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The endless browser wars

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Re: The endless browser wars

#2
Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to.

What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway.

Other than Firefox and Brave, I can't think of any "mainstream" browser choices that can be considered free software or open source.

Re: The endless browser wars

#3

Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to. What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway.…

most people don't even think that deeply about it, firefox and chrome are both trusted, end of thought.

ease of use beats moral advantage most times (almost every time)

Re: The endless browser wars

#4

Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to. What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway.…

[deleted]

Re: The endless browser wars

#5

Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to. What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway.…

You don't consider chromium open source?

Re: The endless browser wars

#6

Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to. What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway.…

You don't consider chromium open source?

My understanding is that chromium can't be run on Windows or Mac. Chrome Canary or some testing variant can but not Chromium. It's hard to consider it a mainstream option in that case for me.

EDIT: this is untrue, chromium builds are available for all platforms from chromium.org. Please ignore

Re: The endless browser wars

#7
There is a new trend emerging in computing with the advent of Machine learning and that is, it is no longer sufficient to have talent/knowledge/passion/amazing team to create something. You need very deep pockets too.

I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for speech-to-text/text-to-speech, etc.

This gap will grow more and more as new machine learning features are introduced (e.g. natural lang page searching, better translation, etc) which would be very easy for Google to add to it's browser but very expensive for open source projects.

Re: The endless browser wars

#8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't consider chromium open source?

My understanding is that chromium can't be run on Windows or Mac. Chrome Canary or some testing variant can but not Chromium. It's hard to consider it a mainstream option in that case for me. EDIT: this is untrue, chromium builds are available for all platforms from chromium.org. Please ignore

FWIW, I don't think that is true.

https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium

Re: The endless browser wars

#9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that chromium can't be run on Windows or Mac. Chrome Canary or some testing variant can but not Chromium. It's hard to consider it a mainstream option in that case for me. EDIT: this is untrue, chromium builds are available for all platforms from chromium.org. Please ignore

FWIW, I don't think that is true. https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium

Oh, that's good to see. I stand corrected.

Re: The endless browser wars

#10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't consider chromium open source?

My understanding is that chromium can't be run on Windows or Mac. Chrome Canary or some testing variant can but not Chromium. It's hard to consider it a mainstream option in that case for me. EDIT: this is untrue, chromium builds are available for all platforms from chromium.org. Please ignore

>can't be run on windows

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. chromium.org doesn't offer chroimium builds on their website but there are a number of places you can get someone elses build, for example https://chromium.woolyss.com/ or https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/tree/master or presumably just build it yourself if you wanted to.

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