There's been a lot of critical talk about Mozilla's recent data policy changes, and while I'm also not a fan of it, supporting Firefox still feels like the lesser of two evils. Google doesn't need...
There's been a lot of critical talk about Mozilla's recent data policy changes, and while I'm also not a fan of it, supporting Firefox still feels like the lesser of two evils.
Google doesn't need Chrome to make money - it's a loss-leader which gains Google this kind of soft power over the internet and they exploit it for money elsewhere. Mozilla don't have an infinite money purse but their developers still need to get paid, so their monetisation options are more limited.
True. "Oh no, Firefox changed their legal wording and their justification seems suspicious, so I'm moving to Chromium" has me rolling my eyes so far it hurts. It's not only about the terms of a...
supporting Firefox still feels like the lesser of two evils.
True. "Oh no, Firefox changed their legal wording and their justification seems suspicious, so I'm moving to Chromium" has me rolling my eyes so far it hurts. It's not only about the terms of a specific browser, using something like Vivaldi gives power to Google, as long as they "own" Chromium.
Google doesn't own Chromium, it's an open source project. And after Firefox has been fumbling the bag for more than a decade, it's perfectly rational for people to get tired of the BS. You can...
Google doesn't own Chromium, it's an open source project.
And after Firefox has been fumbling the bag for more than a decade, it's perfectly rational for people to get tired of the BS. You can roll your eyes all you want, you don't drop from being the biggest browser on the market to having ~2% market share by doing things people like.
It's an open source project that's chock full of Google specifics, so much that it's required to use an community Ungoogled build of it to rid yourself of them. And make no mistake, if Google...
It's an open source project that's chock full of Google specifics, so much that it's required to use an community Ungoogled build of it to rid yourself of them. And make no mistake, if Google stopped sponsoring Chromium and providing developers for it, we'd soon see how much of a Google project it is. Open Source or no.
There’s also precious few organizations that could afford to develop and maintain Chromium/Blink as fervently as Google does with its army of engineers. That alone creates a moat of sorts because...
There’s also precious few organizations that could afford to develop and maintain Chromium/Blink as fervently as Google does with its army of engineers. That alone creates a moat of sorts because for another organization to have anywhere as much steering power as Google, they’d need a similarly huge development force which just isn’t practical.
Well, sort of. The reason they need a massive engineering team is because they keep moving the target. I look at the modern web and I see thousands upon thousands of Rube Goldberg machines being...
Well, sort of.
The reason they need a massive engineering team is because they keep moving the target.
I look at the modern web and I see thousands upon thousands of Rube Goldberg machines being developed to handle really basic things.
Web browsers have, in essence, become operating systems unto themselves, because it turns out running arbitrary binaries from random sources is still a bad idea.
If we stripped out all the 'browser as an operating system' bits, we wouldn't need billion-dollar companies to continually refactor it. We could read, write, and browse relatively safely.
Every time I see a date field in a form that pops up a date picker instead of just letting me type in the date, I die a little inside. I have a keyboard. I know how to type. I don't need to have a...
Every time I see a date field in a form that pops up a date picker instead of just letting me type in the date, I die a little inside.
I have a keyboard. I know how to type. I don't need to have a complex usually somehow broken helper to type in things I know.
Great, now developers need to make sure the format of their form is localized to every region, and the rearranging can't break any page styling. It's much easier to use a date picker that's ready...
Great, now developers need to make sure the format of their form is localized to every region, and the rearranging can't break any page styling. It's much easier to use a date picker that's ready to go out-of-the-box.
Or simply tell the user what format it needs to be in and trust that they probably aren’t a complete moron. Beyond that, I seem to remember that date fields became part of HTML5 specifically...
Or simply tell the user what format it needs to be in and trust that they probably aren’t a complete moron.
Beyond that, I seem to remember that date fields became part of HTML5 specifically because we wanted the browser to take care of these problems. But being lazy first thing in the morning I will assume that it never worked out.
A big reason for Firefox having such a low market share is because there are targetted campaigns to make mountains out of molehills, and have people freak out over every little change with it in a...
A big reason for Firefox having such a low market share is because there are targetted campaigns to make mountains out of molehills, and have people freak out over every little change with it in a way they do not when other browsers make as bad or worse moves.
Like when the Megabar came out and people acted like it was poisoning their wells and killing their pets. Or how much hay was being made about the Mozilla Foundation's finances and CEO compensation. Right now I see more people upset with a change in a Mozilla FAQ than I see people upset about Manifest V3.
Are there targeted campaigns? I think Firefox just has a prickly userbase. Chrome and safari have all the casuals, it's not surprising that Firefox, with what's left, has a lot of the neurotic users.
Are there targeted campaigns? I think Firefox just has a prickly userbase. Chrome and safari have all the casuals, it's not surprising that Firefox, with what's left, has a lot of the neurotic users.
One of the reasons I stopped even bothering with r/firefox was the moderation team didn't do a good job investigating accounts saying things like "I am no longer using Firefox after 10+ years and...
One of the reasons I stopped even bothering with r/firefox was the moderation team didn't do a good job investigating accounts saying things like "I am no longer using Firefox after 10+ years and will be switching to Brave", while their account history showed they were a Brave browser evangelist. It wasn't hard to find many suspicious accounts like this.
With how much more open we've seen astroturfing and bot accounts on reddit following such patterns with accounts, I believe I saw some early examples of successful campaigns in the tech spaces and this was an example. And all this over things like the Megabar, not any privacy or other major issues with the tech or ethics that would apply to Chrome and other browsers more strongly.
(I worked for Mozilla for 9 years) While I agree that there have been many mountains made out of molehills over the years, they have never been the cause of the market share drop — the shift to...
(I worked for Mozilla for 9 years)
While I agree that there have been many mountains made out of molehills over the years, they have never been the cause of the market share drop — the shift to mobile was.
Right, I was being a bit sarcastic but that didn't come off properly. The market share dropped a long time before all the crowing about Mozilla and Firefox reached fever pitches, and it's always...
Right, I was being a bit sarcastic but that didn't come off properly. The market share dropped a long time before all the crowing about Mozilla and Firefox reached fever pitches, and it's always been a terrible metric to look at or judge the quality of a browser.
I own my open source projects just as much as Google owns theirs, because I'm the one driving development, I'm their first user, I approve the PRs, I publish the releases. Open source doesn't mean...
I own my open source projects just as much as Google owns theirs, because I'm the one driving development, I'm their first user, I approve the PRs, I publish the releases.
Open source doesn't mean that the development is driven for the common good. There will always be a few people driving open source projects, with their own goals and agendas.
I'll also add it is easy to lose your first place when you're competing against a company that has infinite amounts of money. You will lose, whatever you do.
Could Firefox be better? Obviously, but whatever they do, there is zero chance they get out of their current niche.
A forced breakup of the tech giants, with monetary restitution from all them into an open-source grant program could do it. Between Apple/Oracle/Facebook/Microsoft/Google/Amazon we could get an...
A forced breakup of the tech giants, with monetary restitution from all them into an open-source grant program could do it. Between Apple/Oracle/Facebook/Microsoft/Google/Amazon we could get an endowment of $100 billion to kick it off. Especially if some degree of taxation on ISPs gets added to keep the operational cash flowing.
If you prefer Chrome because of the UX, you may have a point. But moving from Firefox to Chrome for privacy reasons or because you want to be in control as a user is just stupid. It's like jumping...
If you prefer Chrome because of the UX, you may have a point. But moving from Firefox to Chrome for privacy reasons or because you want to be in control as a user is just stupid. It's like jumping into the pacific to avoid a bit of rain.
I may be in the minority here, but I don’t find the new wording so concerning. I’m fine with them removing the statement they won’t sell my data, because that seems to be the way to fund things in...
I may be in the minority here, but I don’t find the new wording so concerning. I’m fine with them removing the statement they won’t sell my data, because that seems to be the way to fund things in our world.
I would love it if they came up with a subscription model for Mozilla products that opts you out of the data selling market.
It is a completely free product. It should be free and funded by the government just because of how important browsers are to society now. It's a piece of core infrastructure and it's the...
It is a completely free product. It should be free and funded by the government just because of how important browsers are to society now. It's a piece of core infrastructure and it's the absolutely most bang for buck we could possibly fund. The handful of millions needed to secure funding for various key open source software projects is less than pennies to a government budget. But alas we don't have that so I suppose selling marketing data is the ok in the meantime.
I think I agree in principle, but I suspect you and I might disagree on which government. But yeah I’d love if a bunch of the world’s governments pitched in to keep internet standards open and...
It should be free and funded by the government just because of how important browsers are to society now.
I think I agree in principle, but I suspect you and I might disagree on which government. But yeah I’d love if a bunch of the world’s governments pitched in to keep internet standards open and providing an alternative to whatever formerly-the-company-that-didn’t-be-evil might want to do in future.
Honestly the thought of any government being responsible for developing and maintaining a modern web browser is pretty terrifying for a laundry list of reasons. I’m certainly not going to defend...
Honestly the thought of any government being responsible for developing and maintaining a modern web browser is pretty terrifying for a laundry list of reasons.
I’m certainly not going to defend the de facto Google monopoly and its perverse incentives; I’m still a Firefox user because I feel that despite Mozilla’s many missteps they’re still the least of all evils. Gecko is one of the last bastions of browser engine diversity and I’m not willing to give that up. Firefox still has powerful addons untarnished by manifest v3. Mozilla brought us MDN and Rust! I’m still an ally. Heck, I even use Thunderbird.
Back to my original point. Govs certainly can’t be trusted with the awesome responsibility of making browsers work. Neither can massive tech giants funded by ad revenue. It’s gotta be an open-source, collective effort. It’s got to remain that way, to whatever degree it still is. None of the alternatives is acceptable. I wouldn’t want Mozilla in charge of the whole kit and caboodle either.
“For some reason” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the danger of having too much power concentrated in one entity, and trying to imagine alternative methods of balancing and distributing power in more equitable and accountable ways. So no rogue actor can just bring down the whole system in one act of malice or stupidity. I think web standards and browser software are just as valid objects of that discussion as executive branches of government are.
I would never agree to a closed source government product from any government. It's already sketchy enough to take on closed source corporate software but at least they can't imprison you because...
I would never agree to a closed source government product from any government. It's already sketchy enough to take on closed source corporate software but at least they can't imprison you because you bad mouthed them using their software. When I said it should be government funded, what I meant is that government funds should be distributed to open source collectives as another funding source. They should see the complete dependence of society on these key pieces of software and should strive to ensure that there's reliable solutions out there.
The EU should be shitting bricks right now with how much of their key software is US produced, leaving them vulnerable to sanctions from the insanity in chief.
In my opinion it's even less concerning than that. IIRC, what they removed was not 'we won't sell your data you entered in the browser', but 'we won't use your data you entered in the browser'....
In my opinion it's even less concerning than that. IIRC, what they removed was not 'we won't sell your data you entered in the browser', but 'we won't use your data you entered in the browser'.
Obviously, a browser needs to use that data to function properly. I think it was just an overzealous legal team who wanted to dot the i's and 'fix' the terms.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox mainly because of the Manifest v3 nerfing uBlock Origin thing (maybe they should have chosen a more antagonistic name than "Lite"), and because around the same...
I switched from Chrome to Firefox mainly because of the Manifest v3 nerfing uBlock Origin thing (maybe they should have chosen a more antagonistic name than "Lite"), and because around the same time I got annoyed by shitty AI summaries on Google search results.
After fixing a few issues, Firefox has been almost as good as Chrome (some issues with video playback and wonky custom search engine support), and Duck Duck Go has been noticeably worse for me than Google search (but I'm still putting up with it and going to Google as a backup).
That said, how do you convince normies to switch? The argument of "they have more users and are becoming a monopoly!" does not matter to most people. They just think "well everyone uses it because it's the best one." Most don't even use an ad blocker to get upset about! If your argument is "Firefox is open source; open source good." If they are in any way swayed by this they will probably be made aware that Chromium is open source too.
If you can't convince normies, you won't be moving the needle much.
Maybe start from a common frustration? "Do you find it creepy when you talk to someone about a topic, you'll somehow get ads about it later? Did you know you can change a couple of things and make...
Maybe start from a common frustration?
"Do you find it creepy when you talk to someone about a topic, you'll somehow get ads about it later? Did you know you can change a couple of things and make it happen less?"
It might be easier to change people's habits by appealing to something concrete they want to be better, rather than from an economic/philosophical angle
IIRC the author of uBlock originally wanted to call it something like “uBlock Minus” or something like that to advertise that it was worse than the regular version. I think their reasoning not to...
IIRC the author of uBlock originally wanted to call it something like “uBlock Minus” or something like that to advertise that it was worse than the regular version. I think their reasoning not to do that was that it was ultimately better to get people to use it than to scare them away.
Personally I find DDG to be much better than Google search, even if for simply not having so many “highlight” boxes. Kagi seems to be night and day, but I refuse to pay for it at the moment for reasons I’d rather not go into.
I made the switch for the same reason, and haven't found a reason to switch back. But what made me love Firefox is their Containers. It allows to group tabs into completely separate cookie...
I made the switch for the same reason, and haven't found a reason to switch back. But what made me love Firefox is their Containers.
It allows to group tabs into completely separate cookie 'pockets' (or containers). I have personal accounts with several companies, all in the MS Office 365 space. I can be logged in in all of them in the same browser, without them interfering with each other because they're all in their own container. I can choose to open a new tab or link in a specific container. No more juggling with the accounts, it just works. I also use it to keep my social media browsing separate from everything else.
I don't know if this would convince a normie, though.
"Firefox? I haven't heard about that since middle school." - Guy in my programming course. I really wish normies could be sold on more privacy conscious options. However, I am a bit of a crazy...
"Firefox? I haven't heard about that since middle school." - Guy in my programming course.
I really wish normies could be sold on more privacy conscious options. However, I am a bit of a crazy person. The introduction of ai tooling for firefox nightly made me switch to Librewolf.
One add-on I have found absolutely useful for keeping "personal" and "work" containers separated easily is this one: https://github.com/chronakis/firefox-sticky-window-containers With this setup,...
With this setup, you can have one window open with a work container tab and one open with a private container tab, and additional tabs you open in each will stay in that container. To be honest, it's one of those things that Firefox should do natively but for some reason doesn't.
Most users never change their browser at all. Most are happy to use whatever came pre-installed on their device, be it Edge, Safari, Samsung Browser, whatever. I've been thinking for years that...
Most users never change their browser at all. Most are happy to use whatever came pre-installed on their device, be it Edge, Safari, Samsung Browser, whatever. I've been thinking for years that Mozilla should start buying their way into being pre-installed on more devices.
As a side note, I recently bought a new Android phone (HMD, #buyeuropean), and I was pleasantly surprised by the experience of the (I assume EU-mandated) choice for default browser and search engine. It fairly presented good choices for both, without overwhelming the user (unlike when Microsoft was forced to do the same some years back, which gave me malicious compliance vibes).
Have IT people do it. Back in the day, I was the one that pushed Chrome on to everyone. Small company, so it was easy to do. But since then Chrome has become "the Internet" to some people over...
Have IT people do it. Back in the day, I was the one that pushed Chrome on to everyone. Small company, so it was easy to do. But since then Chrome has become "the Internet" to some people over there.
Obviously in bigger places, it's not just a matter of a single IT person making the decision for everyone. But certainly in smaller, maybe even mid-size places, IT folks might have that power. Install Firefox on people's computers; don't even install Chrome. Hide the shortcut for Edge. Eventually, Firefox will become "the Internet" as it once was over a decade ago.
That is how Firefox got their huge breakout before Chrome hit the scenes after all. Circa 2004, every malware-ridden Windows XP install serviced by a savvy techie got a copy of...
That is how Firefox got their huge breakout before Chrome hit the scenes after all.
Circa 2004, every malware-ridden Windows XP install serviced by a savvy techie got a copy of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and a custom shortcut to it with IE's icon labelled 'The Internet.' That's how they hit 32% market share by the time Chrome hit the scene and stole all that momentum, by being excellent and backed by free advertising on "The front page of the Internet."
Incidentally, this post made me check out what Firebird is up to, and it really makes me question how SQLlite got as popular as it did.
There is no choice in the browser market. It’s all just Blink, and Blink is Google. This means that Google has near complete and absolute control over the browser market. Bundle this with the most popular search engine, and they have near complete control over the web.
When you need CDN fonts in the future, Bunny CDN offers a great GDPR compliant drop-in replacement for Google Fonts with a no logging policy. Free and open source :) https://fonts.bunny.net/
When you need CDN fonts in the future, Bunny CDN offers a great GDPR compliant drop-in replacement for Google Fonts with a no logging policy. Free and open source :)
Yep. I started using Gfonts as a CDN back when it first became a thing. I liked the design freedom, but the second I figured out how to grab the font and include it directly I went back to the...
Yep. I started using Gfonts as a CDN back when it first became a thing. I liked the design freedom, but the second I figured out how to grab the font and include it directly I went back to the “old” way. Gfonts is a nice way to browse, but I never found the “added weight” of 2 or even 3 fonts never really mattered much in loading speeds.
Then again, I never tested that rigorously either, so YMMV.
Edit: oops, this should have been a reply to your parent comment, but thanks for the bunny tip. If I ever build sites again I’ll check it out
Better to just not use fonts from a CDN at all. A CDN for fonts offers no benefit whatsoever. It does open the door to tracking etc. though, and makes your website more fragile.
Better to just not use fonts from a CDN at all. A CDN for fonts offers no benefit whatsoever. It does open the door to tracking etc. though, and makes your website more fragile.
Wild claim. I’d guess the majority of bog-standard hosting providers’ servers are slower than CDN connections. To be clear, that doesn’t mean everyone should be using them, just that there are...
A CDN for fonts offers no benefit whatsoever.
Wild claim. I’d guess the majority of bog-standard hosting providers’ servers are slower than CDN connections.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean everyone should be using them, just that there are valid reasons and cases for them to exist. And yeah, tracking can be an issue with shared resources regardless.
Edit: reduced my wording to a less strong one to reflect my lack of factual knowledge in the area
Fonts are assets that can be cached for a very long time. You really need to download them only once. If the difference in speed between your hosting provider and the CDN is so big that it is...
Fonts are assets that can be cached for a very long time. You really need to download them only once. If the difference in speed between your hosting provider and the CDN is so big that it is worthwhile to use the CDN anyway, then you should do one of two things. Either move to a better hoster, or embed the fonts in your website and move the whole package to the CDN.
Good point, thanks. What about cases where there’s a sudden increase in load that your own servers might struggle with, but a CDN definitely doesn’t? That’s less about speed and more a...
Good point, thanks.
What about cases where there’s a sudden increase in load that your own servers might struggle with, but a CDN definitely doesn’t? That’s less about speed and more a bandwidth/throughput/potentially CPU-related question I’m asking, I guess.
I guess my point is that if you are in the situation that a CDN is useful, you might as well use a proper one and put all assets on there. The only use case I can see for free font CDNs is when...
I guess my point is that if you are in the situation that a CDN is useful, you might as well use a proper one and put all assets on there. The only use case I can see for free font CDNs is when the developer either does not know how to, or does not care enough to take the simple steps to host the font themselves.
That's not correct at all. If you're operating a website with significant enough traffic, bandwidth becomes a serious concern and self-hosted fonts can add up quickly in bandwidth cost. Most...
That's not correct at all. If you're operating a website with significant enough traffic, bandwidth becomes a serious concern and self-hosted fonts can add up quickly in bandwidth cost. Most hosting providers don't offer unlimited bandwidth without a premium price tag attached to it, and free CDN font offerings from Bunny/Google reduce that cost entirely.
As I said in a sibling comment: if this is indeed an issue in your situation, you should change to a new hosting provider, or move everything to a proper CDN. I just checked for my own website....
As I said in a sibling comment: if this is indeed an issue in your situation, you should change to a new hosting provider, or move everything to a proper CDN.
I just checked for my own website. Two fonts in various variations. Ten files that together measure a whopping 185 kilobytes. I cannot imagine a scenario where everything is fine and dandy, but that one time download of 185 kilobytes breaks your site so hard that you are forced to add a CDN for fonts, while at the same everything else (images, CSS, etc.) can just stay where it is.
And as I said in my previous comment, I'm referring to high-traffic sites (likely with a globally-distributed user base), not someone's sub-$20/month personal website. A couple hundred kilobytes...
And as I said in my previous comment, I'm referring to high-traffic sites (likely with a globally-distributed user base), not someone's sub-$20/month personal website. A couple hundred kilobytes is inconsequential for a personal site especially through a flat-rate managed provider if you're using Squarespace et al, but at scale those optimizations matter even just for allowing international users a 100ms increase in load time, no less to consider the unnecessary strain that could have been pushed to edge for free.
Can you give me an example of a high-traffic site that: Has so much traffic that a CDN for fonts is necessary Has so little traffic that it does not need a CDN for other assets like images, CSS,...
Can you give me an example of a high-traffic site that:
Has so much traffic that a CDN for fonts is necessary
Has so little traffic that it does not need a CDN for other assets like images, CSS, static pages, etc.
I am OK with a fictional site, I just don't see how the numbers would work out.
You would need a CDN for other content in this hypothetical, I was just speaking in the context of fonts as we were discussing Google and Bunny's free CDN font offerings in this thread. If you're...
You would need a CDN for other content in this hypothetical, I was just speaking in the context of fonts as we were discussing Google and Bunny's free CDN font offerings in this thread. If you're using open-source fonts, regardless of whether or not you're using CDN services for images, there's no real point in driving your costs up further if you can integrate a free service for that need - especially since Bunny doesn't track or retain logs as you expressed concerns about earlier.
Ok, thanks for explaining. I think I get your point now. I still would not use a free font CDN in that situation, as it is an extra dependency and I imagine the cost savings would be marginal at...
Ok, thanks for explaining. I think I get your point now. I still would not use a free font CDN in that situation, as it is an extra dependency and I imagine the cost savings would be marginal at best. But I'll admit that this is an opinion and not a hard truth.
Vendoring in general means copying a dependency into your project, as opposed to importing it from somewhere else. Specifically in this case: One easy way to use Google Fonts in a website is to...
Vendoring in general means copying a dependency into your project, as opposed to importing it from somewhere else.
Specifically in this case:
One easy way to use Google Fonts in a website is to add a tag to your HTML that says "while you're downloading the HTML/CSS/JS/etc from this server, also download these font files from Google's servers". The browser then creates a new connection to Google and downloads the fonts from there. This has some performance and security issues: the browser needs to open a new connection to talk to Google (it can't use the connection it's already using to talk to your website), and it will send some identifying data to Google (because all connections have to send that data).
When you vendor fonts, however, you download the files from Google Fonts, and put them alongside the HTML/JS/CSS/etc that you've written yourself. When someone opens the website in their browser, it downloads the font files from the same place it downloads everything else, with no additional connections made to other, Google-owned servers.
Fascinating, thank you. I had no idea that vendoring was used in that way. I was expecting something along the lines of "buy", to be honest. And thanks for the explanation of why that might be...
Fascinating, thank you. I had no idea that vendoring was used in that way. I was expecting something along the lines of "buy", to be honest. And thanks for the explanation of why that might be preferable in some cases.
I’ve never encountered this usage before, but I suspect it derives from the “vendors” directory where many web frameworks install local copies of third-party libraries and assets (such as fonts).
I’ve never encountered this usage before, but I suspect it derives from the “vendors” directory where many web frameworks install local copies of third-party libraries and assets (such as fonts).
Not necessarily, for a while CDNs (i.e. explicitly not vendoring and linking to shared static assets) was the hot thing for performance, because if everyone linked to the same asset, then users...
Not necessarily, for a while CDNs (i.e. explicitly not vendoring and linking to shared static assets) was the hot thing for performance, because if everyone linked to the same asset, then users would usually have it cached and wouldn't need to download it for every user.
I don't know how effective it ever was, and it turned out to be a slight security risk, so shared caches got turned off several years ago now. But for a while it was the recommended way of loading certain files.
Include the (web) font files in the product rather than using Google fonts as a CDN. Various ways to do that, even without using Google fonts as there are also things like Fontsource that packages...
Include the (web) font files in the product rather than using Google fonts as a CDN. Various ways to do that, even without using Google fonts as there are also things like Fontsource that packages open source fonts in npm to be used.
First they say there is "no choice" but that's obviously false (Safari and Firefox are used by many people), then they hedge with "near complete", then they exaggerate again with "absolute" and...
First they say there is "no choice" but that's obviously false (Safari and Firefox are used by many people), then they hedge with "near complete", then they exaggerate again with "absolute" and follow up with "near complete control of the web" which is obviously false, since most websites aren't Google-owned.
Would it be so hard to tell the story without this repeated exaggeration?
For some reason I’ve seen a lot of posts in the technology-inclined web sphere count WebKit and Blink as one in the same, which hasn’t been true in years and becomes less true every day. A lot of...
For some reason I’ve seen a lot of posts in the technology-inclined web sphere count WebKit and Blink as one in the same, which hasn’t been true in years and becomes less true every day. A lot of people don’t like WebKit’s primary developer and that’s fine, but it’s absolutely not Blink/Chromium.
Off-topic: the title made me realize Spongebob was right. In the future, everything is Chrome. Even that little scene of a flower bursting through the chrome and instantly getting sprayed with...
Off-topic: the title made me realize Spongebob was right. In the future, everything is Chrome. Even that little scene of a flower bursting through the chrome and instantly getting sprayed with more chrome is an apt metaphor for the current state of browsers.
And I don't think it's exclusive to browsers. From what I understand, many Windows programs are increasingly using Chromium under the hood. I believe Discord was entirely Chromium from the start...
And I don't think it's exclusive to browsers. From what I understand, many Windows programs are increasingly using Chromium under the hood. I believe Discord was entirely Chromium from the start and Steam made the switch over a couple years ago as a couple examples.
CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) is one of those things that Google did which Mozilla basically just never responded to, and it's done so much to cement the hold Chrome has. Mozilla even had...
CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) is one of those things that Google did which Mozilla basically just never responded to, and it's done so much to cement the hold Chrome has.
Mozilla even had Prism as early as 2007(!), which was already well along the path to what Electron is now, but dropped it three years later and never even tried to revisit the idea. Doing anything to make Gecko more embeddable would've given devs a real choice when desktop development started moving to CEF/Electron, but instead Google was the only option.
The worst thing is that they had functional embedding, which several Gecko-powered browsers including Camino, Epiphany, and K-Meleon all used and then decided to remove it entirely, ceding that...
The worst thing is that they had functional embedding, which several Gecko-powered browsers including Camino, Epiphany, and K-Meleon all used and then decided to remove it entirely, ceding that advantage to WebKit and reducing Gecko-based browsers to derivatives of Firefox and Seamonkey.
So today, anywhere you find an embedded webview it’s either WebKit or CEF. Excluding Apple products, the more mainstream the platform the more likely it’s CEF, with WebKit remaining the more flexible and portable of the two, making it a better fit for oddball platforms.
I"ve recently switched to zen from Arc and brave due to the manifest 3 changes coming. I pay for orion on Mac and like it and also like sigmaos on there. I wish someone out there would put up some...
I"ve recently switched to zen from Arc and brave due to the manifest 3 changes coming. I pay for orion on Mac and like it and also like sigmaos on there.
I wish someone out there would put up some alternative on windows even if i had to pay a small fee which i'm not opposed to. Ladybird and servo still both seem to be years out and besides those theres really nothing in the pipe.
If you're on Mac, there are alternatives. Safari may not have many power user features, but Orion - a browser made by the guys who also make the Kagi search engine - is a real powerhouse and I...
If you're on Mac, there are alternatives. Safari may not have many power user features, but Orion - a browser made by the guys who also make the Kagi search engine - is a real powerhouse and I recommend it to everyone who's sick of Chrome.
Orion is fantastic, and I use it as my only browser. But it also isn't very stable. I get crashes pretty frequently. I also get instances where tabs just won't load (other tabs work fine). It...
Orion is fantastic, and I use it as my only browser. But it also isn't very stable. I get crashes pretty frequently. I also get instances where tabs just won't load (other tabs work fine). It reloads everything after close, so it is just control-q then reopen. But it definitely needs more work until I would call it stable.
It's not crashed more than Firefox or Chrome has for me. If you keep your tabs down and don't overload it with extensions, I think you can get it pretty stable - one of the biggest improvements to...
It's not crashed more than Firefox or Chrome has for me. If you keep your tabs down and don't overload it with extensions, I think you can get it pretty stable - one of the biggest improvements to usability for me was to right click the tool bar where the address is, hit "customise toolbar" and drag in one of the programmable buttons - then set it to "Close other tabs". That way it's easier to keep your tabs corralled instead of letting them accrue
That just hasn’t been my experience. I have 6 pinned tabs and usually less than 10 actual tabs. Most of those tabs are actually hibernated most of the time (I keep Orion in battery saver mode,...
That just hasn’t been my experience. I have 6 pinned tabs and usually less than 10 actual tabs. Most of those tabs are actually hibernated most of the time (I keep Orion in battery saver mode, since some websites in Orion seem to be able to peg a cpu core and drain my battery). Despite this, I had 3 crashes today alone. To be fair, I think the current build is unusually crash prone, and I expect it to be fixed shortly.
But it’s all worth it, particularly for the vertical tab bar.
It’s so nice that vertical tabs are finally being taken seriously and rolled into browsers as a first-tier feature, between Arc, Orion, Zen, and Edge. Ever since Firefox extensions got nerfed,...
It’s so nice that vertical tabs are finally being taken seriously and rolled into browsers as a first-tier feature, between Arc, Orion, Zen, and Edge. Ever since Firefox extensions got nerfed, bolted-on vertical tabs by the way of extensions have felt janky there.
Some lightweight web browser alternatives worth trying: qutebrowser (win/mac/linux) - This is what I use as my daily driver. A webkit view controlled mostly by vim-like keybindings and ex commands...
Some lightweight web browser alternatives worth trying:
qutebrowser (win/mac/linux) - This is what I use as my daily driver. A webkit view controlled mostly by vim-like keybindings and ex commands in place of a GUI. Surprisingly configurable if you spend the time to figure out how everything works. Supports a vertical tab bar natively.
vimb (linux) - Similar to qutebrowser, but doesn't support tabs natively. Qutebrowser has overtaken this one in terms of usability and stability, in my opinion, but vimb is still actively developed so worth checking out.
surf (linux)- Even more lightweight than vimb, also doesn't directly support tabs, but can be used along with tabbed to add them (horizontal tab bar only, afaik). I haven't played with this one very much since it doesn't work so well with Wayland and I'm already so happy with qutebrowser.
I looked at qutebrowser but it seems to me if I want it to actually work, I won't be using webkit, I'll be using it with a chromium renderer. Do you use the webkit version?
I looked at qutebrowser but it seems to me if I want it to actually work, I won't be using webkit, I'll be using it with a chromium renderer. Do you use the webkit version?
Nope, I just didn't realize there was a difference between webkit and webengine. Looks like the version I have (from the Void Linux repos) is based off chromium. Backend: QtWebEngine 6.8.2 based...
Nope, I just didn't realize there was a difference between webkit and webengine. Looks like the version I have (from the Void Linux repos) is based off chromium.
Backend: QtWebEngine 6.8.2
based on Chromium 122.0.6261.171
with security patches up to 132.0.6834.111 (plus any distribution patches)
There's been a lot of critical talk about Mozilla's recent data policy changes, and while I'm also not a fan of it, supporting Firefox still feels like the lesser of two evils.
Google doesn't need Chrome to make money - it's a loss-leader which gains Google this kind of soft power over the internet and they exploit it for money elsewhere. Mozilla don't have an infinite money purse but their developers still need to get paid, so their monetisation options are more limited.
True. "Oh no, Firefox changed their legal wording and their justification seems suspicious, so I'm moving to Chromium" has me rolling my eyes so far it hurts. It's not only about the terms of a specific browser, using something like Vivaldi gives power to Google, as long as they "own" Chromium.
Google doesn't own Chromium, it's an open source project.
And after Firefox has been fumbling the bag for more than a decade, it's perfectly rational for people to get tired of the BS. You can roll your eyes all you want, you don't drop from being the biggest browser on the market to having ~2% market share by doing things people like.
It's an open source project that's chock full of Google specifics, so much that it's required to use an community Ungoogled build of it to rid yourself of them. And make no mistake, if Google stopped sponsoring Chromium and providing developers for it, we'd soon see how much of a Google project it is. Open Source or no.
There’s also precious few organizations that could afford to develop and maintain Chromium/Blink as fervently as Google does with its army of engineers. That alone creates a moat of sorts because for another organization to have anywhere as much steering power as Google, they’d need a similarly huge development force which just isn’t practical.
Well, sort of.
The reason they need a massive engineering team is because they keep moving the target.
I look at the modern web and I see thousands upon thousands of Rube Goldberg machines being developed to handle really basic things.
Web browsers have, in essence, become operating systems unto themselves, because it turns out running arbitrary binaries from random sources is still a bad idea.
If we stripped out all the 'browser as an operating system' bits, we wouldn't need billion-dollar companies to continually refactor it. We could read, write, and browse relatively safely.
Every time I see a date field in a form that pops up a date picker instead of just letting me type in the date, I die a little inside.
I have a keyboard. I know how to type. I don't need to have a complex usually somehow broken helper to type in things I know.
That's off topic, but there are many ways to write a date, and guessing the format used by a user is the best way to get it wrong, hence date pickers.
Yes, but a simple form dropdown for month and a 4 digit year fixes all those problems.
Great, now developers need to make sure the format of their form is localized to every region, and the rearranging can't break any page styling. It's much easier to use a date picker that's ready to go out-of-the-box.
Or simply tell the user what format it needs to be in and trust that they probably aren’t a complete moron.
Beyond that, I seem to remember that date fields became part of HTML5 specifically because we wanted the browser to take care of these problems. But being lazy first thing in the morning I will assume that it never worked out.
A big reason for Firefox having such a low market share is because there are targetted campaigns to make mountains out of molehills, and have people freak out over every little change with it in a way they do not when other browsers make as bad or worse moves.
Like when the Megabar came out and people acted like it was poisoning their wells and killing their pets. Or how much hay was being made about the Mozilla Foundation's finances and CEO compensation. Right now I see more people upset with a change in a Mozilla FAQ than I see people upset about Manifest V3.
Are there targeted campaigns? I think Firefox just has a prickly userbase. Chrome and safari have all the casuals, it's not surprising that Firefox, with what's left, has a lot of the neurotic users.
One of the reasons I stopped even bothering with r/firefox was the moderation team didn't do a good job investigating accounts saying things like "I am no longer using Firefox after 10+ years and will be switching to Brave", while their account history showed they were a Brave browser evangelist. It wasn't hard to find many suspicious accounts like this.
With how much more open we've seen astroturfing and bot accounts on reddit following such patterns with accounts, I believe I saw some early examples of successful campaigns in the tech spaces and this was an example. And all this over things like the Megabar, not any privacy or other major issues with the tech or ethics that would apply to Chrome and other browsers more strongly.
(I worked for Mozilla for 9 years)
While I agree that there have been many mountains made out of molehills over the years, they have never been the cause of the market share drop — the shift to mobile was.
Right, I was being a bit sarcastic but that didn't come off properly. The market share dropped a long time before all the crowing about Mozilla and Firefox reached fever pitches, and it's always been a terrible metric to look at or judge the quality of a browser.
I own my open source projects just as much as Google owns theirs, because I'm the one driving development, I'm their first user, I approve the PRs, I publish the releases.
Open source doesn't mean that the development is driven for the common good. There will always be a few people driving open source projects, with their own goals and agendas.
I'll also add it is easy to lose your first place when you're competing against a company that has infinite amounts of money. You will lose, whatever you do.
Could Firefox be better? Obviously, but whatever they do, there is zero chance they get out of their current niche.
A forced breakup of the tech giants, with monetary restitution from all them into an open-source grant program could do it. Between Apple/Oracle/Facebook/Microsoft/Google/Amazon we could get an endowment of $100 billion to kick it off. Especially if some degree of taxation on ISPs gets added to keep the operational cash flowing.
If you prefer Chrome because of the UX, you may have a point. But moving from Firefox to Chrome for privacy reasons or because you want to be in control as a user is just stupid. It's like jumping into the pacific to avoid a bit of rain.
I may be in the minority here, but I don’t find the new wording so concerning. I’m fine with them removing the statement they won’t sell my data, because that seems to be the way to fund things in our world.
I would love it if they came up with a subscription model for Mozilla products that opts you out of the data selling market.
It is a completely free product. It should be free and funded by the government just because of how important browsers are to society now. It's a piece of core infrastructure and it's the absolutely most bang for buck we could possibly fund. The handful of millions needed to secure funding for various key open source software projects is less than pennies to a government budget. But alas we don't have that so I suppose selling marketing data is the ok in the meantime.
I think I agree in principle, but I suspect you and I might disagree on which government. But yeah I’d love if a bunch of the world’s governments pitched in to keep internet standards open and providing an alternative to whatever formerly-the-company-that-didn’t-be-evil might want to do in future.
Honestly the thought of any government being responsible for developing and maintaining a modern web browser is pretty terrifying for a laundry list of reasons.
I’m certainly not going to defend the de facto Google monopoly and its perverse incentives; I’m still a Firefox user because I feel that despite Mozilla’s many missteps they’re still the least of all evils. Gecko is one of the last bastions of browser engine diversity and I’m not willing to give that up. Firefox still has powerful addons untarnished by manifest v3. Mozilla brought us MDN and Rust! I’m still an ally. Heck, I even use Thunderbird.
Back to my original point. Govs certainly can’t be trusted with the awesome responsibility of making browsers work. Neither can massive tech giants funded by ad revenue. It’s gotta be an open-source, collective effort. It’s got to remain that way, to whatever degree it still is. None of the alternatives is acceptable. I wouldn’t want Mozilla in charge of the whole kit and caboodle either.
“For some reason” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the danger of having too much power concentrated in one entity, and trying to imagine alternative methods of balancing and distributing power in more equitable and accountable ways. So no rogue actor can just bring down the whole system in one act of malice or stupidity. I think web standards and browser software are just as valid objects of that discussion as executive branches of government are.
I would never agree to a closed source government product from any government. It's already sketchy enough to take on closed source corporate software but at least they can't imprison you because you bad mouthed them using their software. When I said it should be government funded, what I meant is that government funds should be distributed to open source collectives as another funding source. They should see the complete dependence of society on these key pieces of software and should strive to ensure that there's reliable solutions out there.
The EU should be shitting bricks right now with how much of their key software is US produced, leaving them vulnerable to sanctions from the insanity in chief.
In my opinion it's even less concerning than that. IIRC, what they removed was not 'we won't sell your data you entered in the browser', but 'we won't use your data you entered in the browser'.
Obviously, a browser needs to use that data to function properly. I think it was just an overzealous legal team who wanted to dot the i's and 'fix' the terms.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox mainly because of the Manifest v3 nerfing uBlock Origin thing (maybe they should have chosen a more antagonistic name than "Lite"), and because around the same time I got annoyed by shitty AI summaries on Google search results.
After fixing a few issues, Firefox has been almost as good as Chrome (some issues with video playback and wonky custom search engine support), and Duck Duck Go has been noticeably worse for me than Google search (but I'm still putting up with it and going to Google as a backup).
That said, how do you convince normies to switch? The argument of "they have more users and are becoming a monopoly!" does not matter to most people. They just think "well everyone uses it because it's the best one." Most don't even use an ad blocker to get upset about! If your argument is "Firefox is open source; open source good." If they are in any way swayed by this they will probably be made aware that Chromium is open source too.
If you can't convince normies, you won't be moving the needle much.
Maybe start from a common frustration?
"Do you find it creepy when you talk to someone about a topic, you'll somehow get ads about it later? Did you know you can change a couple of things and make it happen less?"
It might be easier to change people's habits by appealing to something concrete they want to be better, rather than from an economic/philosophical angle
IIRC the author of uBlock originally wanted to call it something like “uBlock Minus” or something like that to advertise that it was worse than the regular version. I think their reasoning not to do that was that it was ultimately better to get people to use it than to scare them away.
Personally I find DDG to be much better than Google search, even if for simply not having so many “highlight” boxes. Kagi seems to be night and day, but I refuse to pay for it at the moment for reasons I’d rather not go into.
I made the switch for the same reason, and haven't found a reason to switch back. But what made me love Firefox is their Containers.
It allows to group tabs into completely separate cookie 'pockets' (or containers). I have personal accounts with several companies, all in the MS Office 365 space. I can be logged in in all of them in the same browser, without them interfering with each other because they're all in their own container. I can choose to open a new tab or link in a specific container. No more juggling with the accounts, it just works. I also use it to keep my social media browsing separate from everything else.
I don't know if this would convince a normie, though.
As for separating social media from everything else, Firefox does that now to some degree even without you using Containers:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cookie-protection-standard-mode
"Firefox? I haven't heard about that since middle school." - Guy in my programming course.
I really wish normies could be sold on more privacy conscious options. However, I am a bit of a crazy person. The introduction of ai tooling for firefox nightly made me switch to Librewolf.
One add-on I have found absolutely useful for keeping "personal" and "work" containers separated easily is this one: https://github.com/chronakis/firefox-sticky-window-containers
With this setup, you can have one window open with a work container tab and one open with a private container tab, and additional tabs you open in each will stay in that container. To be honest, it's one of those things that Firefox should do natively but for some reason doesn't.
Most users never change their browser at all. Most are happy to use whatever came pre-installed on their device, be it Edge, Safari, Samsung Browser, whatever. I've been thinking for years that Mozilla should start buying their way into being pre-installed on more devices.
As a side note, I recently bought a new Android phone (HMD, #buyeuropean), and I was pleasantly surprised by the experience of the (I assume EU-mandated) choice for default browser and search engine. It fairly presented good choices for both, without overwhelming the user (unlike when Microsoft was forced to do the same some years back, which gave me malicious compliance vibes).
Have IT people do it. Back in the day, I was the one that pushed Chrome on to everyone. Small company, so it was easy to do. But since then Chrome has become "the Internet" to some people over there.
Obviously in bigger places, it's not just a matter of a single IT person making the decision for everyone. But certainly in smaller, maybe even mid-size places, IT folks might have that power. Install Firefox on people's computers; don't even install Chrome. Hide the shortcut for Edge. Eventually, Firefox will become "the Internet" as it once was over a decade ago.
That is how Firefox got their huge breakout before Chrome hit the scenes after all.
Circa 2004, every malware-ridden Windows XP install serviced by a savvy techie got a copy of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and a custom shortcut to it with IE's icon labelled 'The Internet.' That's how they hit 32% market share by the time Chrome hit the scene and stole all that momentum, by being excellent and backed by free advertising on "The front page of the Internet."
Incidentally, this post made me check out what Firebird is up to, and it really makes me question how SQLlite got as popular as it did.
Not to even mention Google Maps, Fonts, Analytics, Ads, Tag Manager, etc. Many of the most visited sites don’t work without Google.
I always vendor my Google fonts. It feels asinine to have the local copy of my sites not work offline.
When you need CDN fonts in the future, Bunny CDN offers a great GDPR compliant drop-in replacement for Google Fonts with a no logging policy. Free and open source :)
https://fonts.bunny.net/
Yep. I started using Gfonts as a CDN back when it first became a thing. I liked the design freedom, but the second I figured out how to grab the font and include it directly I went back to the “old” way. Gfonts is a nice way to browse, but I never found the “added weight” of 2 or even 3 fonts never really mattered much in loading speeds.
Then again, I never tested that rigorously either, so YMMV.
Edit: oops, this should have been a reply to your parent comment, but thanks for the bunny tip. If I ever build sites again I’ll check it out
Better to just not use fonts from a CDN at all. A CDN for fonts offers no benefit whatsoever. It does open the door to tracking etc. though, and makes your website more fragile.
Wild claim. I’d guess the majority of bog-standard hosting providers’ servers are slower than CDN connections.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean everyone should be using them, just that there are valid reasons and cases for them to exist. And yeah, tracking can be an issue with shared resources regardless.
Edit: reduced my wording to a less strong one to reflect my lack of factual knowledge in the area
Fonts are assets that can be cached for a very long time. You really need to download them only once. If the difference in speed between your hosting provider and the CDN is so big that it is worthwhile to use the CDN anyway, then you should do one of two things. Either move to a better hoster, or embed the fonts in your website and move the whole package to the CDN.
Good point, thanks.
What about cases where there’s a sudden increase in load that your own servers might struggle with, but a CDN definitely doesn’t? That’s less about speed and more a bandwidth/throughput/potentially CPU-related question I’m asking, I guess.
I guess my point is that if you are in the situation that a CDN is useful, you might as well use a proper one and put all assets on there. The only use case I can see for free font CDNs is when the developer either does not know how to, or does not care enough to take the simple steps to host the font themselves.
That's not correct at all. If you're operating a website with significant enough traffic, bandwidth becomes a serious concern and self-hosted fonts can add up quickly in bandwidth cost. Most hosting providers don't offer unlimited bandwidth without a premium price tag attached to it, and free CDN font offerings from Bunny/Google reduce that cost entirely.
As I said in a sibling comment: if this is indeed an issue in your situation, you should change to a new hosting provider, or move everything to a proper CDN.
I just checked for my own website. Two fonts in various variations. Ten files that together measure a whopping 185 kilobytes. I cannot imagine a scenario where everything is fine and dandy, but that one time download of 185 kilobytes breaks your site so hard that you are forced to add a CDN for fonts, while at the same everything else (images, CSS, etc.) can just stay where it is.
And as I said in my previous comment, I'm referring to high-traffic sites (likely with a globally-distributed user base), not someone's sub-$20/month personal website. A couple hundred kilobytes is inconsequential for a personal site especially through a flat-rate managed provider if you're using Squarespace et al, but at scale those optimizations matter even just for allowing international users a 100ms increase in load time, no less to consider the unnecessary strain that could have been pushed to edge for free.
Can you give me an example of a high-traffic site that:
I am OK with a fictional site, I just don't see how the numbers would work out.
You would need a CDN for other content in this hypothetical, I was just speaking in the context of fonts as we were discussing Google and Bunny's free CDN font offerings in this thread. If you're using open-source fonts, regardless of whether or not you're using CDN services for images, there's no real point in driving your costs up further if you can integrate a free service for that need - especially since Bunny doesn't track or retain logs as you expressed concerns about earlier.
Ok, thanks for explaining. I think I get your point now. I still would not use a free font CDN in that situation, as it is an extra dependency and I imagine the cost savings would be marginal at best. But I'll admit that this is an opinion and not a hard truth.
What does this mean? How do you "vendor" a font?
Vendoring in general means copying a dependency into your project, as opposed to importing it from somewhere else.
Specifically in this case:
One easy way to use Google Fonts in a website is to add a tag to your HTML that says "while you're downloading the HTML/CSS/JS/etc from this server, also download these font files from Google's servers". The browser then creates a new connection to Google and downloads the fonts from there. This has some performance and security issues: the browser needs to open a new connection to talk to Google (it can't use the connection it's already using to talk to your website), and it will send some identifying data to Google (because all connections have to send that data).
When you vendor fonts, however, you download the files from Google Fonts, and put them alongside the HTML/JS/CSS/etc that you've written yourself. When someone opens the website in their browser, it downloads the font files from the same place it downloads everything else, with no additional connections made to other, Google-owned servers.
Fascinating, thank you. I had no idea that vendoring was used in that way. I was expecting something along the lines of "buy", to be honest. And thanks for the explanation of why that might be preferable in some cases.
I’ve never encountered this usage before, but I suspect it derives from the “vendors” directory where many web frameworks install local copies of third-party libraries and assets (such as fonts).
It used to be the default when internet was slow and size of page was a huge factor of responsiveness.
Not necessarily, for a while CDNs (i.e. explicitly not vendoring and linking to shared static assets) was the hot thing for performance, because if everyone linked to the same asset, then users would usually have it cached and wouldn't need to download it for every user.
I don't know how effective it ever was, and it turned out to be a slight security risk, so shared caches got turned off several years ago now. But for a while it was the recommended way of loading certain files.
Include the (web) font files in the product rather than using Google fonts as a CDN. Various ways to do that, even without using Google fonts as there are also things like Fontsource that packages open source fonts in npm to be used.
First they say there is "no choice" but that's obviously false (Safari and Firefox are used by many people), then they hedge with "near complete", then they exaggerate again with "absolute" and follow up with "near complete control of the web" which is obviously false, since most websites aren't Google-owned.
Would it be so hard to tell the story without this repeated exaggeration?
For some reason I’ve seen a lot of posts in the technology-inclined web sphere count WebKit and Blink as one in the same, which hasn’t been true in years and becomes less true every day. A lot of people don’t like WebKit’s primary developer and that’s fine, but it’s absolutely not Blink/Chromium.
Off-topic: the title made me realize Spongebob was right. In the future, everything is Chrome. Even that little scene of a flower bursting through the chrome and instantly getting sprayed with more chrome is an apt metaphor for the current state of browsers.
And I don't think it's exclusive to browsers. From what I understand, many Windows programs are increasingly using Chromium under the hood. I believe Discord was entirely Chromium from the start and Steam made the switch over a couple years ago as a couple examples.
Electron, so yes, Chromium.
CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) is one of those things that Google did which Mozilla basically just never responded to, and it's done so much to cement the hold Chrome has.
Mozilla even had Prism as early as 2007(!), which was already well along the path to what Electron is now, but dropped it three years later and never even tried to revisit the idea. Doing anything to make Gecko more embeddable would've given devs a real choice when desktop development started moving to CEF/Electron, but instead Google was the only option.
The worst thing is that they had functional embedding, which several Gecko-powered browsers including Camino, Epiphany, and K-Meleon all used and then decided to remove it entirely, ceding that advantage to WebKit and reducing Gecko-based browsers to derivatives of Firefox and Seamonkey.
So today, anywhere you find an embedded webview it’s either WebKit or CEF. Excluding Apple products, the more mainstream the platform the more likely it’s CEF, with WebKit remaining the more flexible and portable of the two, making it a better fit for oddball platforms.
I"ve recently switched to zen from Arc and brave due to the manifest 3 changes coming. I pay for orion on Mac and like it and also like sigmaos on there.
I wish someone out there would put up some alternative on windows even if i had to pay a small fee which i'm not opposed to. Ladybird and servo still both seem to be years out and besides those theres really nothing in the pipe.
If you're on Mac, there are alternatives. Safari may not have many power user features, but Orion - a browser made by the guys who also make the Kagi search engine - is a real powerhouse and I recommend it to everyone who's sick of Chrome.
Orion is fantastic, and I use it as my only browser. But it also isn't very stable. I get crashes pretty frequently. I also get instances where tabs just won't load (other tabs work fine). It reloads everything after close, so it is just control-q then reopen. But it definitely needs more work until I would call it stable.
It's not crashed more than Firefox or Chrome has for me. If you keep your tabs down and don't overload it with extensions, I think you can get it pretty stable - one of the biggest improvements to usability for me was to right click the tool bar where the address is, hit "customise toolbar" and drag in one of the programmable buttons - then set it to "Close other tabs". That way it's easier to keep your tabs corralled instead of letting them accrue
That just hasn’t been my experience. I have 6 pinned tabs and usually less than 10 actual tabs. Most of those tabs are actually hibernated most of the time (I keep Orion in battery saver mode, since some websites in Orion seem to be able to peg a cpu core and drain my battery). Despite this, I had 3 crashes today alone. To be fair, I think the current build is unusually crash prone, and I expect it to be fixed shortly.
But it’s all worth it, particularly for the vertical tab bar.
It’s so nice that vertical tabs are finally being taken seriously and rolled into browsers as a first-tier feature, between Arc, Orion, Zen, and Edge. Ever since Firefox extensions got nerfed, bolted-on vertical tabs by the way of extensions have felt janky there.
Some lightweight web browser alternatives worth trying:
I looked at qutebrowser but it seems to me if I want it to actually work, I won't be using webkit, I'll be using it with a chromium renderer. Do you use the webkit version?
Nope, I just didn't realize there was a difference between webkit and webengine. Looks like the version I have (from the Void Linux repos) is based off chromium.