The real death knell is that Microsoft decided not to go with Mozilla in building the relaunched version of Edge.
That would have been a very fruitful relationship, but they couldn't make it work. My understanding is - albeit its second hand - that they really didn't want to simply jump to Chromium, but Firefox proved far more complicated to do what they wanted to do.
Ultimately, Microsoft Edge went from a pretty good browser to loaded with of things I dislike, which is a real shame, but I know it would have significantly boosted usage numbers of Firefox and its engine, which in turn would drive more investment into Firefox itself.
This has always been an issue with Gecko and the Mozilla codebase. It was a massive blow to the Mozilla community when Safari was released using KHTML instead of Gecko. Google then adopted WebKit (itself an evolution of KHTML) for Chrome, another slight for Mozilla. This despite prominent ex Mozilla developers like Lisa Melton, David Hyatt, Ben Goodger, and others being involved early on with Safari and Chrome development. Even Brendan Eich went with Chromium and not Mozilla technology for Brave.
I really really wish they would have gone with webkit, even though they could have with some effort used gecko. Just giving up and going blink engine is awful for diversity in browser engines. I don't have much hope for efforts like ladybird, as they're just too small and browsers are a huge ecosystem now.
Microsoft was (and is) interested in Electron. They used it for lots of stuff like MS Teams (which is now using their WebView2 control), VSCode, Outlook, and their Graph toolkit.
>At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6.
The only lesson Google took from the Microsoft browser monopoly was "make sure the browser doesn't suck ass". So, Chromium will continue to be technically competent, enough that they can lull people to sleep and mine their personal data in ways that should horrify us all. Whatever else Microsoft was, it wasn't a gigantic advertising company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.
I don't think people even think about downloading browsers, swear the overwhelming majority of my irl friends only uses the default one on whatever phone, with rare exceptions.
Microsoft's goal was to make sure the browser didn't obviate Windows.
Google's goal is to push ads and you can see that with everything their doing. Manifest v3 castrates adblockers and their attempts to remove 3rd party cookies would stifle any competition in adtech.
Indeed, shipping Chrome alongside each application, because developers couldn't be bothered to write cross-platform Web code for OS Web widgets or the users system browser doesn't have nothing to do with it.
None at all, those poor devs, write portable Web code is so hard.
In my experience, Safari has been the slowest to implement useful new standards and is the least transparent about bugs and development plans, so it's very hard to act like they're doing us a favor by preventing better and more open browsers from having more marketshare.
And just a tip, if you don't have any Apple devices but need to test a bug/inconsistency being reported by Safari users, you can usually use GNOME Web (Epiphany) and the same behavior will usually manifest, since it is a true Webkit browser. It also includes the Web Inspector with the exact same interface as Safari. And it's not super outdated or anything like that, it tracks Webkit quite well nowadays.
It's a bit ironic that Webkit started as KHTML, a component of KDE, but eventually made its way to GNOME when a Gecko-based Epiphany became hard to maintain.
Kagi is starting to build their Orion browser which is WebKit-based for Linux as of this year.
I never do anything close enough to the browser engine to know, but apparently devs like WebKit a lot?
...is there a better reason to like webkit? Chromium certainly doesn't make effort to seem appealing to developers outside of its association with WebKit.
I used a really low-end system for a while some time back, running Linux, and WebKit-based browsers were the only ones with a mainstream (so: actually renders correctly for practically all sites) engine that was usable with even one tab open (I could do 2-3 as long as none of the pages were “webapps”)
This indicates some kind of fundamentally better design, to me. Probably related to why Safari’s by far the most respectful to battery life, of the big three browsers.
On mobile, I somewhat like Sleipnir browser for various configurable UI niceties unrelated to WebKit. I like the way it displays tabs as a scrolling strip of buttons, instead of making me open a "manage tabs" UI.
I configured a different user-agent string[1] to make some sites happy or to get some sites to neither force a dumbed-down "mobile view" nor spam demands that I use their mobile apps.
It has a small selection of plugins/extensions, mostly written by users.
Occasionally, a captcha will get stuck in a loop, so I'll have to try Opera[2] or Firefox. Or a Google site will sometimes refuse logins.
. o O ( I don't bother with Sleipnir on desktop, because it's buggy, quixotic, and nothing like the mobile version. )
[1] There's an optional UI button for switching UA string among Sleipnir's desktop or mobile ones, or your own custom string.
[2] The only mobile browser I've tried that can always convince a site to load is desktop view. Some Google sites try Very HardTM to force a mobile experience.
Sure, but fewer (sic) features is mostly a better state of affairs, and apple devices are mostly what matter if you're catering to rich westerners (as most products on this forum try to do).
To me, chromium only matters so much as I am forced to care by being employed. It offers very little to me outside of being necessary to enable the "blur" background on my video chats and offers a very shitty corporate UX.
Unfortunately, Safari is also pivoting towards ads in the form of “Help Apple to…”, services and that thing AI companies now call Personal Context. It’s not a bad browser just you wouldn’t pick it for privacy.
It's yet another 2.8k line specification solely authored by Google
employees, introducing a brand new complexity monster (clones of ghost
elements represented as a pseudo-element tree) to... make it easier
to add fancy animations.
Now what I really miss is a "disable CSS animations" button. I find
them very distracting and an unnecessary burden on battery life.
What frustrates me is that many people that claim to want a faster horse don’t actually use them where they are available
Bandcamp to me is the ideal “horse” for music (and I’m praying it stays a horse)
Those complaining about Chrome dominance but still not personally using Firefox is another example (even with all of Mozilla’s controversies, Firefox is still the “fastest horse” available imo)
Not being satisfied with the horse selection is understandable, but actively furthering the obsolescence of the available horses is not (even if the individual impact is minimal)
Mozilla has been around for 25 years at this point, they'd be as thrilled as anyone if this were the case. What they have is the structure that their legal counsel recommended. Anyone can play fast and loose with tax law up until the point that the IRS comes knocking.
Mozilla said they formed Mozilla Corporation for revenue flexibility. Not because tax exempt organizations aren't allowed to develop software. And organizations have to request tax exemption from the IRS.
You can just say Chromium