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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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This is why I’ve stuck with firefox through thick and thin
Been using FF for about 2 decades now and I have never seen a single good reason to switch.
Ditto. As much as people pretend Firefox is niche, it is the only browser with lineage back to the start of the web.
Truly. I don’t get this new “switch to Firefox!!” hype, are the people writing this very young, or am I missing something? I’ve been using Firefox since beta, I’ve never seen a reason to switch since it’s always been the superior browser, why have people been running anything else in the first place?
I made the switch to Lemmy. Time to do the same with Firefox I guess.
If they ever fuck up big time I’ll go with the next obscure option.
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
Vivaldi is filled with bloat and feature creep to the brim now. They abandoned that “lightweight” philosophy ages ago.
Just to add the missing comment about Edge - MS is turning into the Microsoft version of Chrome. They removed Google’s ad bs and replaced it with their own ad and monetization bs.
Gosh, the more I hear about Brave the worse it gets…
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they will not ship WEI
I don’t really understand how this could work.
The whole outcry around WEI is that most of the web wouldn’t work if you didn’t have a browser that supported it.
Not shipping WEI would seem tantamount to just discontinuing.
@DogMuffins @amycatgirl, it is not so simple, there are a huge number of third-party pages that also depend on certain Google services, directly or indirectly. This is what happens when you depend on sponsors, because with this you lose your freedom of decision, especially if you make a pact with the devil, sorry, Google.
Mozilla has already suffered this in its own flesh, becoming a Google mascot from an independent platform, even with Google devs working on Firefox.
Discord’s electron still hasn’t received the patch for spectre/meltdown mitigation in the browser, I doubt they will ever have to deal with manifest V3 or WEI.
You probably missed a part where Chrome, Chromium, and CEF are practically the same thing when it comes to resource consumption. Man, I can’t even make Steam consume less than 1 gb ram at any time anymore, even when minimized. CPU consumption, the amount of processes, loading times are also problematic. I wish companies would rely on a labor of programmers, not just web programmers.
I don’t think that Steam would consume less resources if it wasn’t a web app. Most of the resources usage there comes from crap loads of high quality images. You can’t have hundreds of images in a single window without eating loads of RAM.
Bullshit. Steam works well when CEF isn’t working right, like no internet connection. Images are still loaded. It’s 100% thier storefront.
Wut?
Reading comprehension level: 0
Eh, after all, they are all chromium under the hood. So I’d expect similar cpu/ram usage from them.
Problem is that someone will have to keep maintain it all. We will see how it will pan out in the end.
Vivaldi is a great browser
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.
Google doesn’t directly make money from their browser, but controlling their browser means they lock in the thing that drives their revenues. They can always test it out against all their ads and make sure it works, putting out a fix if it ever doesn’t. We’ve also seen recently how they’re trying to make it so people can’t run ad blockers, something they could only consider if they lock down the entire browser market.
I disagree.
Google doesn’t “control” mozilla in that way.
They can always test it out against all their ads and make sure it works, putting out a fix if it ever doesn’t.
They could do this even if they weren’t funding mozilla. Ad’s aren’t exactly reliant on bleeding edge web standards anyway. You’re thinking about tracking tech, which they don’t have any input in for firefox.
We’ve also seen recently how they’re trying to make it so people can’t run ad blockers
Well yes, and mozilla was quite vocal in their opposition, demonstrating that Google doesn’t have much control over them.
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.
Stop using public VPN, problem solved.
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.
That’s a good point, though I still think the average person is already entrenched in Google. Being the default on an alternative browser isn’t really going to make the difference to the average, uncaring individual.
In a perfect world it wouldn’t be necessary but on the bright side Google search is already doing enough itself to make the average person want to try something else.
Yeah that’s hardly a game changer.
Do you have any examples of how google is pulling the strings at Mozilla ?
For an example, Mozilla being forced to use Google Location Services as default even though Mozilla has its own. I am also a Firefox user but it always makes me wonder what other TnCs forced on Mozilla as part of the search deal.
go to about:config and type “google”
For default search.
I’m sure you’re aware Firefox isn’t in the search market. They are in the browser market and need to fund browser development. They’ve used Yahoo in the past and will go with whatever deal gives the best value. They could go with Bing if they wanted.
Funding from them does not mean control, and your insinuation is misleading and false.
This feels weird to say… I really think Microsoft should’ve stuck with trident / edgehtml.
Why? Because you liked the greater browser diversity or because you think it made a better browser?
Diversity. MS had made great strides with EdgeHTML, but it was still pretty bad
But at least opening the browser didn’t take all my ram.
And also at the very least you had another option. Which, in my opinion, wasn’t that bad, at least it could’ve been if they just gave up on Bing and MSN.
No way, they can’t give up on bing. They do that and all we have is Google for searches. We need the competition. For MSN, it’s all about content now, I kinda like that branding… It makes it easier to see that I don’t want to see it.
Microsoft could host their on SearXNG instance. /s
It was actually one of the most W3C compliant browsers there is, more so than chromium based ones. Unfortunately google’s near monopoly has made websites focus on working in chrome, not on standards.
As a web developer, EdgeHTML was the source of so many bugs, including a few that were regressions, and it didn’t seem like Microsoft dedicated enough resources to the Edge project.
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
Do I still use chromium when I visit the steam website via firefox?
No, its the steam app that runs on Chromium.
Visual studio code is chromium.
dies
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.
Chromium isn’t technically Google
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.
Still serves googles goal of control over the internet.
It is, good luck hard forking such a huge codebase.
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.
While that’s fairly typical and good practice in dev circles, we’re talking about a company that’s single handedly elevated an entire OS to prevent a big company taking too much power. I think the key here is they don’t really compete with Google.
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.
Mozilla doesn’t make it as easy to use the Firefox / Gecko engine in other projects, which doesn’t help for adoption.
I’m way out of the loop, but is the issue that they actively make it difficult to use the rendering engine or is it that the cost to modularize it isn’t worth the payoff to Firefox itself? A subtle but important distinction IMO. I always felt it was the second, but maybe I was being dense?
Back in the days it was possible to use Firefox engine to create apps. It was called XUL. Heck, Firefox itself was just a XUL app! But then they decided it wasn’t worth it for whatever reason and now their engine is tightly integrated.
I believe it might be still possible with UXP - a hard fork made for Pale Moon project.
Pale Moon is based on a derivative of the Gecko rendering engine (Goanna) and builds on a hard fork of the Mozilla code (mozilla-central) called UXP, a XUL-focused application platform that provides the underpinnings of several XUL applications including Pale Moon. This means that the core rendering functions for Pale Moon may differ from Firefox (and other browsers) and websites may display slightly different in this browser.
They don’t try to make it difficult, but they make code changes that make it clear they have no concern for anyone who might be trying to use the engine anywhere other than in a retail build of Firefox, without providing things like deprecation warnings or upgrade paths.
wait, the steam browser is chromium? no way
Basically every in app browser is.
How the fuck has everyone so easily allowed so few tech companies to dominate?
That’s just late stage capitalism.
No, that’s just people don’t want to pay for anything and expect everything to be free.
The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.
When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.
Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.
The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?
What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That’s why they switched to Chromium.
Oh… so to answer your question no one is “allowing” a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You’re free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you’ll do it you’ll probably just use Chromium.
And if you were to actually create an innovative or competing product, Google would just buy you out like Android, Waze, Nest, etc
Not on browsers, probably. It’s one of the areas where antitrust still has some echoes. They’ll probably pay you to stay afloat.
Tech giants are buying everyone left and right because people don’t want to pay for these innovative products. Imagine paying a monthly subscription for Waze! Who would do that? Literally no one. Innovative products can’t exist without paying customers.
Have you tried developing your own web browser?
The Web has become so complex, you need a huge team of talented developers to keep up with it, and for that you need a lot of money.
How hard can’t it be just put scrum on GitHub and let it work from there
Strange that nobody’s doing that, then. Especially since so many people want more competition for Google.
Software development is very expensive. And everyone just wants free stuff. Imagine the outcry if Firefox would drop revenue from Google search and switched to a subscription model a-la Adobe! People would literally lose their minds and call Mozilla Nazis.
Robert Bork:
He also became an influential antitrust scholar, arguing that consumers often benefited from corporate mergers and that antitrust law should focus on consumer welfare rather than on ensuring competition.
…What the fuck?
Yeah, it’s fine if you drive all your competition out of business, as long as the consumer “isn’t harmed”^TM . But, of course, how are you going to prove that the consumer isn’t harmed?
Chromium/Electron is just super easy to integrate. Afaik Mozilla wanted to make Firefox more easily embedable as well, but that project was killed.
Closest these days is an extension for Firefox that enable progressive web apps.
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Not only the browser. The whole app was built with CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
It used to be only the browser/store. Now it’s the whole app.
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
I don’t believe this has been the case for years?
It’s still the case, at least for Firefox on Android
They do have an extension that forces the new search results page, but I’ve noticed it freezes the browser if I tap on an image result, so I have it disabled.
I completely forgot I had added that extension (back when Google actually looked ugly on Firefox on Android without it) just disabled and oh my god not only does it not freeze it actually feels usable again (I hate the weird AI suggested tabs at the top in the chromium UI).
Ah yeah, seems not in every country! Had to go through 2017 bloomberg articles to find out lol
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 if the engines developer doesn’t give a fuck about you! :/
Damn, that sounds like a real missed opportunity. Hopefully they come around on that one.
Well, they always did it like that and basically cut all their bigger projects in the massive layoff so I wish they did too but I doubt it :/
Laughts in LibreWolf
Techically an FF fork !
Firefox or Netscape? I only ask since Firefox has its own roots in Netscape, and I understood that the Scape apps were ported from Netscape, not Firefox. Libre was a Scape app a decade ago.
Totally firefox , librewolf is rather a hardened firefox , with few features we can tweak in FF already !
Firefox, it’s only been around for a few years. It works as a soft fork where they pull in all the upstream releases after hardening their privacy
This is the way
It gets worse. All Electron applications are Chromium, too.
Chromium is everywhere…
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
It’s uBlock, but it’s fucking with their revenue
Unfortunately, if you have properly set up Firefox, i.e with arkenfox user.js or by using Librewolf, it doesn’t work :/ It still blocks adds without issues, but it’s not visiting them.
Or if you’re running PiHole - same issue. Is there a way how to make PiHole actually go though all those clicks? I guess it would be hard to figure out what’s an ad and what’s telemetry.
PiHole is doing DNS resolution only, it doesn’t have any way to know what the link is, its not sent that data.
I actually think AdNauseam is the cause of Google making WEI.
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.
it was great
Is this some Mandela effect speaking?
Yeah, it might have been “fine” at the normal web browsing part, but Microsoft kept trying to push their proprietary extension store. Also, didn’t they not support extensions for the longest time? I think that was the biggest reason they switched to chromium, so they could use all those existing chrome extensions?
Same with Opera, I miss old Opera with stackable tabs and before they got sold off to some shady company
Wasn’t old Edge just ie, revamped?
Yes but it was changed quite a bit, it supported way more standards and was getting way more updates to keep it up to date. The issue is that was expensive and also people complained that it some websites didn’t work on it, so it made more economical sense to switch it to chromium. I really wish they had kept it though.
Sorta, sorta not. Looking at the wiki page, it used “EdgeHTML” as the browser engine, which was a fork of ie’s engine (MSHTML). But it was a massive overhaul removing a bunch of legacy code and rewriting parts to fit modern standards and to make it compatible with webkit. It was maintained alongside ie11.
I remember testing it out and it being a lot faster than ie was when it first came out, but I’ve always been a ff user so I didn’t switch to it.