A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
Posted Apr 1, 2023 6:02 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)Parent article: A quarter century of Mozilla
You've got other options, guys. You've got GNOME Web and Konqueror. If you're willing to go obscure, you've got Fifth Browser. If you're willing to go proprietary, you've got Brave and Vivaldi.
And, if you want the very last project seriously trying to maintain its own rendering engine rather than just cribbing the latest Blink, WebKit, or Gecko, you've got Pale Moon, which is originally based on Firefox but is a hard fork of a the pre-Quantum codebase. I use Pale Moon and have for many, many years. The project has run into a rough patch, and a lot of websites aren't working right now, but things are getting better and getting better quickly.
You don't need to stick to one of the big three browsers. If you don't want to use Pale Moon, you do need to stick to one of the big three browser ENGINES, but even browsers sharing the same engine can have vastly different UIs.
Posted Apr 1, 2023 8:59 UTC (Sat)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
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Posted Apr 1, 2023 22:48 UTC (Sat)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
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> Konqueror
> If you're willing to go obscure, you've got Fifth Browser.
> If you're willing to go proprietary, you've got Brave and Vivaldi.
> you've got Pale Moon
> even browsers sharing the same engine can have vastly different UIs.
Posted Apr 2, 2023 3:25 UTC (Sun)
by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
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Even at the browser "engine" level, there are basically only three:
1. Blink ( everything Chrome derived -- almost everything )
2. Gecko ( Firefox )
3. WebKit ( basically just Safari at this point )
Opera stopped making Presto and went for Blink. Microsoft adopted Blink and stopped making Trident and even EdgeHTML.
Blink is actually a fork of WebKit which itself started as a fork of KHTML which was the KDE web browser engine ( for Konqueror ) browser. Ironically, Konqueror is really just an old version of Blink these days. Google used to use WebKit until they forked it to Blink in 2013 or so. People site things like GNOME Web ( Epiphany ) as independent browser projects but it is based on WebKit ( like Midori ) as is WebPositive ( Haiku ).
Gecko is the modern day descendent of the Netscape Navigator web engine which started life as NCSA Mosaic ( the first graphical browser ). So, Firefox is sort of the "original" web browser, really the only alternative implementation out there, and currently the best hope for the open web. Pretty sad given the market share that it has ( almost none ) and what it used to have ( more than half ).
What else is there? Even the likes of Dillo have not produced a release in close to a decade ( close enough to dead for me ).
It is a bit of a wild card but I personally have some hope that these guys will eventually succeed and provide us a true Open Source and non-corporate alternative:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird
Ladybird is a web browser based on LibWeb and LibJS which were created for the SerenityOS project. They have a long, long way to go but they have a real dedication to writing everything themselves from scratch and building all their own expertise in-house. The community they are building around LibWeb and SerenityOS just might get there someday. The founder of the SerenityOS project used to work on WebKit ( Safari ) at Apple and so he certainly knows what he is getting himself into by making a "browser from scratch" part of his OS project. The number two man in Serenity leads the LibWeb and LibJS effort while Ladybird ( the cross-platform expression of their web engine ) is a personal project of the SerenityOS founder. It has all the attributes of a project that will eventually succeed though, again, they certainly have a long, long way to go. In the meantime, the videos they release detailing their progress ( including live coding sessions to add specific features ) are very educational and entertaining.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
Every version of Epiphany has handled CSS units wildly inconsistently on hidpi to the point of rendering some sites unusable, and GNOME's attitude to bugs at a boundary between their code and the rest of the universe is to leave their software losing hard and demand the rest of the universe adjust to them - c.f. the recent glib fallout. I'm not waiting around for it to become a usable browser.
I can't tell if this is blind optimism, out of touch, or being insultingly patronising. You should clarify whether you mean with the abandonware engine that even KDE apps don't use any more or with Qt's Blink fork that lags several years behind upstream.
But I *have* five different browsers already. Not even counting the ones that don't run JavaScript.
Don't like Chrome? Have you tried Chrome With Overt Ancap Dogwhistles? How about Chrome But The Entire Frontend Is A Bloatware Node/React Webapp?
…Or how about Pre-CSS4 Firefox But Waving A Small Gadsden Flag? The only place I'd ever consider running something like this is on my phone, and then only because modern Firefox removed the workarounds for powervr GPUs to make room for about:robots or whatever. I can just as easily avoid browsers entirely there.
That you (and several of the projects you list) think UI is the only other significant differentiator here demonstrates an irreconcilable misunderstanding of the problem space, and history. I'm using Firefox for the same reasons I did in 2003 — and the UI is a reason to *not* switch.
A quarter century of Mozilla