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The endless browser wars

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Re: The endless browser wars

#81

Post by lorenzhs »

dzdt wrote: post #50

Not mentioned is the password situation. That is the bigger lock-in than bookmarks. I don't know what is the tech stack underneath or even what chromium does. But as a normal-ish chrome user I know behind the scenes google is managing my passwords and it would be a nightmare to switch. Too many sites I wouldn't know how to access without their password management. That is true lock-in.

You can export your saved passwords from chrome on chrome://settings/passwords, click the three dot icon to the right of "Saved Passwords" then "Export Passwords". You'll get a CSV file with columns name,url,username,password.

This file can be imported into Firefox with https://github.com/louisabraham/ffpass/ (Firefox doesn't support importing the passwords from a chrome profile on Linux). It shouldn't be too hard to import it into your password manager of choice, either.

Re: The endless browser wars

#82

Post by mumblemumble »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #75
mumblemumble wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so much more pernicious than that. As long as one company controls the One Rendering Engine to Rule Them All, one company de facto controls the Web itself, and everyone else is mostly just along for the ride.

It's worse even than that. As long as one company controls the One Rendering Engine, all websites are tested against that One Rendering Engine (i.e. not the truth of the spec). It becomes impossible to create a new rendering engine without actively copying the quirks behaviours.

It also - and this is why folks got so keyed up about the last browser monoculture - makes it impossible to create a successful alternative software platform without the support of the One Rendering Engine. So it becomes an agent of an overall software monoculture.

Sadly, I fear that the reason Free Software folks don't seem to be getting quite so keyed up about Chrome is that, at least for now, the One Rendering Engine happens to work on Linux. It seems that even principles can be mercenary.

Re: The endless browser wars

#83

Post by sinkflay »

doublerabbit wrote: post #38

Until someone creates a new browser with a new render/scripting engine. Which everyone always jumps on saying "it's impossible", the war is over. Chrome has won. Chrome is currently giving life support to Mozilla and when they decide to axe that, well it's game over for Mozilla. The depressing part is the freedom, the new that the internet once provided is over. It's been turned in to a commercial breeding ground and…

> Chrome is currently giving life support to Mozilla and when they decide to axe that, well it's game over for Mozilla.

Mozilla has a viable business model: making a browser and selling placement of search engine. They aren't on "life support" from Google.

I use Firefox every day and it's a great browser. Chrome has not leap-frogged the competition. It's just the default choice for most people.

Re: The endless browser wars

#84

Post by marcosdumay »

stiray wrote: post #39
doublerabbit wrote: post #38

Until someone creates a new browser with a new render/scripting engine. Which everyone always jumps on saying "it's impossible", the war is over. Chrome has won. Chrome is currently giving life support to Mozilla and when they decide to axe that, well it's game over for Mozilla. The depressing part is the freedom, the new that the internet once provided is over. It's been turned in to a commercial breeding ground and…

The issue is that Firefox HAS created a new rendering engine, but people don't switch. It has nothing to do with technology, people wont even try to switch. Some for fanboyism, some because they would have to adapt, some don't even know what browser is. What I do consider staggering is how many technically capable people are not prepared to make a switch. Google is slowly closing down the lock-down trap they have nur…

Afaik, Mozilla didn't release any Firefox version with their new rendering engine. They just declared it a failure without any attempt to make it run.

I know, because I've been following its news and was eager to try anything that Mozilla declared beta quality. I just am not willing to go search for a hidden code repository and compile it myself.

Re: The endless browser wars

#85

Post by detaro »

marcosdumay wrote: post #84
stiray wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that Firefox HAS created a new rendering engine, but people don't switch. It has nothing to do with technology, people wont even try to switch. Some for fanboyism, some because they would have to adapt, some don't even know what browser is. What I do consider staggering is how many technically capable people are not prepared to make a switch. Google is slowly closing down the lock-down trap they have nur…

Afaik, Mozilla didn't release any Firefox version with their new rendering engine. They just declared it a failure without any attempt to make it run. I know, because I've been following its news and was eager to try anything that Mozilla declared beta quality. I just am not willing to go search for a hidden code repository and compile it myself.

Firefox Quantum did massively rework the browser engine and is presumably what the parent is talking about (multiprocess support, new CSS engine, various other bits and pieces)

I assume you mean Servo, which was a research project from the start and never intended to be a new production engine, but did produce side products like the CSS engine that are used.

Re: The endless browser wars

#86

Post by pygy_ »

stiray wrote: post #39
doublerabbit wrote: post #38

Until someone creates a new browser with a new render/scripting engine. Which everyone always jumps on saying "it's impossible", the war is over. Chrome has won. Chrome is currently giving life support to Mozilla and when they decide to axe that, well it's game over for Mozilla. The depressing part is the freedom, the new that the internet once provided is over. It's been turned in to a commercial breeding ground and…

The issue is that Firefox HAS created a new rendering engine, but people don't switch. It has nothing to do with technology, people wont even try to switch. Some for fanboyism, some because they would have to adapt, some don't even know what browser is. What I do consider staggering is how many technically capable people are not prepared to make a switch. Google is slowly closing down the lock-down trap they have nur…

I'm afraid Firefox has gotten to a point where it is too niche to recover. The last time I checked, 80+% of https://webcompat.com's reports were sites that were broken in FF, not because it is less standards compliant than the competition, but just because there was no testing.

Mozilla had been courting devs with MDN, ever improving dev tools and sexy tech (Servo) for years, with some success, although they weren't there yet.

Now they've completely dropped that ball (and fired the respective people working on these techs). Without Web dev on board, I don't think they'll ever catch up.

Degooglified Chromium was already the way to go since the June firings IMO, it's great that Google makes it easier to get that experience.

Re: The endless browser wars

#87

Post by CryptoGhost »

Maybe trying to maintain a free beer web browser is not the best path forward (given all the requirements for a web browser in 2021). Perhaps the best solution is a paid application with an either free or proprietary source model. Free beer programs seem best suited for problem domains where they can age like wine and not worry about maintaining some service level agreement.

Re: The endless browser wars

#88

Post by tyingq »

lqet wrote: post #22

Key points: > Much of what appears to be Chrome (or Chromium) functionality is, in truth, provided by servers in Google's data centers. These include bookmark synchronization, the safe-browsing feature, search suggestions, spell-checking, and more. > On January 15, the Chromium blog carried this brief notice that, as of March 15, non-Chrome builds of Chromium would lose access to these APIs. > Anticipating this, dist…

Chrome's sync does sync more than just bookmarks. You can paste "chrome://sync-internals/" into the url bar to see the list of synced stuff, it's in a table on the far right, or click the "data" tab. The synced autofill, for example, is useful to me.

Re: The endless browser wars

#89

Post by pygy_ »

detaro wrote: post #85
marcosdumay wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, Mozilla didn't release any Firefox version with their new rendering engine. They just declared it a failure without any attempt to make it run. I know, because I've been following its news and was eager to try anything that Mozilla declared beta quality. I just am not willing to go search for a hidden code repository and compile it myself.

Firefox Quantum did massively rework the browser engine and is presumably what the parent is talking about (multiprocess support, new CSS engine, various other bits and pieces) I assume you mean Servo, which was a research project from the start and never intended to be a new production engine, but did produce side products like the CSS engine that are used.

Yes, the last major piece AFAIK was WebRender (hardware-accelerated compositing), which has been shipped last autumn.

Re: The endless browser wars

#90

Post by esprehn »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #43
Yaggo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's webkit is open source as well. All major browsers are based on open source engines. The situation could be much worse.

That's true, but Safari uses a closed source JavaScript engine. Seems to me it doesn't count for much unless the whole browser is Free and Open Source. A single non-Free component is enough for them to sneak in functionality that you don't want. See also: the VSCodium editor/IDE. Official builds of Visual Studio Code do not correspond to the published Visual Studio Code source-code, as they ship with additional telem…

Safari's JS engine is open source: https://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/JavaScriptCore
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