Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics [LWN.net]

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 29, 2022 18:15 UTC (Sat) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics by developer122
Parent article: Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Chromium is absolutely shipped by Google, from the same codebase with configuration options changed; it's just *compiled* by others, sometimes with a few additional configuration changes. Yes, it's Open Source and not hiding anything, but that doesn't mean it won't *openly* do things you'd rather it didn't, and those things aren't likely to change.

Also, Chromium still uses the same browser engine, and as a result, further encourages websites to only care about that same browser engine, which makes life harder for other browsers.

Chromium does not meaningfully diverge from browser design decisions made in Chrome; it may disable individual features (or support others compiling binaries with those features disabled), but won't make substantial direction changes that diverge from Chrome's.

If you very much like Chrome and just want it to be fully Open Source, then by all means run Chromium.

If you don't like Chrome's direction or choices, Chromium generally won't help you avoid them.

And if you want a multiple browsers to continue existing and thriving, try something not based on the same engine, like Firefox.

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Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 29, 2022 18:19 UTC (Sat) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (2 responses)

Couldn't agree more. Also - both Chromium and Firefox are beasts to build. Various Linux distros are struggling to keep pace, especially where you have to build Rust toolchains or whatever in addition. The two browsers have enough code to be a mini OS in themselves and, sadly, upstream aren't always interested in building on architectures other than Intel/AMD/Android. Not a great situation to be in.

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Feb 7, 2022 0:47 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Things could be worse, we still have WebKit and I don't think that's going away any time soon. The only thing holding it back on Linux is that it's treated like a throwaway thing and nobody tries to build a serious browser on it.

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Feb 7, 2022 4:38 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I haven't used it, but the GNOME Web browser is based on WebKit.