> Helium is based on Chromium
> Best privacy by default
Sorry, pass...
Even with un-googled Chromium I do not think these statements are self-consistent. We need browsers that do not allow Google to control the ecosystem. We need legitimate competition. So what, our choices are Firefox (Gecko), Safari (WebKit), and Ladybird?
Personally I go with Firefox on most devices and Orion (WebKit) on my iPhone and iPad.
> Helium anonymizes all internal requests to the Chrome Web Store via Helium services.
This seems like something pretty easy to mess up. Maybe it is good now, but it sure is going to be a cat and mouse game.
I really would be curious to have some breakdown comparison with something like the Mullvad browser (Gecko). I have a lot of trust for both the Mullvad and Tor teams. They have a much longer history working with this kind of stuff and have been consistently updating it since release. Launched in early 2023[0] and last update was last week[1].
Because at the time IE6 was a terrible browser with poor standards support, while Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support. It is a gilded cage.
> Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support.
Google learned it can be "standards compliant" if it submits a draft spec to WHATWG/W3C, and while the comment and revision process is still ongoing, roll out those features in Chrome and start using them in YouTube, Gmail, Google docs, and AMP. Now Firefox and Safari are forced to implement those draft specs as well or users will leave in droves because Google websites are broken. Soon enough, Google's draft spec is standardized with minimal revisions because it's already out there in the wild.
The debate, revision, and multistakeholder aspects of the standards process have been effectively bypassed, a la IE6 and ActiveX, but Chrome can claim to be on the cutting edge of standards compliance. This is a case of Goodharts's law.
I don't mean this to doubt you, it is a sincere question. Do you have any examples of that happening? It sounds very believable, but it would be great to have actual sources for future reference.
Anytime you see someone on HN lamenting that Safari is the new IE because it doesn't implement something, 99.9% of the time it's Chrome-only non-standards.
- Most of standards advertised on web.dev as "new exciting opportunities you can try now". E.g. WebTransport https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/webt.... The status of that spec is "scribbled on a napkin", but somehow already released in Chrome.
Can I Use had to create a special UNOFF tag for all the web APIs that Chrome (mostly Chrome) ships. If you go to MDN and look at all APIs marked as "experimental", you'll find that most of them are already shipped in Chrome: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
push notifications, webgpu and webusb are examples of chrome being a reference implementation and using things for their services while simultaneously pushing the standard.
Push for mail, webgpu for maps (iirc) and I believe WebUSB is used for Android flash/debug.
WebGPU is the only one of those I’ve really followed, but hasn’t that had a huge amount of input and changes due to other voices in the working group? That seems to contradict the simplistic picture painted above of Google just dictating standards to the industry.
To add insult to injury, we probably would have gotten WebGL 2.0 Compute, which was initially done by Intel, if Chrome had not refused to ship it on Chrome, arguing that WebGPU was right around the corner, and it would take too much space, this was about 5 years ago.
And to those rushing out to point out the excuse part about OpenGL on Mac not having support for compute, WebGL already back then wasn't backed up by OpenGL on all platforms, see Windows (DirectX), PlayStation (LibGNM).
Also eventually Safari also moved their WebGL implementation from OpenGL to Metal, and Chrome did as well, replace their WebGL to run on top of Metal on Mac.
So not really that much of a problem regarding the state of OpenGL on Mac as "required" implemenatation layer for WebGL.
If Google websites break on Safari, users will stop using Google before they stop using an iPhone. They will blame Google as well. Safari has refused to implement standards multiple times.
That is revisionism, IE only stagnated because they kind of wipedout the competition, like Chrome is today, and Microsoft withdraw most of the development resources from the team.
WPF XAML was originally designed by ex IE team members, and they were the same that a few years later proposed XAML Grid concept as CSS Grid initial design.
Many JavaScript devs have to thank their abuse of JavaScript in the browser to XMLHttpRequest introduced by IE.
> IE only stagnated because they kind of wipedout the competition
Yeah, people forget that IE was a great browser. It was easily the most performant, I think driven by the Outlook web (I believe the first web app to make use of XMLHttpRequest) team demanding IE team make it so. The issue, like you said, is they won and then stopped updating.
> Internet explorer became the dominant browser for one reason only: it came by default.
Default helped, but IE was the far superior browser for a long time. People chose to use it.
I was also a FF user and it came out a few years later than IE6. When FF came out IE6 was still the superior browser, though it was eventually overtaken by both FF and Chrome.
It was sad to me watching that battle unfold. Maybe i was ignorant (and maybe i still am), but I learned most of what i know about web dev on Netscape sitting in a mac lab at university viewing source code. I HATED when IE started to takeover and eventually won that first battle. I miss Netscape :-(
Revisionism? I was around then and I implemented plenty of sites in IE. It always had bugs that other browsers did not (and there were more than two engines back then). Maddening lack of support of features that other browsers had implemented, often requiring crazy workarounds. Transparent PNGs didn't even work! Not to mention all the proprietary crap like ActiveX.
"Leading" being the operative word. Ship a new feature, submit it as a standard and encourage its adoption so things only work on chrome and further increase market share when people find other browsers "broken".
MS did exactly the same shit with IE - the only really difference was that the standards body (w3c) was independent, so they couldn't self declare it as a standard. Now the "standards" body (whatwg) is mostly google...
CSS Canvas Drawings
CSS filter() function
Video Tracks
Audio Tracks
FIDO U2F API
SPDY protocol
JPEG XL image format
HTTP Live Streaming
HEIF/HEIC image format
SVG fonts
CSS hanging-punctuation
And broken support for:
CSS font-smooth
CSS Initial Letter
Speech Recognition API
CSS -webkit-user-drag property
CSS3 Multiple column layout
CSS text-indent
Synchronous Clipboard API
HEVC/H.265 video format
TLS 1.1
text-decoration styling
CSS display: contents
CSS Container Style Queries
CSS clip-path property for HTML
CSS Counter Styles
Ruby annotation
WAI-ARIA Accessibility features
Media Fragments
autocomplete attribute: on & off values
DOMMatrix
SVG effects for HTML
X-Frame-Options HTTP header
DNSSEC and DANE
WebXR Device API
DeviceOrientation & DeviceMotion events
Permissions Policy
asm.js
Network Information API
theme-color Meta Tag
Document Policy
Your copy&paste does not support your argument. Just looking at the top items on your list, it's basically a bunch of Safari-only features which no other browser vendor ships:
- CSS Canvas Drawings is not a web standard. It's a WebKit-specific feature, only Safari implements it. Chromium removed it in order to replace it with an actual web standard (CSS Painting API).
- Likewise, the CSS filter() function is Safari-only.
- U2F API has been deprecated for years, was replaced by WebAuthn, and only Safari still implements it.
- Same with SPDY, which was replaced by an actual web standard (HTTP2). Only Safari still ships it, but has marked it deprecated.
- SVG Fonts were removed from the SVG spec.
- HLS, JPEG-XL, HEIF/HEIC are essentially Safari-only as well.
CSS hanging-punctuation and audio/video tracks are new features that haven't been widely implemented yet.
The last thing Google would want is the web to turn into a Chrome platform. Unlike with Microsoft or even Apple, their source of revenue is web, and they they are doing everything in their capacity for this platform to win. This is exactly why they open-sourced most of Chrome and almost fully finance Chrome's biggest competitor.
>Unlike with Microsoft or even Apple, their source of revenue is web, and they they are doing everything in their capacity for this platform to win.
I feel like there's a missing step in the argument here. Yes Google's revenue comes from the web, yes Chromium being open source and paying for search deals are a hedge against anti trust, but why does it follow that they wouldn't want to dominate the browser space? They do, and it seems to be working quite well for them. But it feels more like a minimum effort hedge against antitrust then a demonstration of a healthy ecosystem.
Also, every time Chromium comes up you have people pointing to it like it's a counterpoint to their browser dominance. It's open source, so what's the issue? But the issue is that Chromium as a body decides whether commits make it into the browser and the decision making body is an invite only group of full time Google developers. So it is controlled by Google after all.
>But the issue is that Chromium as a body decides whether commits make it into the browser and the decision making body is an invite only group of full time Google developers.
I understand that "just fork it" has been the canonical response to disagreements over direction of open source software. Sometimes that's the right call, the world is better for having a forked Syncthing, forked Nextcloud, and so on.
But I think there are cases, such as Chromium where the "just fork it" response is unrealistic about the burden of maintaining a codebase or the ongoing relationship to new updates, or not having capacity to solve new problems or comply with new standards in Google-independent ways. Part of the problem of Chromium is that it's normalized a velocity of development and of codebase size in exactly the way you would if you were going for embrace-extend-extinguish.
And the foundational point is still true, Google controls commits to Chromium, so the core project itself is not ever going to be an organic manifestion of community desires for an egalitarian internet. It's going to be whatever helps consolidate Google's monopoly.
You're not wrong, but there are organizations which could hard-fork Chromium, it just happens to be more productive to collaborate as long as Google remains a good steward.
The only reason Safari has any market share is because it's the default on every iPhone.
4/5 top browsers by market share are there because they are preinstalled on millions of devices and none of them are terrible enough for an average person to look for an alternative.
Exactly right and I wish more people understood this as the key dynamic driving change in browser adoption. Just for one more example, what little toehold Edge and Bing have right now are from muscling those in front of people as defaults.
Which I think is important as it relates to Mozilla. Because a lot of the arguments back and forth about Mozilla assume that change in browser adoption was about what features they did or didn't add. But I think that completely ignores powerful actors leveraging monopoly positions to drive users to their browsers, which is more important by several orders or magnitude. Any explanation of that history which leaves that part out is revisionist history in my opinion.
I disagree wholeheartedly, the current state of browser market share has nothing to do with how good any of the browsers are, it's just monopolistic behavior. Device manufacturers should force you to pick one during setup, which is absolutely a reasonable policy decision away.
In fact, as of this year, Apple devices in the EU already have to ask you which browser you want to use during the setup process, while Android devices don't have to ask you which browser you want to use, but do have to ask you which search engine you want to use. It is a bit inconsistent and arbitrary, but it's a step in the right direction.
What do you mean? It is on many Androids and every Chromebook.
I just checked some website stats I have access to and ~78.6% of iOS users use Safari. On Android on the other hand, ~76% of them use Chrome, ~8.1% uses the Samsung Browser, and there's a marginal amount of people using other manufacturer-provided browsers like Huawei Browser and MIUI (Xiaomi's default). Of course I don't know the exact manufacturer of Android phones to be able to tell what percentage of say Samsung devices switched to Chrome, but I'd say the pattern's still pretty clear.
The only people likely to switch browsers are desktop users, but they total to <20% of the traffic. Funnily enough Chrome isn't even the top browser overall, it's Safari, but that tells you more about my clientele (richer than average for my target market).
An alternative explanation is they fund Mozilla to avoid a monopoly breakup. The evidence? The fact that everyone currently knows exactly how much Google pays Mozilla because of the recent attempt to do a monopoly breakup.
I took "don't BE evil" to mean don't let the company image be that of an evil company which already made me distrust them. Once it was gone I knew the death star was fully operational.
the (very challenging) "trick" is to use Libre hardware/software, like Pinephone and LineageOS, but that's not realistic for the vast majority of people :(
It's not just anyone, it's the folks at Igalia. I think people disregard Servo since it's no longer under Mozilla but Igalia aren't just random contributors picking up the slack, they're browser experts that also work on Chromium.
Personally, I disregard Servo because I've been hearing about it for 10 years. I'll start paying attention again when they remove the "don't log into your bank with Servo" warning.
"These pre-built nightly snapshots allow developers to try Servo and report issues without building Servo locally. Please don’t log into your bank with Servo just yet!"
Maybe it's just me, but from time to time I try latest Servo build and it never survives more than few minutes of usage before crashing. Last time I did it was 3 days ago, I opened a website and it crashed with "RefCell already borrowed" in what seems to be a logger module. This always strikes me as weird because one of the selling points for Rust is memory and thread safety (quote from the website: "eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time").
Yes it's safe but undesirable, like Java's NullPointerException.
A more interesting question is why it was not possible to use compile time borrow checking in this particular case. It shows how valuable the borrow checker is when you can use it.
I don't use an ad blocker, I just don't look at the ads. Cookie alerts are a pain though. For privacy I just run in Incognito mode in Chrome or private mode in Safari.
I'm tired of people who are doing such great work being labeled politically over things like pronoun preferences and somehow this is supposed to make us wish for the projects failure OR the founder's expulsion from his own project.
(oh dear I forgot to imagine the project lead could also be female - damn you English language!)
I am deeply ashamed to know that the Ladybird browser was being coded by indentured children somewhere far away. Your thoughtful and considerate "Strawman Argument" has fully enlightened me.
Look, you could have said "I don't know what you mean. Explain it to me." And I would have tried and we would have had a civilised discussion why we think what we think.
But you, by resorting to sarcasm, inappropriate quotational use of a term, and distorting my sentences, demonstrate that you understood what I said and what I meant. This, in turn, tells me you think it is okay to deny people liberty, equality and justice, as long as the product is swell. In fact, I think you think that's OK even if there is no product.
I could argue some more, but this is the internet. So I leave it be and remind myself of the well-known saying "all evil needs to triumph is that good men do nothing."
Dunno if that's possible. To stick with the example, you can either go for gender neutral language or reject it. There is no "I'll stay out of it and do neither". Your only options are one or the other. So feels like a bit of a cop out.
For the decision itself, I don't see how he should be put in some extreme political camp for that. I think that's probably hard to understand for anyone outside the US / culture wars bubble.
There is the very obvious middle ground of "I won't make an effort for it but accept if others do", but somehow the people scared of "gender police" are always the ones that want strict rules saying that nobody is allowed to use it.
Same way nobody asked him to plaster pride flags over his project, but he went to the step of telling a contributor to please remove a flag from their avatar because showing that avatar in his project would be "political".
I suppose there's no way to not make a _decision_ though, is there? If, to stay with that example, he says "You know what, anyone can make a PR to gender any way they like", that sounds like a blood bath.
Reasonable responses I can think of are:
1. No we will not use gender neutral language here, it's a policy.
2. I think it's a good idea, but I don't have the bandwidth to make ground rules for that right now, so for the time being it will stay as it is.
3. Good idea, I'll set up some policy on that and if you have time to change things, help is appreciated.
> Same way nobody asked him to plaster pride flags over his project, but he went to the step of telling a contributor to please remove a flag from their avatar because showing that avatar in his project would be "political".
If that part is true, that's pretty wild. If he _did_ ask someone else to remove symbols from their personal avatar, that sounds as political as it gets to me... But from some quick research, I couldn't find anything about such a thing happening.
> There is the very obvious middle ground of "I won't make an effort for it but accept if others do"
And how does that work, exactly? If you get a PR to modify all the docs/code to be gender neutral you accept it? And what if in the same PR someone else vehemently opposes to the change? Or what if 2 days after the PR was merged you get a revert PR by someone else?
The thing is that you cannot just ignore "politics", politics are an integral part of our lives. Completely ignoring politics means accepting the status quo, so it's by definition a conservative position.
Ah, thanks for the link. Looks like a storm in a glass of water, I'm happy it's not something bigger. The description had me afraid akling came out as full MAGA supporter or something crazy like that.
I'd like to caution the reader that Lunduke is a notoriously biased source, having drifted off into right-wing (and particularly anti-trans) activism in recent years.
>That statement reads, in full, "This is a purely technical project. As such, it is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics or religious beliefs. Any changes that appear ideologically motivated will be rejected."
Yeah well tell me how a Web browser in the 2020s is not an ideological device. I'll wait.
Scroll through his X account -- Charlie Kirk and DHH content are some recent entries. He is one of those people who thinks tech should be apolitical without really interrogating what apolitical means or how it affects people who have been marginalized by politics
Hmm, I see what you mean. That's a little disappointing. I don't think the contents of any of his recent comments are extreme enough to consider him "controversial" yet, but the language he uses definitely remind me of supposedly "apolitical" or even "centrist" rhetoric.
What are you talking about? You’re referring to Andreas Kling, right? All I’m finding is he used to work at Nokia, then on WebKit at Apple, then founded SerenityOS, and now works on Ladybird full time. He says he was a drug addict, but is now many years clean, surely that’s not what you’re taking issue with?
I agree with you here. I want a viable non-Chromium browser.
But even if that existed, I also think a practical Chromium browser is important to have access to. I'm a developer and I use the web, so sometimes I just need Chromium. I think that will continue to be necessary for at least 10 years.
And I think the landscape of Chromium browsers is very bad. As a minimum, I want adblocking, low- or no-telemetry, timely security updates, no forced arbitration clause in its ToS, and support across platforms.
Right now, I think that makes Brave the best Chromium browser. That is not an accolade, I deeply dislike Brave, for dozens of reasons. It's just the best of a bad bunch. (But credit where it's due, I do very much like its "Shields" control.)
I only learned about Helium from this thread, but it checks almost all of my boxes. I was really excited to see a new browser that hits my checkboxes... But it's MacOS only :( Alas
You are making assumptions about me which are not correct. I am not using Firefox because it has bugs which made it stop working as web browser for me. I have had breaking problems with Firefox on every platform I've used it on.
On desktop (multiple Linuxes, Windows 7 and 10, and MacOS) I run into problems which I spend hours trying to fix, until I give up and go back to a Chromium browser. On iPadOS and iOS, it would crash when using arrowkeys to navigate URL history(or something like that, if I remember correctly. Been awhile). I had another issue with it on Android, the details of which I'd forgotten. I don't even use the sync features- these are just independent bugs.
Every time I tried to switch to Firefox, it's a time sink that ends with a broken install. I used Firefox as my primary browser in the early 00s through to ~2010. I tried to switch back every few years between 2017 and 2023.
The recent bad new changes (forced built-in advertising, new worse ToS, forced AI stuff) make me uninterested in spending more time on Firefox. I'm happy it works for you, but we are not the same person, and Firefox is entirely nonviable for me.
> On desktop (multiple Linuxes, Windows 7 and 10, and MacOS) I run into problems which I spend hours trying to fix, until I give up and go back to a Chromium browser. On iPadOS and iOS, it would crash when using arrowkeys to navigate URL history(or something like that, if I remember correctly. Been awhile). I had another issue with it on Android, the details of which I'd forgotten. I don't even use the sync features- these are just independent bugs.
And yet I, and a few hundreds of thousands of others, have used it on all of those platforms. Even at FAANGs.
If it's only breaking for you, and you alone, you can see why the rest of us are skeptical that it really is that broken.
Welcome to the HN/Social Media/Internet/Humanity! If someone has special needs that can't be fulfilled by X, they will make known about their experience and tirelessly defend against why X isn't usable for them, often with a list of reasons (I personally have a txt file full of reasons not to use X, Y, Z). It definitely doesn't mean everyone is that way, they are simply sharing their personal views on why they can't/won't use X. Arguing about this seems generally futile, as their point must be made and their opinion will probably not change regardless of anything you say.
I myself am guilty of this in the past, and I hope GP does not take offense at my writing this, as I don't intend to offend. I think it's just a feature/bug of humanity... some underlying mechanism that can possibly only be explained with psychology of lizard brains or something ;)
> If it's only breaking for you, and you alone, you can see why the rest of us are skeptical that it really is that broken.
There are several problems here.
Before anything, I want to note that we don't have to fight, we aren't enemies. We're on the same ideological side, even. This tastes like an angry and bitter internet argument. Do you taste it too?
We're just two people talking about web browsers. We don't need acrimony for each other. My bitterness is for the browser ecosystem. I am very sad about the browser ecosystem.
On that note, who are you speaking for, other than yourself, when you talk about "the rest of us"?
You are only you, and I am only me. The difference here is that you have good experiences with Firefox, and I have had bad experiences with Firefox.
Second, your skepticism is part of the problem with Firefox. In trying to find support for these issues, I mostly found people who did not believe me (or that I'm using it wrong, etc.)
The way you engage with people is common in the Firefox community, which is deleterious to the goal of having more people use Firefox. I think it's actually really important that we have a good non-Chromium non-corporate browser which people want to use, and Firefox is still the most promising one in the running.
Third, it's just incorrect to think I am alone in my issues. Some of these issues I could confirm were unfixed bugs, by finding them in the issue trackers. Others I could find with my issues in threads on Reddit, for example. Others are in this same thread we're commenting on. You can see people here talking about issues with Firefox, or needing to "Frankenstein" their install to get it to a usable state (a relatable experience for me, except I couldn't get it back into a usable state. I never want to touch user.js again.) My experience is lonely, but I am not the only person with my experience.
There is also the 94% to 98% of people on the internet who do not use Firefox. Some of those must be because they wanted to use Firefox, but had a breaking issue and went to Chrome.
People use software with bugs all the time, and Chromium and Safari's dominance is mostly because of years of costly domination from Apple and especially Google. But part of it is also things simply not working in Firefox. (Which is, also, partially due to Google expanding on Microsoft's IE-era standards playbook).
Finally, what is your position exactly? That Firefox can't possibly have the bugs I had? Or that I am lying about wanting a viable non-Chromium browser? I think you might be responding with a knee-jerk defense of Firefox, and you might assume I'm arguing in bad faith, which is fair, given this is the "Forum for Bad Faith Arguments About Computers with Some Amount of Financially-Motivated Arguments".
But I am ideologically motivated to be on Firefox's side. It's the largest browser engine not owned by a FAANG. Ideological motivation is the reason why I tried to use Firefox several times over several years, and why I spend time talking on the internet with strangers about web browsers.
Okay, let's get back to your original assertion, that FF isn't viable.
It clearly is, with hundreds of thousands of daily users. Maybe it's broken on some specific sites[1]; can you recall which sites those were?
Because it works, right now, on all the mainstream and popular sites, including every banking site I use it on, every shopping site, every wordpress site, every forum, subreddit, LLM/webchat, search engine, LoB and social networking site I used it on over the last decade and a half.
Actions speak louder than words - use FF, and then when you get to a site it doesn't work on, start Chromium, instead of complaining about the hours trying to fix it.
=============
[1] Note I am not saying that it is broken for you, I am saying that it is broken for specific sites.
It's not specific sites. See my previous comments about crashes, and about captchas. Like you said, when I use Firefox, I get to a site that doesn't work and then I start Chromium. I'm not going to use Firefox again, that's just silly.
I'm going to generally side with with ops "bitterness" here.
Sure, I don't want bad blood -- but like, I get why their tone is this way; this ain't just McDonalds vs Burger King.
Op is correctly frustrated at the "consumer is always right" mindset folks like you show. This is more important than consumer choice and (as someone who uses Firefox as a daily driver and will just bounce to Chromium as needed) "fixing a billion little bugs that you see" isn't as near as important as promoting the ideology more?
But the bugs made the browser not work for me, and I spent hours on them with no progress. The big thing are crashes, and webpages not working (usually in captcha and auth).
I read you two's conversation and didn't get an adversarial tone at any point. It sounds like you two have a difference of opinion, and are just kind of dug in on your "Apples" and "Oranges," quite honestly.
What is your definition of “viable”? Plenty of people own iPhones, which is locked down to webkit.
Similarly, firefox is fine. I switch between it chromium and safari for dev work, and (unless you go out of your way to find a counterexample) they’re completely interchangeable in terms of compatibility and real-world performance.
Firefox runs fine on android, so there’s not even a platform where chrome is the only choice (other than chromebooks).
I know this is not typical, but I just run into breaking bugs on Firefox on every platform which prevent me from using Firefox (except Intel MacOS, which I have not used, and Windows, which I haven't used in a few years.)
For Safari, the problem for most platforms is that it doesn't run on most platforms. It doesn't really count to me if I can't use it on my computers. (Caveat that there are non-Safari webkit browsers, but they're not very good.)
I like Arc browser by The Browser Company. As far as I understand it, it's made by a bunch of jaded ex-google employees, so the Google stuff is also stripped-out. The features are next level, and I feel it's a very forward-thinking browser. Maybe it will work for you
Arc was famously not built by ex-Chrome people but rather a bunch of opinionated UX folks. It amounted to what I can best describe as a glorified "skin" for Chromium and nothing innovative under the hood.
They realized they couldn't make any money with that, so they abandoned it and started Dia which was "AI". Again, they had no capability nor plan to make any solid product, was just sold to Atlassian
Actually, they really knew how to hype up their product. And their marketing videos were top notch. Innovation I suppose.
Oh you are right! I guess the site must be inferring User Agent and just presenting one download link. It looks like they have Linux, MacOS, and Windows builds.
Literally the first thing I looked for...(if it is based on chromium).
When can we get a new kind of browser that doesn't use html/css/js...? Build one from scratch with a common design language (but modifiable by the user)
Depends on your goals but I think a minimal and useful browser with completely new APIs wouldn't be so hard to do if you leverage the huge amount of existing open source libraries. The hardest part would be getting people to actually use it.
Make it markdown based. It'll be like the web once was... Just documents linking to other documents, with images and videos. We just pretend web 2.0 never happened. Everybody can write markdown so we don't even need web2.0.
Gemini is probably not exactly what GP wished for, but it has something resembling a critical mass of users and while I do not think the text format (gemtext, i.e. gmi) is perfect I find it good enough for what it does.
I even use gemtext now and then offline just as an even simpler markdown. Since it has so few features it is trivial to convert gmi to markdown or to any other format without losing anything. It works as a lowest common markup language for when something that minimal is enough.
That would actually make sense. But it would also point at the larger problem (the one we're not actually looking into because we're too busy with solving the unsolvable a.k.a. with C++).
It goes like this: are "we" building a browser for it to be reckoned with, or are "we" building a browser in order to let people browse webpages?
Because only one of these two requires collecting tens of million of... pretty much anything where ten million is a large number I guess? Yet people conflate the two, thinking the same approach holds for both goals, so let's put it sideways:
Which exact problem does a new browser (engine) solve, besides people saying there are too few browsers? What's the purpose of having this problem, its underlying nature? Can we solve it a way that doesn't require reimplementing the last 30 years of computing history? Can we even go look for such a way or will someone show up to stop us?
If the goal is to become a browser vendor, obviously there's no workaround to building a browser (or rebadging one lol); if the goal is not that or not only that, anyone building a browser is gonna have to expound a little more on what exactly they're trying to achieve. That's complicated by how the vast difference between a new browser engine and, say, a new model of TV set, can't really be expressed in beancounts.
While I agree that monopolies suck, I _absolutely hate_ having to waste my time adjusting styles and writing workaround code just to make everything look and work consistently in a multitude of browsers. This is one of the reasons — among a hundred others — that I grew to somewhat hate front-end, doubly so with the rise of mobile devices. And the more rendering engines we have, the more developers will have to fight frustrating battles with inconsistencies and quirks.
Indeed front-end development in software can be painful. Much of the cruft can be attributed to computing's byzantine history of incremental experimentation. You might take some comfort in knowing that the biological analogue is vastly more complicated: the transformation of genotype to phenotype. Trying to figure out the evolutionary pressures and various mutational accidents that drove particular biological changes feels way harder than trying to figure out WTF Project X was thinking when they decided to pivot from being a social network for dog walkers to a low-latency query planner for a database no one has heard of.
It's actually the beauty of open source that we can align on a few primitives that are reusable in several different contexts to build radically different product experiences and world views. If you think of the phylogenetic tree of software this is exactly what you want to happen.
A browser being based on Chromium has nothing to do with how private it is. Yes you are furthering an internet monopoly by using chromium. But there is noncorrelation between being based of Chromium and Privacy.
Yes it has, unless they plan to do significant changes to how the relevant JS APIs function, which is usually prohibitively expensive to maintain. Standard Chromium allows websites to fetch a lot of fingerprintable bits, this is even true for Brave. Tracking protection on Chromium is a joke.
Firefox on the other hand is better in this respect and even has a setting explicitly for resisting fingerprinting.
Calling Brave "best-in-class for resisting fingerprinting" is quite bold. Especially when it's so easily disproven.
Try some good fingerprint testing sites on Brave and see what comes up (those results alone should chock you). Then try the same sites on Firefox with privacy.resistFingerprinting=true. Unless some truly revolutionary initiatives have been taken at Brave since last I checked, you will see Firefox do A LOT better than Brave.
Brave suck at resisting fingerprinting. It may be better than other Chromium-based browsers, but it's still pathetic.
> Try some good fingerprint testing sites on Brave
Um. Have you tried this? Because obviously based on my comment I've done this before (and I've of course included Firefox).
I just did this again and sites tell me Brave has a randomized fingerprint. Firefox's is "unique". A specific example: the EFF Cover Your Tracks website[1] said that both browsers convey 18.21 bits of identifying information.
Additionally, if you need to enable a certain setting for best performance, that browser is obviously worse for purpose, given that the vast majority of people don't change settings.
I actually did, but admittedly it was maybe 4 years ago. Brave vs Firefox. Brave gave the fingerprinter a lot of information about my hardware including the exact model of my GPU, while Firefox did not.
I think I wrote some report at one time about this issue, so it was a bit more than just surface level testing. Chromium was always a disapointment whenever I attempted a comparison.
I think a more fair comparison would be today's Brave vs some hardened Firefox such as Librewolf, Mullvad Browser or even Tor Browser. Because the issue is not how vanilla Chromium or Firefox perform, but how well they can be hardened in practice.
Worth noting is that Brave does better when it comes to compatibility, because it leaves WebGL and other APIs enabled, while something like Tor Browser will disable those for privacy reasons. It hints at different priorities between these projects.
You need to look at history. In early 90s why did Microsoft invest in apple when it is its competitors. Investment doesn't mean they are medling into mozilla business.
For companies like google (present) or Microsoft in 90's.
It is better to have a crippled competitor than no competitor.
No competitor attracts government agencies for monopoly which is worse.
In the 1990s Microsoft “invested” in Apple because Steve Jobs allowed them to save face by giving them the option to settle their part of Apple v San Francisco Canyon Co by calling part of it—$150 M—a stock purchase that only lasted a few years. I do not know how much the total cash settlement from Microsoft was, but industry rumors went up to $1B.
Maybe it's also the other way around: if Firefox was legitimate competition, Google wouldn't "fund" them (quotes because really, google is also just buying user traffic with their investment).
Is Google actively sabotaging Mozilla or is Mozilla a genuine competitor that just hasn't figured out how to build a browser that'll actually challenge Chrome (and Chromiumy browsers) beyond ideologist users?
I say it's the latter. Google's money doesn't actually negatively impact Firefox's competitiveness.
I dont see how the competitiveness argument can still stand. I've been using both browsers for the better part of two decades now and chrome/chromium never was the better product. Sure it had slightly better devtools for a while but nowadays it is very difficult to argue either way. Performance was rubbish on both ends for years in a row, right now both seem to do fine. Firefox has sync, a significantly better product than whatever google comes up with every two years. So yeah, I think Mozilla has a good enough product to challenge chrome. What they don't have is comparable traffic to their site.
Oh and of course focus. Mozilla has lacked focus for almost a decade now with all the random products and initiatives they launch.
As someone who almost compulsively changes browsers every so often with the mistaken belief that "there's gotta be something better" and has swung by Firefox on multiple occasions, it has never offered me any compelling reason to stick with it beyond not being Chrome.
Zen came close, but also didn't stick.
Containers seemed nice at first but my personal usage of them devolved into an over abundance of containers to isolate everything from one another (my fault, though).
On the other hand, I've had various small nits here and there that always eventually push me back towards a chromium browser.
But hey, I'm a believer in not holding on to my decisions so long that they become assumptions, so off I go to install Firefox and give it a 4th whirl since 2010.
That's gotten me married to Firefox. The hierarchical vertical tab management makes research and general web browsing far more efficient and productive. It also helps me know which tabs I can close when I'm done.
I did. TBH, it did not do much for me, but I'm pretty sure the problem is me.
I've tried all kinds of tab management things (they're usually a motivation for trying a new browser that supposedly offers a better way) and nothing ever sticks out for me.
Are you saying that, because people don't want to buy browsers, the end result is we only get the ones that can be financed by companies that sell other things (which in this day and age is ads, with only a few exceptions)?
I'd agree. Although I'd also add: people don't want to sell software anymore, they want to sell subscriptions, and I personally do not have much desire to pay $10/month for a browser (and then get pitched more services to buy on top, no doubt).
The subscription thing is key, although maybe a generational thing. I would happily pay a flat $60-100 for each major version upgrade I choose to adopt, but I won't just give them a direct monthly tap into my bank account.
It's purely a theoretical, since nobody has offered me a choice of that model - either I'm a source of ad revenue whether I want to be or not (Chrome, FireFox, Safari), or I'm in a captive ecosystem where I'm already paying a premium (Safari, Chrome for android)
> is Mozilla a genuine competitor that just hasn't figured out how to build a browser that'll actually challenge Chrome
Mozilla had a browser that had huge market share and was growing, and actively destroyed it for the sake of Chrome, at the same time as they became a financial dependent of google.
> google is also just buying user traffic with their investment
Google is not buying user traffic from a browser with a 3% share and falling. Google is probably responsible for 2-300% of firefox's profits, because if they stopped paying them off, they'd have to close up shop in 6 months. Everything else they do is a failure, and if it looks like it has a chance of being successful, like Servo and Rust*, they get rid of it.
They're not going to give them money to them with a check with "Bribe to fail continually, and to never give users a feature that they would leave Chrome for ever again" written on it. Money is fungible. If they couldn't bribe them like this, they'd create an "Extensions Interop Consortium," let Mozilla host it, and fund it to the tune of a half-billion dollars. Let Google prove this "partnership" is profitable, this default search engine placement on the 3% browser used exclusively by people who are experts, know how to change their defaults, and hate google. It doesn't pass the stupid test.
But actually, they don't have to prove anything because even though they're officially a monopoly, one of the worst of the many horrible, horrible Obama judges has now affirmed that there will be no remedy, because a remedy might affect their business. He then immediately went on tour, telling audiences how the government is bullying tech companies.
[*] And maybe firefoxOS, I accidentally had one as my daily phone for a year, and it worked fine. I didn't love it and I didn't even like the idea of it, but it certainly worked.
Which sucks because it's not exactly fantastic as a competitor. There's still very, very noticeable performance differences and render speed/pattern differences that after you've been using a chromium based browser for a long time give firefox a feeling of being slow (it's not, it is absolutely just a perception thing, but it's enough to put you off using it)
Chromium: Entirely dependent on Google, a $3T company who's entire business model relies upon invading your privacy and currently has a >70% global share of browsers
WebKit: A closed source browser with ~18% of browser share and run by a nearly $4T company who forces all browsers on their mobile devices to be reskinned versions of their browser and probably wants to do the same on their other devices
Gecko: An open source browser with ~4% of the browser share, run by a non-profit with a mission of to preserve privacy but is struggling to find funding.
All three choices suck. I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that. But there's only one option on here that isn't trying to royally fuck everyone over and actually cares about the very service we're arguing over.
So what... we're going to let the internet get screwed because a bunch of dudes making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year can't toss some beer money over to the little guy?
You paint this as a hopeless picture, but seriously, have you considered donating? Every time I see these types of threads I see comments like
> I would happily pay a small monthly subscription fee for a browser if it has strong legally protected privacy guarantees.[0]
Seriously, are we all that greedy and myopic? They're a non-profit. You know tons of companies, such as Google and every other big tech company, have some donation matching system. Google pays the Mozilla Foundation about half a billion a year to make Google the default search engine. How is the fact that they are throwing such massive amounts of money not a concerning thing? Yet FF has enough users that we could give them an extra 40% revenue if we tossed them $5 PER YEAR. That's it.
Do you really think your browser provides to you less value than your Netflix (160%/360%/500% more expensive) or Spotify (240% more expensive) account? Seriously? If literally 30% of FF users gave to Mozilla what they are willing to give to Spotify, then the problem is solved. Or 15% of users did it through their company's matching program. If instead of discouraging people, you got more people to convert then the percentage of necessary contributors decreases!
It's even tax fucking deductible so it isn't even that <$5/yr...
My problem with donating to Mozilla is the donation goes into a pocket of their greedy CEO and only a small fraction to those who do the browser development. And that’s mostly why I donate to Ladybird.
I recently purchased Firefox relay because I thought it was a nifty service to start using to prevent spam and preserve my privacy, but also a driving factor in my purchase was giving money to Mozilla. I didn't really look into it beyond that internal thought process. Your comment made me wonder, are things so segmented at Mozilla that supporting something like relay doesn't actually help Firefox in general?
Long story short, you made the right choice. You can't purchase anything from a non-profit and you can't donate anything to a corporation.
If you purchase a product from them, it goes to Mozilla Corporation which makes all the products[0], if you donate money to Mozilla, it goes to the foundation.
[0] Minus Thunderbird, Thunderbird is developed by a separate foundation. Both the "Thunderbird foundation" (not actually called that) and Mozilla Corporation are 100% owned by the Mozilla Foundation.
I’m a Mozilla employee who works on Firefox, so I’ll try to answer this to the best of my knowledge but as a disclaimer I can’t guarantee I’m 100% correct
Paying for relay will give money to Mozilla Corporation, the same pot the google money goes into, which will predominantly pay for Firefox development but also other products. The corporation’s profits also fund the non-profit Foundation’s activities.
People often raise this argument regarding donating to the Foundation, as that money will be spent by the foundation, therefore not on Firefox. But a dollar raised by the foundation is a dollar less the corporation has to give the foundation, leaving it with more money to spend on Firefox and other things.
You can also donate directly to “MZLA” which makes thunderbird, and that money will be spent on thunderbird.
The problem many people have with donating to the Mozilla Foundation us them squandering enormous amounts of it. Mostly on things nobody asked for and executive pay.
Personally, I don’t feel like firing Firefox devs and starting controversial and expensive diversity campaigns while raising executive pay when Firefox is losing market share every year is being a great steward.
People have a lot of weird excuses for disliking Mozilla. There are definitely legitimate ones, but the point really is "what's the alternative"? Are the faults of Mozilla really so much worse that we'll turn to Google instead? Honestly, that seems silly to me.
Can we just for once not blindly hate something for not being perfect and consequently strengthening an even worse option?
Could you, and everybody, stop saying this for any reason about any subject? Go through this thread, pick out all of the people saying that they hate Mozilla for "not being perfect." Argue with them.
> the point really is "what's the alternative"?
Yes, that is the point. If there were an alternative people wouldn't complain, they would just leave. But Google is paying Mozilla (and Apple by the way) massive amounts of money not to compete. Mozilla is just very-ungoogled-chromium. It is not an alternative to google, it is one of the alternatives that google offers. I use it because I don't want to leave the internet altogether. It is a pain in the ass that involves a lot of work to bring it up to 70% of the functionality and UI it had 20 years ago.
So what remains from your argument? It's been shown that Mozilla Corporation is for-profit, donations to the Mozilla Foundation do not go into the pot that pays for Firefox development, and Mozilla Corporation is 85% funded by Google.
So not independent of Google and not a non-profit.
To be clear: I use Firefox, mainly because uBlock origin is blocked on Chrome.
The original plan with the iPhone was to have web apps, not native apps. That's why they needed to run the rendering engine of the iPhone on Windows. Then they went native and Mac only with the dev environment.
I don't think that Apple would earn one single dollar by porting Safari to Windows again.
"MiniBrowser" opened after installing AppleMobileDeviceSupport64 from iTunes and VC_redist.x64, and it appeared to be making network requests, but it never rendered any web content I could see.
You used to be able to get Epiphany preview on Windows, for quite a long time after you could get Safari on Windows. Doesn't seem to be the case anymore, though.
> Even with un-googled Chromium I do not think these statements are self-consistent. We need browsers that do not allow Google to control the ecosystem. We need legitimate competition.
If you fork Chromium, Google doesn't control the ecosystem, it controls a large part of it. But you're able to build on top of that ecosystem. So you can have the best of both worlds, all the extensions and ecosystem from Chrome but with more. That is called true competition.
I also suspect Brave would take offense to your claim you can't have privacy on a Chromium fork.
While I appreciate your perspective, the widespread adoption of Google Chrome has presented challenges. The implementation of Manifest V3 demonstrates Google's significant influence over extension developers, requiring adherence to increasingly restrictive APIs or facing limited visibility within less popular browsers.
Extension developers are not forced to adhere to anything from Google to build compatible extensions that work on forks such as Brave. If they want to be in the Google ecosystem, sure, but as I pointed out, you can build your own ecosystem on top of it.
If you build on top of it, you're not forced and unable to extend the ecosystem.
For me, the fact that a browser is based on Chromium is a deal breaker when compared to CPU/RAM usage of Safari on Mac OS. When I open the some JS heavy tabs like Notion, AIstudio.google.com, email, the difference is huge.
Orion is the only alternative, because as you said, it's built on WebKit, but I had trouble it working with extensions that I need for my work.
Most of these chromium-based browsers are intended to address privacy concerns. Firefox (mostly) respects your privacy.
There are also sometimes compatibility issues with Firefox because web developers only test on chromium and webkit. Anyone opinionated enough to put up with that is just going to use Firefox.
Primarily probably yes, but I think for example Brave or Arc Browser teams also had ideas for their own browser features instead of "just" making a more degoogled Chromium. Helium as well, I suppose, otherwise what's the point?
That's my (admittedly extremely limited) understanding. The Mozilla/Firefox people de-prioritized making Gecko a separate linkable library years ago, and it's no longer a straightforward thing to do. Which is a real bummer.
They do, whilst they have a minor user base. If they become the majority they'll lose funding.
So from Mozilla's point of view, they must be continually worse alternative. They'd shoot themselves in the foot if they looked like the better alternative.
You say this like chromium is not the best browser experience we have. There used to be a point where everyone had to build websites for 5 different web engines, each of which had their own quirks. Now that we just build for one it's so much easier, and while chromium still does a great job I'm not sure why we'd want to create another, likely worse, engine and browser.
I use FF... but they are financially tied to Google and even technically they are waiting on Google to implement JPEG-XL instead of moving forward themselves. Why not do some work/spend some money to borrow Safari's implementation or audit and augment a third party library? Instead of waiting on Google... esp on this matter where you could be waiting for a long time.
They do however have the right idea. Document sharing and applications are completely different things that require different architectures. I like their start with Gemini though I’d bring over non video images and CSS3, html5 tags that make html more intuitive. I’d just strip the browser way way down back basically to what it was with some enhancements and lessons learned. The application part is much more complex though I’m working on it and will share my research if when ready.
Helium does not have to be the destination. But it is a good step when Chromium is the standard (try using Safari and quickly websites seem uncharacteristically janky)
The thing is, Gecko is really insecure when compared to Chromium. Its sandboxing is asinine. Additionally, due to lack of WebView implementation, on mobile you have to use Chromium either way, leaving you with two completely separate attack surfaces.
Quoting GrapheneOS developers[1]:
> Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
IronFox (an FF fork) developers[2]:
> While we do as much as possible to improve the situation, it should be noted that Firefox-based web browsers, including IronFox, have security deficiencies when compared to Chromium. This is especially notable on Android.
Yet I pick a Chromium based browser because Firefox is awfully anti-user. I still can't load extensions that are not Mozilla-approved, a major deal breaker for me. Then there's the "news" (ragebait slop) on the new tab screen by default, almost like I'm using MS Edge, and also the many sponsored & "suggested" (read: sponsored) links by default in new tab and the address bar as well.
The only acceptable Gecko-based browser I know of right now is Zen, which is great but still in beta. And Tor & Mullvad Browser are good for private one-time sessions.
We need competition for a free and open internet, I fully agree. Mozilla is far from a decent champion for that cause. I'm far more excited at what Ladybird has to offer.
Extensions in Firefox are required to be signed by Mozilla. If you make your own build of an open-source extension, it will not load. The setting to disable this check only works in Developer Edition, ESR and Nightly builds.
Firefox nightly is pretty darn stable, though I'm not sure if there's any security issues with it. I use it for both mobile and desktop, and have for the past 5~10 years and haven't had any issues that weren't fixed by immediately downloading a fresh build (this happened twice) or were caused by me performing unsupported/insane actions (transferring browser profiles (indexeddb) on mobile via CLI commands using remote devtools).
I've got one buggy device, but I suspect corruption due to the error message and I'm more interested in saving the unsyncable data I've got on that profile than I am in trying to fix it by clearing data.
Sponsor stuff that you can just turn off (Firefox) vs. Selling out your privacy directly (chromium with worse fingerprinting protection) and indirectly (Google browser monopoly).
I love Chromium ! It's the fastest browser implementation out there, and the best to handle hundreds of tabs in the background. What if, everyone was going on a fork of ungoogled chromium, there would be interest into alternative browsers to Chrome and money invested there, and at some point making forks of Chromium separated from Google might make sense business wise. So, we can impact the future of browsers by using chromium based browsers
Even with un-googled Chromium I do not think these statements are self-consistent. We need browsers that do not allow Google to control the ecosystem. We need legitimate competition. So what, our choices are Firefox (Gecko), Safari (WebKit), and Ladybird?
Personally I go with Firefox on most devices and Orion (WebKit) on my iPhone and iPad.
This seems like something pretty easy to mess up. Maybe it is good now, but it sure is going to be a cat and mouse game.I really would be curious to have some breakdown comparison with something like the Mullvad browser (Gecko). I have a lot of trust for both the Mullvad and Tor teams. They have a much longer history working with this kind of stuff and have been consistently updating it since release. Launched in early 2023[0] and last update was last week[1].
[0] The Mullvad Browser (mullvad.net) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35421034
[0.5] Mullvad Browser (torproject.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37159744
[1] https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser