I dont see much advantage over Firefox with some extensions. Plus I’d rather support a non-chromium based browser as we’re dangerously close to ending up with the www == chromium only and I think that’d be terrible.
It’s not impossible to deeply fork Firefox or put a new browser around Gecko. After all, Firefox started as a radically reskinned Mozilla.
This takes engineering talent though, and I don’t see anyone who wants to invest. Brave could’ve, but I suspect Eich had some hurt feelings which prevented it. So it’s just Yet Another Blink Browser.
If Safari/WebKit loses its market share, the internet will become a darker, more proprietary place led by the world’s largest Internet advertising company.
The only reason I can think that people who want to make a new browser dont fork Firefox is because firefox can already do whatever it is they want to do in their new browser via extensions. This is only a recommendation for firefox in my eyes.
YACF: Yet Another Chromium Fork
It’s not a fork at all though. On macOS they use Webkit, and on Windows they use Blink.
For web page rendering, the browser uses the underlying operating system rendering API. (In this case, it’s a Windows WebView2 call that utilizes the Blink rendering engine underneath.)
(source)
Blink is part of the chromium project and it was forked from the Webkit codebase
YACF?
Yet Another Chromium forK
Firefox FTW here.
I’m not convinced. There’s already plenty of choices for chrome reskins. I’d rather they make their search engine better. Maybe get independence from bing.
Maybe get independence from bing.
The only alternative is dependence on Google. Indexing the entirety of the internet is such an expensive project that there are only two companies on the planet that can afford it.
Even then, there’s the theory/circumstantial “evidence” that Google’s indexing is a big farce. Forgot where I saw the video, but someone pointed out that the average person only relies on the 1st page or two of search results. To try to go beyond that, most searches very quickly drop from “millions of results” down to a few hundred/thousand at best. Going beyond the first couple of search result pages, the page count seemingly drops off a cliff.
However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.
If you’ve got some time to kill, check out some stuff related to the “Dead Internet Theory”. While I cant say how accurate the information presented may be, it certainly opens up the idea that there’s something funky about the internet and how we perceive it.
However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.
Gigablast went down 2 months ago. The crawler is available as free software, though.
Mojeek’s Search Engine Map gives you a good picture of the search engines out there. You can also see Seirdy’s very informative post on all the different search engines out there, which is fairly regularly updated: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/
I mean, Brave seems to have done a good job of it, better results than Google in many cases for me.
Brave search actually has its own index, and it works reasonably well
I guess I could just search for it, but is this chromium based?
Edit: The mac and ios versions are based on WebKit, the android one is based on chromium. I would guess the windows one is based on chromium as well, but cant find anything definitive.
Yes, they also haven’t implemented extension support yet.
That’s a pity. I never quite understood why these privacy-focused browsers always reskin chromium, instead of firefox.
Reason is money, I guess.
There are many privacy focused browsers that are built on FireFox
A lot of people saying this is a Chromium fork, but According to their blog, that’s not fully the case.
What’s under the hood
DuckDuckGo for Windows was built with your privacy, security, and ease of use in mind. It’s not a “fork” of any other browser code; all the code, from tab and bookmark management to our new tab page to our password manager, is written by our own engineers. For web page rendering, the browser uses the underlying operating system rendering API. (In this case, it’s a Windows WebView2 call that utilizes the Blink rendering engine underneath.)
So it uses Window’s default web renderer. It just happens that the default renderer for windows is the same as Chromium’s renderer. In this way it does mean that it has a lot of the same problems as Chromium forks, but the browser itself isn’t a chromium fork. (This is also why the macOS version uses Webkit and not Blink.)
Blink is a fork of Webkit. And Webkit was the original rendering engine of Chrome, before Google replaced it with Blink. So the DuckDuckGo browser belongs to the chromium family.
EDIT: And Safari is a distant cousin of Chromium.
And WebKit is itself a fork of KHTML.
they’ll have to wrench firefox from my cold, dead hands
Sadly it’ll die on its own likely due to mozilla mismanagement. The real question I have is how long will the FF forks survive without mozilla?
Tldr what’s going on?
So would the “best” browser be Firefox? Because I hear Brave is good as well but isn’t Brave a chromium skin-esque browser?
There are also Servo and WebKit. Servo was kinda dead for a while, but the project was recently transferred to the Linux Foundation and revived by Igalia, with funding from Futurewei. Not suitable for daily use yet, but worth keeping an eye on. WebKit is of course used by Safari (which I guess makes it the second most used browser engine after Chromium), but also Epiphany on Linux. I’m not aware of any Windows browsers using WebKit. Fun fact: Chromium was forked from WebKit, which in turn was forked from KDE’s KHTML and KJS engines.
Please forgive the spam – if you use Firefox and would like to join the Reddit diaspora from r/firefox, check us out on Kbin/Lemmy.
If I wanted a browser fork from another company I would just choose Mullvad Browser. At the moment, though, Firefox with arkenfox.js and uBlock Origin will do
Apparently it doesn’t block ads, so no thanks.
Isn’t that like step one for a privacy focused browser?
i just tried it, they have some baking that needs to be done before you make this your default browser.
right now almost all JS is blocked OOB.
edit: nm, it wasn’t JS blocking but the tab crashing.
It’s a bad move to strengthen to chrome hegemony.
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Thanks for that link! I’ve been almost firefox only for a few years and a reskin sounds really nice
Chrome Reskin
Ehn. I sleep.
If you want this kind of privacy use Mullvad’s browser (based on Firefox).
Is there a reason to use it over the regular TOR browser?
if i was making a crossplatform browser i’d use the OS’s default web renderer too.
i dont know of a single company that wants to secure their renderers outside of apple, microsoft, and google.
mozilla barely gets by with being a tiny marketshare and using the same security features provided by the OS.
Exactly my sentiments. Zero desire to use any form of chromium.
interesting they went with Chromium on desktop when their Android browser uses (or at least used to use) Gecko.
