this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Because it's the only browser not based on Google's Chromium rendering engine (Webview, WebKit? whatever). Using any other browser supports Google's monopoly over how we browse the internet and what we are allowed to see. No, fuck Google.
Edit: spelling
I just wanna add that one reason this monopoly is dangerous is that Google (could and nowadays) does use it to dictate "web standards". So e.g. they don't come anymore from organizations that develop standards but Google just forces their own standards by sheer power of market dominance.
Yes! I failed to dive deeper, but you expressed it well. They have already planned to remove the option to have ad-blockers in Chrome... what will come next?
Technically, WebKit is Apple’s rendering engine (Safari).
Google uses Blink, which is a fork of WebKit, but is its own thing now.
So, you can still use Safari without directly contributing to Google’s de facto rendering engine monopoly.
Thank you, I used to know the rendering engines fairly well a few years ago, but I'm out of the loop now.
What about WebView? It's the rendering engine used in Android, closely related to Blink I assume.
I honestly wasn’t super familiar with WebView until you asked!
It looks like WebView is a stripped-down browser, more than anything else. It can leverage different rendering engines depending on the platform, and on Android it looks like it leverages Blink just like Chrome.
If you're interested at all:
Google Chrome is a fork of the open source Chromium with several Google proprietary features. Chromium uses the Blink engine. Blink is a fork of a large component of WebKit called WebCore. Apple primarily develops WebKit (and by proxy WebCore), itself being a fork of KHTML and KJS which were actually discontinued this year.
Thank you, it gets complicated as you dive deeper. Am I right when I think that Chromium, although Open Source, is mainly developed by Google and therefore follows Google's agenda?
As of 2020, Chromium was made more permissive in accepting additional code. Before this, Chromium rejected a lot of outside code. Microsoft is now the biggest contributor outside of Google. Samsung, Intel, ARM and Apple are other notable contributors. There are several features found in the code that aren't used by Google at all. Chrome is 100% Google's agenda. Chromium does include Google services that Google rejects the removal of. Of course Google would rather you use them. Microsoft just removes them. As do others. But the features others have submitted to the Chromium code are of course used in their forks and possibly others. I would say Chromium is less of Google's agenda than it used to be. As it's not entirely neutral, there is still Google influence behind it.
This.