It’s a shame the web got so complex that it has become unfeasible to make a browser engine anywhere near full compliance for anyone that isn’t a large company.
There’s no “full compliance”. There’s a set of a hundred or so features and everey major browser supports the most important +/- a few dotzend.
And I’ve literally heard people say they view Chromium as a reference implementation of the living standard. 😭
Chromium is to the modern internet what Internet Explorer was in the mid 2000s. It’s not as stagnant (thankfully), but as far as market share and giving one oversized tech giant arguably too much power over the internet, we’ve basically come full circle.
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Can anyone explain how much control Google has over the Chromium project?
It’s unfortunately a relatively complex thing to answer.
First off, there’s the license. The source code is published under a BSD-3 license, which is very permissive, meaning in theory, anyone could fork the repository and be completely free from any control of Google.
However, this is not really a thing in reality.
First of all, for your fork to have any meaning at all, you need people to use it. They’re not going to use your fork, if it’s unclear whether you’re trustworthy and in particular, you need to offer something better than Google and do so for a while, so that people feel like they can rely on you.
Google is also not bound by its license to make future updates available under the same license. If your fork would become too successful, they could re-license and then it would genuinely just become a competition for who has more dev power.
But with the additional caveat that if you don’t also re-license, then Google can continue taking your work and provide theirs on top.Google also has a load of tracking infrastructure and an ad business, which makes Chrome a valuable investment for them.
There’s very few other organizations for which it would make sense to invest similarly much into Chromium development (and those organizations will then have similarly awful motivations).
Which means a hard fork, i.e. without dependence on future updates from Google, is pretty much not going to happen.Additionally, you’d need a solid number of users in your fork, if you want to have any say in terms of web standards. So long as Google Chrome has a majority of users, Google can easily introduce proprietary standards, which webdevs will gladly lap up.
So, all in all, Google does have a pretty tight grip.
Presumably, they don’t put any incriminating stuff into Chromium, so that they steer clear of even faint attempts to fork (and because they can just put those into Google Chrome instead).
But there’s plenty room for interpretation in most web standards, so they can implement them in their interest, and then the forks have to stick to that implement, if they want to remain compatible with the web.Basically, a corporation owning such an open source project removes almost all positive things associated with “open source”. They’re using it for “look we are good” much more than for “we actually care about open source community”.
Look into “Ungoogled Chromium” if you want the browser without all the Google crap.
That’s still not free from Google’s control of the chromium web engine
pro tip: to link to a youtube video at a specific timestamp, you can either right click the video and Copy Video URL At Current Time or add the timestamp to the URL parameters. e.g. if you want to link to the youtube video https://youtube.com/watch?v=ThiSPArt at the time 1 minute 23 seconds, you can either link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THiSPArt&t=1m23s or https://youtu.be/THiSPArt?t=1m23s
here’s a link to that same video with the timestamp built in
You’re a saint <3
Download Firefox/ Look inside/ Still Firefox.
Download thunderbird/ Look inside/ Older Firefox.
I mean modern corporate emails are basically just webpages
I wish there’s more Mozilla forks.
Icefox I’ve heard about and LIbrewolf I use actively.
The latter has frustrations with Video Downloadheper. IDK WTF to do to make it work. Sticks me to fucking Firefox to rip. Icefox recommender said it should work with VDH but they don’t really know and I ain’t had a chance to work with it.
Have you asked the Video Download helper team? I had an issue before where it wasn’t picking up a media after an update and asked them and they fixed it by the next update. They’re really good with support.
I can’t figure out how to post on github yet. I have little time that isn’t bothered with other things first. I’m missing a bunch of shit I already stole from yt but keeps getting fried cuz im lazy and don’t book it to my vault
If you’re logged on to GitHub and go under discussions for this dev, you can just post a discussion or add to an existing thread with a similar issue.
Floorp, Waterfox, Mercury, Librewolf, Tor (if that even counts)
look inside Librewolf
See Firefox
look inside Firefox
See Netscape
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, time for a Netscape reboot
They tried that once, it was terrible :/ I miss communicator 4.7.1
Look inside Netscape
See mosaic
😏
You know you can check what a software is before you download it, right?
@Download vscodium
@look inside
@chromium
Codium is closer to degoogled chromium. “Code - OSS” is the unmodified version of Code and Codium.
There’s Discord clients that uses Firefox instead of Chromium, fun fact. The one I know is Datcord
I myself like Gnome’s Epiphany browser. Yeah it’s not perfect, but at least it works and granted the performance is getting somewhere. Also, I think its based on Apple’s Webkit, but I couldn’t be more far off.
Yeah I wish Vivaldi wasn’t Chromium-based, because I love all the bells and whistles of Vivaldi so much. But like, at the end of the day it’s still partly contributing to the Chromium dominance of the web, so I still have to default to Firefox as my primary.
100% Vivaldi is my favorite browser, I only use it as backup though because I’m not using Chromium if I can help it
Exactly my sentiment
Sentiment shared.
I went from Firefox, to Chrome (came as default, didn’t swap because browser was fine), to Vivaldi which was really neat when I started learning Chrome was going to become suck, then back to good old Firefox when I learned that Vivaldi is Chromium.
Same sentiment here. Coming from Opera (in the days it had its own engine) and having been using Vivaldi as my daily since its first public preview, native mouse gestures is the thing I miss the most from Firefox.
I know that the folks at Vivaldi are pretty strongly against the manifest v3 thing, but seems like at one point they’ll have to fold.
I miss old Opera. I want it back
I have high hopes for ladybird
Why will people use literally anything but Firefox?Edit: good points.
New CEO and questionable new “privacy” stuff.
Because Firefox isn’t perfect either, to say the least. It has problems, which it had for many years and it’s just counting.
Because Google has made significant contributions to Mozilla
Firefox FTW!
Yes, but only begrudgingly.
(edit) oh no, I’ve said something bad about the lesser evil, and the people who have made it their identity to violently cum all over the first thing that isn’t owned by Google are after me. I hope the pipe bomb hitman is at least polite.
Same… I know it’s better and worth supporting, I just don’t like using it for some reason.
I’m an advocate for Firefox, but it is slowly, slowly entering enshittification.
The addition of AI, dark patterns to enable “sponsored bookmarks” upon reinstall, ads (albeit subtle) when using the address bar for search…
All of these can be disabled, some easily, some with feature flags.
Sure the enshittification isn’t anywhere near the pace as Chrome but it’s happening. And again, this is coming from a maybe 10 year financial donor to Mozilla.
Firefox is better than Chrome, no question but there is an opportunity for a new browser to challenge the field.
You make good points but some people are knew jerking on Firefox’s AI. One of them is client side translation which is really neat as I don’t need to send the content to some Google ad data vacuum.
Another AI model helps differently abled people to have websites described to them using, again, a local model.
There is also Libtefox which uses the same rendering engine without the other stuff if you don’t want it.
I consider it an important act to use non Chromium browsers as not to completely hand over the power of rendering web content to Google.
Back in the day, Firefox was literally not as good as Chrome. I personally think that has reversed and it’s now much better than Chrome. Leagues better, now that Chrome is banning UBlock Origin. I do wish we had more competition than just Chrome, Safari, and Firefox though…
Yeah any other alternatives? There’s arc, but I think that’s just chromium underneath (see above, meme)
There’s ladybird and servo, but neither are near a release and ladybird won’t even have an alpha til 2026.
And to make matters more complicated,
- Servo, as far I know, has no plans to be a browser. Instead, they want to offer an alternative to Blink (the Chrome rendering engine), so that other software can be made with it. This seems to be a common misconception.
- Ladybird’s project lead and main developer, Andreas Kling, may or may not hold controversial views that some would prefer to avoid supporting.
I really want there to be more options in the browser market that aren’t Blink based (or WebKit, sorry Apple), but the situation’s tough.
Nah, Firefox is way better.
Different profiles on Firefox are nowhere near Chrome.
I’m still going to use FF, but there are areas it lags behind Chrome. That’s the only big one for me.
Naturally, the browser that receives way less funding has less Dev work available.
I wish this blanket statement were true. Firefox is better in some respects, but surely not all. Tab and session management - just to name two examples - are just handled better by the Chromium crowd, as much as it pains me to say that.
That said, I still use Firefox in most cases.
I just wish Firefox updates weren’t so intrusive. Having it hit me with “Firefox updated in the background, restart to continue using Firefox” while I’m trying to use QuickBooks for my job is so disruptive when QuickBooks doesn’t save automatically and never opens back up to where I left it off. I won’t go back to Chrome, but I never had it pull that sort of forced restart on me.
Ah. I guess I don’t notice that since I’m on Linux and just update Firefox whenever I want.
If you go to Hamburger menu > Settings > General > Check for updates but let you choose to install them, you won’t auto update anymore. I agree that would be annoying.
I legitimately forgot this used to happen to me on Windows, it’s so convenient being able to update all the software on my system with the click of a button
Thanks! I had no idea this setting existed and it will make Firefox so much more practical for me to use.
From what I understand, Chrome doesn’t need to do this, because when you close it, it keeps running in the background and does its upgrades then, which is also pretty intrusive.
If you’re updating Firefox via the built-in auto-updater, you can tell it in the settings that it should only install updates when you tell it to do so.
You can disable that. I have mine set to notify me when updates are available
I’m happy that they give an option but goddamn would it kill them to have the safe option as the default for once?
There are lots of people who will never update if asked to update at their leisure. I think it’s far better for user security to have updates be forced by default, with the option to schedule them yourself.
Or batch update some of your apps with Patch My PC Home Updater
Amazing, I’ll give that a shot
Looks like it didn’t work unfortunately 😞 Thank you for the suggestion though!
Restart Firefox to let it finish updating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a screen that says you HAVE to restart right now at this very moment.
They said at work, perhaps it is a corporate thingy that forces them to be on the mandated version.
When it happens, it doesn’t let me do anything other than stay on the already loaded webpage without restarting.
Open a new tab > “Restart to continue…”
Click a link > “Restart to continue…”
Type a URL > “Restart to continue…”
and etcWhat OS? I almost never close out of Firefox on my Macs at home and I’ve never seen that message there. FF on Windows seems to be the same. It’s been ages though since I’ve left FF open for months on end on Linux though.
Windows 10
I’ve had this same experience on Linux Mint. I’ll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages won’t load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.
I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes I’m like, “Dangit, didn’t realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox.”
It happens on Linux – after your package manager has updated Firefox. Which typically means that you told it to. So it’s not really a surprise.
I got it again unfortunately, here’s a screenshot of what it looks like
I found this. https://superuser.com/questions/1451210/how-can-i-make-firefox-stop-forcing-me-to-restart-my-browser
On Linux, disabling Firefox updates in Firefox itself will not fix this issue, because Firefox’s own updater doesn’t actually have this bug! You get this warning when the Linux package manager has already replaced the files underneath the running program.
You say it’s windows, but I think you said it’s a work machine so maybe they’re updating firefox from under you?
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LibreWolf
Is there anything better about LibreWolf that can’t be achieved by altering Firefox settings?
It ships preconfigured without invading your privacy (like Firefox does). Just look up a comparison online.
Firefox doesn’t invade anyone’s privacy.
Sadly, with default settings that’s the case. Partly due to Telemetry being active and Google being the default search engine.
Telemetry is not privacy-invading, it’s pretty well anonymized. It’s also a lot easier to change the search engine than it is to download a completely different web browser.
You should inform yourself before writing. And I say that without any harmful intent. To get a true privacy focused Browser you need to harden Firefox (and may download some scripts from github to do so). Or just use LibreWolf as it has a lot of tracking preventative stuff built in similarly to Mullvad Browser or Tor Browser. Those two are however of course still way better. The latter being the best with regards of anonymity if you know what you are doing. I can just encourage you to inform yourself about the Firefox browser which is better than Chrome of course, but still compromises your privacy in the default shipped state.
What telemetry options are enabled by default that are invasive? I’m not saying they aren’t there, it’s just been forever since I installed it and I sync my settings. Also, if our bar for saying something is invading our privacy is so low that we say having a default search browser selection as Google then I think we’re going to far.
Why then not use Chrome if you are fine with Google?!
There’s a lot of people on here that see literally any telemetry or analytics as evil, even though it’s a necessary component for any software at the scale of Firefox (especially automated bug reports). Mozilla makes it clear they collect as little data as possible: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
I guess, this is most of the changes they do: https://librewolf.net/docs/features/
There’s maybe a handful where I’m not sure, if you can do them via settings.
One where it’s technically the case, is that they remove Pocket at compile time. But to my knowledge, Pocket integration is pretty much a glorified bookmark. There’s not much code to remove. And it can be disabled via about:config by settingextensions.pocket.enabledtofalse.I guess, to be fair to LibreWolf, Mozilla has been helping out the Tor Browser devs since forever, so most things needed for Tor Browser are just a toggle in the Firefox settings.
As a result, though, there’s also lots of settings, which partially need expert knowledge. So, there is definitely room for different presets. But yeah, still leaves the question, whether one really needs a different executable to adjust these settings.
