this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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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.
Wha- hold up... I'm not sure I understand...
Chrome was based on WebKit?
I'm not aware about the old stuff as much so if someone could fill me in...
WebKit is a rendering engine which is one of the major components of a web browser. Chrome/Chromium was released in 2008 using a modified version of WebKit as its rendering engine. Eventually in 2013 they created a fork of WebKit called Blink, which is the current rendering engine for Chrome/Chromium.
In more history, WebKit is a fork of KHTML. That's the reason why WebKit itself is open source.
Apparently there hasn't been active maintenance since 2016 though and it's officially dead since this year. RIP
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Remember Konqueror? That's KDE's web browser, which still uses KHTML. I should try it out again and see how it's held up.
I'm not sure, but didn't Konqueror switch to qtwebkit at some point? Or was that a different qt-based browser?
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.
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.
Microsoft was never bad at making browsers, their issue is that they tied browser release to Windows release cycle. IE6 was the best and the most compatible browser on the market in its release date. But it didn't get a single update during its long life. 5 years old Chrome is completely useless today even if it was a pinnacle back then.
Sure, but Windows Update was already part of the OS and web users were a customer segment that had an Internet connection. They could have pushed patches and bug fixes.
That's not Microsoft philosophy. Microsoft has strong backwards compatibility. If they would change how border box is rendered on the screen, that would break a lot of apps which use IE engine as a web view. Thus they only push security updates, but ensure that rendering stays the same within one Windows version.
Most compatible to what, itself?
To existing web standards at the time.
Opera was the shit back in the early days. It could pretend to be any other browser.
Can't you do that with any browser by changing the user agent?
Yeah:
~Sent~ ~from~ ~Internet~ ~Explorer~ ~9~
I'm not sure how long you've been able to change the user agent in config pages tbh, I just remember Opera had it as an option in the GUI settings and even the right click menu.
@TWeaK @seitanic,also Vivaldi
https://file.coffee/u/QOBRX5BHuQU5Etg6GN6A8.png
I have an installer for Opera 12.18, the last one to use their Presto engine. Every once in a while I test it out to see how it has aged.
It's not pretty haha. It barely works.
I miss pre chromium Opera so much lol, lot of nostalgia
My favourite browser, abandoned it when they went chromium. RIP in peace Opera.
Always weren't been
Always been't
But they are now…
Right but that meme says 'always has been'.
For the majority of current users, that’s the point. For them it always has been.