly robust and performant engine. Perhaps this still reinforces a kind of monopolization.
Seems like other companies could build derivatives based on FF. Or are there issues with that?
@dgodon There are very few differences between Chrome and Chromium, and browsers wanting to do things differently have to maintain their changes of the Chromium codebase. With the browser being very complex and new releases coming out every six weeks, this is far from trivial – putting a limit on how much Chromium forks can deviate from the original.
In principle, forking Firefox is also possible. This is rarely done however. I think that in the past this was due to worse documentation and higher code complexity (a tribute to its age). I think that things improved considerably by now, so I don’t know how Firefox compares to Chromium today.
I think #Firefox is not healthy either anymore. I think I read about it moderating bookmarks or something. Either way, if you use a liberated and community based fork like #Chromium or #LibreWolf you are fine. I am using the latter on desktop and #einkbro on my tablet(I have got an #Epaper tablet).
@farooqkz Yes, Firefox is struggling and has been for a while. As such, they’ve been trying out desperate ideas, such as those paid bookmarks people were upset about a bunch of years ago. And Safari has never been a great browser in my book.
But that’s beyond the point. You won’t have good options as long as Google is dominating the entire ecosystem.
You also seem to have some misconceptions about Chromium. Chromium isn’t a fork, there is no real community around it, this project is run by Google and Google employees. It is open source in the same sense as Android is open source – you can look at the source code, but Google calls the shots.
what do you think of Brave and Opera? I use pretty much everything, from Edge to Seamonkey. The only one's I really hate are Safari and IE. But Brave and Opera seem pretty tight.
And Opera has been bought by a Chinese company which is in the business of selling users’ data.
If you really want a Chromium-based browser, Vivaldi or DuckDuckGo are the ones with a good reputation. But they also cannot change everything that Google adds to the browser engine.
Repeating something I said elsewhere... all the Blink-based non-Chrome browsers - Vivaldi etc - should fork Chromium and maintain it together. Several of them have already said they'll be disabling Google's spyware; they should just rip it out entirely so people know it's actually gone.
I use Firefox, but anything that gets people away from Chrome would be a positive for the web at large.
@WPalant I used to use Firefox but it kept crashing. Then I was directed to use Chrome by the people I work for (I work from home). But I've always used DuckDuckGo, believing it to be one of the least snoopy ones. I think schools favour it.
@WPalant I used Brave on my laptop for a long time until I learned about their terrible CEO. Now I use the Duck Duck Go browser. What about that? I've also used DDG on my phone for years.
@OtherRetroMatt It’s the same Chromium engine, which limits severely how much they can do. In theory, they can do whatever modifications they like – but the effort for any non-trivial changes is enormous (consider the effort to maintain these changes with new browser releases every six weeks), and they will have to choose their battles.
@independentpen Gnome Web and Epiphany are the same thing. It’s the browser engine used in Safari. The browser itself is sadly barely used, even among the people using Gnome. It’s one of those niche browsers barely contributing to diversity in the browser space.
@WPalant I'm feeling better and better about my decision a year ago to move from Chrome to Firefox. My only regret: Firefox STILL doesn't support passkeys.
@m1k3s Your question sounds like it is based on a misconception. Chromium may be open source, but it doesn’t have open governance (unlike Firefox for example). Google has full control over it, and the overwhelming majority of Chromium contributors are Google employees. @vwestlife
@ricardolopes@gaspart Yes, I see your priorities. That’s not a “controversial political donation,” it’s donating to a hate group. And then going through the entire alt-right playbook: not apologizing, complaining about how people want him canceled, claiming to be the actual victim here. Framing that as merely “controversial” is only something you can do from a position of privilege – namely the privilege of this hate group (or alt-right in general) not attacking you personally.
Also, I’d personally stay as far away as possible from any company run by crypto bros who are into blockchains and “web3.” They will always end up scamming someone, and I’d rather have that someone not be me. In Brave’s case, they are scamming publishers (who aren’t actually getting anything, predictably so) and users (who were promised that they do something good for the publishers). Instead, this whole crypto scheme is a very lucrative money source for Brave. But again, you can always choose to focus on the technical aspects while ignoring ethics.
@WPalant@gaspart ok, so a better summary would be: not much on a technical/functional level, but because of ethics by association. That's a fair argument, though one that can be applied to almost anything, if we want to.
@WPalant I'm seeing a lot of fanboyism over Safari with all this too. I wouldn't trust it any more than Chrome though. I really wish we could see a larger list of actual browsers than Chrome/Chromium, Firefox, and Safari, but sadly what few there are outside that list are hardly even used and unreliable at best. I guess for now Firefox really is the best bet, but Vivaldi has issued a statement they'll make certain that particular "feature" gets blocked when it gets downstream to theirs.
@nazokiyoubinbou Yes, I’m not a fan of Safari either. Apple doesn’t really seem to know what they want with their browser, and often enough they will simply follow Chrome’s lead. They’ve never been big on privacy either.
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