Um actually... Opera and Edge weren't always based on chromium!
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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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.
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Opera was the shit back in the early days. It could pretend to be any other 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.
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.
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Google accounts for some 80%+ of Mozilla’s revenue. Firefox struck a different kind of deal with the devil than chromium browsers, but Google is the one pulling the strings.
Bit of a weird thought, but I wonder also if they see Mozilla as a sort of controlled opposition too? As in, keep Firefox around so they don't get in trouble over antitrust or something like that?
Mozilla.org is the corpse of Netscape that Google keeps animated so that it looks like they have competition when they really don't.
The existence of Firefox is something they can point to to say they're not a monopoly. The fact that 80% of the revenue Firefox receives is from Google means that Google effectively controls them. Mozilla has to weigh every decision against the risk that it will cause Google to withdraw their funding. That severely restricts the choices they're willing to consider.
Firefox is only 5% of browsers, so it really doesn't matter to Google if that 5% of users considers using a different search engine. Because of the Firefox user base, many of them will have already switched search engines, and because Google is such a dominant player, many others would switch back to Google if the browser used a different default. So, maybe 10% of that 5% would permanently switch search engines if Google stopped paying. Is that really worth billions per year? Probably not. But, pretending like you have competitors in the browser space and using that to push back on antitrust, that's definitely worth billions per year.
Google makes something like $100 Billion a year in search ad revenue. 5% of that is $5 Billion.
It's odd that people think Google is incredibly worried about having too large of a market share in the browser market (which they don't make any money from) yet their 92% market share in searches is not concerning at all in terms of the potential for regulation.
The truth is nobody does anti-trust anymore (though they definitely should) and the big corporations aren't worried at all about it. Google makes Chrome, Android, and pays Mozilla because they want to maintain dominance in the search market. Which is the thing they make money form. What they pay Mozilla is a drop in the bucket compared to what they pay Apple to be the default search engine on their devices.
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Could you expand on this
Google pays Mozilla in exchange for google being Firefox's default search engine
I see that as an okay compromise. Anyone who cares will also know how to change it easily.
And I actually wouldn't have a problem with using google for searches if it weren't for the fact they constantly do the captcha thing when I'm connecting via VPN. Captchas for a simple google search.
I'm not against google making money off of a good product, but they've enshittified it too much to be considered good now.
Bruh, I just checked google.com again after a long time... Damn, I forgot that it was so annoying. Have been using ddg for years — no problem.
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A lot of people don't bother with changing defaults and corpos like Google, Microsoft, and the likes are well aware of this which is why Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars per year to be the default search engine.
I understand the compromise at the surface level but the implications just result in Google gaining more power and data, making it harder for "alternatives" to replace it over time which puts us all in an a bad situation when they decide to pull shit like WEI.
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Brave, Vivaldi, Edge and other chromium browsers are forks of the main chromium project. They can decide whether to include or exclude features from mainstream chromium.
As far as I know, Brave and Vivaldi will keep Manifest V2 extension support and said that they will not ship WEI (Web Environment Integrity).
Discord uses a modified version of electron, and it's also probably an outdated fork as well, although I am not sure about that.
Steam, in the other hand, uses CEF, which they use as a way to render it's interface and as a replacement of VGUI (a good example of this is the steam game overlay), I don't know if they will ship WEI if it ever releases in chromium as there isn't a statement from Valve yet.
Sources:
- ARSTechnica, Chrome's "Manifest V3" plan to limit ad-blocking extensions is delayed, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/chrome-delays-plan-to-limit-ad-blockers-new-timeline-coming-in-march/
- GHacks, Brave confirms it will support Manifest V2 extensions like uBlock Origin even after Chrome drops them, https://www.ghacks.net/2022/09/29/brave-browser-manifest-v2-extensions-after-v3-update/
- Valve Developer Community Wiki, Chromium Embedded Framework, https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
- Github, Discord's Electron Fork, https://github.com/discord/electron
If I missed something, please tell me!
Brave has an entire contingent of the FOSS community up in arms. They claim that it is doing more data harvesting than Alphabet, and the EULA prevents anyone from finding out what they are doing with all that data scraping.
I don't have a dog in the fight, other than as a windows user I would like to see FOSS adopted as quickly as possible since they have predicted all this shit for the last 30 years at least.
ETA: I know basically nothing about Vivaldi, though having used it, it seems to function as lightweight as chromium did back in the day. I have no comments on Edge.
I mean, brave is an Ad company, I think they're just using an ad blocker to stop other ad services other than their own from competing
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Sources in a comment?! Even more proof lemmy is superior over reddit. Thanks fa those man, more people need to do shit like that
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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!
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Yeah, just wrappers. Steam wasn't untill fairly recently, but they were slowly switching to it for some time.
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Mozilla doesn't make it as easy to use the Firefox / Gecko engine in other projects, which doesn't help for adoption.
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Firefox is kept alive by Google default search money AFAIK otherwise why don't they sue google for showing different search results page in firefox
It’s sad. Google basically owns the internet
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I just wish Mozilla didn't just tread Gecko as part of Firefox, the few who tried developing on it came to the conclusion that it's not sustainable with the engines developer doesn't give a fuck about you! :/
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Be sure to install AdNauseam on your Firefox to really go full "fuck you" to google.
AdNauseam
Note that AdNauseam no longer recommends Firefox
Sigh. I believe this is simply because of the removal from Firefox mobile
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But... but... it's an open-source...
Edge wasn’t always chromium. It was their own engine and it was great, but too many people complained essentially that it wasn’t chromium so they switched to chromium.
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From this band, I get more and more in love with Vivaldi, especially their Workspaces feature.
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Honest question… I get that Chrome has a bunch questionable privacy practices that sends data back to Google, but do the chromium based browsers do that as well? My understanding is that Chromium is just the rendering engine. How is it bad?
Also, if Google implements their bullshit DRM features, I wonder if the derivative browsers will be able to disable it. I believe I saw that Brave said they won’t use it.
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