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The endless browser wars

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Re: The endless browser wars

#241
post #202

Nobody is addressing the elephant in the room, which is the reason why there are only two viable browsers in the first place - because the endless and ever-growing list of specifications and standards web browsers must comply with has grown to the point where it is apparently impossible to build a browser without the budget of a nation state. For example, https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope...…

There are two components of a modern browser: browser rendering engine and a browser framework (everything around the rendering engine that creates the browser itself).

There are three main browser rendering engines, all of which are open-source: Gecko, Blink and Webkit.

Problem of standards is mainly "offsourced" to these rendering engines and these open source communities have been doing their job more or less successfully.

Browser frameworks are built around these rendering engines. Two most popular open source ones are Firefox (built around Gecko) and Chromium (brother of closed-source Chrome, built around Blink).

I think the problem that you are articulating comes from the fact that 99% of browsers on the market use one of these two frameworks, in reality mostly Chromium. For example Edge and Brave are based on Chromium. This leads to inheriting most of the features but also most of the flaws of the browser framework.

Notably there are no major open source frameworks built around Webkit, which is a shame, considering that at least for macOS, Webkit is by far the most superior rendering engine (both in battery life and sheer performance).

Re: The endless browser wars

#242
post #200
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes Firefox 5% worse than Chromium-based browsers in your eyes?

A killer feature for me is opening the history & download list in a tab instead of a window. This way I don't have to alt+tab twice to switch to the next application. Opening the history in the same tab (ctrl+h) isn't good enough because I usually need the time of visit and there is no shortcut to open the download list in the same window. Perhaps this is just muscle memory and I would think oppositely if I never swi…

    about:downloads

    chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml
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