this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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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.
I wish they could bring back mozilla prism. Like all this electron web app shit is popular, so we don't we use the faster and more efficient browser engine and use gecko!
Speaking of Mozilla, the project they dropped and fired all of their employees working on it all while giving CEO a million dollar raise, the same one that provided most of the performance improvements in the Quantum update, Servo is targetting being an embedded solution. https://floss.social/@servo/110780173168763670
Nice, I didn't know Servo was still being developed!
This whole Chromium fiasco is partially Mozilla's fault, they let Google grab the embedded browser monopoly by making Firefox hard to componentize and letting Electron take all the market share. No competition.
Do I still use chromium when I visit the steam website via firefox?
No, its the steam app that runs on Chromium.
Yeah, just wrappers. Steam wasn't untill fairly recently, but they were slowly switching to it for some time.
So that's why it runs worse now.
It all makes sense
Not a good idea if Google be pulling some shit
Yeah, it's weird for them to rely on Google considering how hard Valve has worked to make Steam independent from MS.
It probably doesn't matter for what they do. There isn't really much need for an ad blocker on a browser that's going to a store page which is essentially an ad for a product in and of itself. A steam user actually wants that store page to load, why would there be a need for a store page?
And they could transition to something else if Google does something that affects them.
I don't think it's too weird. So many apps today are just Chromium wrappers. It's just easier to use a premade base, plus you don't have to develop the web and desktop version independently, they can literally be the same code.
Chromium isn't technically Google
Still serves googles goal of control over the internet.
It's maintained by Google, which is pretty much the same thing - in the end, they get to decide what features get implemented and what doesn't make the cut. Sure we can fork it, and we can make our own, but in the end as long as their code is the main base, they have a lot of control over all the different forks, as usually the forks will have to keep rebasing their code off of new updates to stay as secure and up to date as possible.
It is, good luck hard forking such a huge codebase.
I mean what would stop a company from doing that? I get why they don't, because a lot of changes and fixes get implemented into the code from various companies/individuals, but if you had enough manpower and money, it could be done.
Exaclly money and manpower. Noone is going to do it.
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.