I think we should have specialized browsers; For e.g. ultra secure browsers solely for financial/banking transactions;
Otter Browser
71–80 of 98 posts
Re: Otter Browser
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The web needs independent browsers...[websites] should work on any browser Unfortunately, independence ends with the choice between WebKit (QtWebKit) or Blink (QtWebEngine), albeit with a faithful Opera 12-like interface that's less resource hungry than Vivaldi. Otter is still in development and it shows in some rough spots and occasional crashes.
it would be cool if just one of those smaller browser projects was based on firefox/gecko
I don't know why there aren't more browsers based on Gecko; especially since there are quite a few people who are not exactly thrilled with the general direction Firefox has been going.
There's PaleMoon, which is a fork, and there's SeaMonkey, although the latest version is based on Firefox 60.8 (May 2018), so I guess that's more of a fork than "using the Gecko engine" too? Also the UI is a bit too 1999-esque even for my tastes.
So I guess it's just hard to re-use Gecko? Using QtWebEngine (or QtWebKit before that) is very easy. No really, it's 20 minutes and you have a basic browser. I built a basic "vim-like" browser in the style of Qutebrowser in a day with PyQt (missing a lot of UI stuff and polish, obviously) and I'm not even very experienced in Qt/PyQt (or GUI programming in general).
Re: Otter Browser
#73I'm not well versed enough in the Browser Wars to say one thing or another about except this: I like the name. It lends it self to saying "I use the Otter browser" which is not just a great pun but the pun on 'other' defines what Otter is, the "other" browser. The web needs independent browsers. We need to get rid of the idea that websites are designed to work on any one technology. They should work on any browser th…
> We need to get rid of the idea that websites are designed to work on any one technology.
Otter-Browser uses QtWebKit.
So it's still another entry using the "one" technology, WebKit (which Blink is a fork of as well).
Otter-Browser doesn't change anything at all about the erosion of standards. The only WebKit-independent engine we have still is Firefox Gecko.
Re: Otter Browser
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
it would be cool if just one of those smaller browser projects was based on firefox/gecko
I don't know why there aren't more browsers based on Gecko; especially since there are quite a few people who are not exactly thrilled with the general direction Firefox has been going. There's PaleMoon, which is a fork, and there's SeaMonkey, although the latest version is based on Firefox 60.8 (May 2018), so I guess that's more of a fork than "using the Gecko engine" too? Also the UI is a bit too 1999-esque even fo…
Yes, Firefox/Gecko is much more one thing, Mozilla apparently even had some problems with that close integration and baked-in assumptions when building the Android variants.
Re: Otter Browser
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why there aren't more browsers based on Gecko; especially since there are quite a few people who are not exactly thrilled with the general direction Firefox has been going. There's PaleMoon, which is a fork, and there's SeaMonkey, although the latest version is based on Firefox 60.8 (May 2018), so I guess that's more of a fork than "using the Gecko engine" too? Also the UI is a bit too 1999-esque even fo…
Yes, Firefox/Gecko is much more one thing, Mozilla apparently even had some problems with that close integration and baked-in assumptions when building the Android variants.
Splitting this out a bit more seems like it would be a good strategic choice, not just for Mozilla, but for the web in general. There are undoubtedly all sorts of technical challenges involved, but betting on only Firefox is putting all eggs in one basket.
Say what you will about Blink/Google, but the easy with which you can build a browser on top of it has spawned a plethora of browsers, ranging from Edge and Vivaldi, to all sorts of more niche ones like Otter and Qutebrowser, and many more.
Half of Vietnam is using Cốc Cốc. Yandex Browser is fairly popular in Russia, UC Browser is popular in China (or rather was, since it was banned) and some other Asian countries.
There's no reason at least some of these couldn't have been a Gecko-based browser.
Re: Otter Browser
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will not change until dev stop developing on Chrome as their main browser. Maybe tooling could be an excuse for very large webapps, but otherwise and especially for websites (hello simple forms broken except if you use Chrome) it's definitely not. Also it's orthogonal with JS usage, anecdotically I mainly work on JS heavy websites and don't use Chrome.
I dev in Firefox. It’s great! The tooling’s really good. It’s subtly different from Chrome and you’ll feel a twinge of friction moving, but by and large, it’s easy. Just shut it down and restart it every couple of days because it’s memory usage isn’t as tight.
I do too, but what I miss is customized throttling settings (I need to optimize for fast overseas connections: high bandwidth but also high latency). Chrome (and Edge) have this.
Re: Otter Browser
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, let's be clear, Google's ability to enact change is a result of their pervasive influence over the internet. It took _years_ for XMLHTTPRequest to become a dominant influence on site design. Google can push new standard changes in fraction of the time because _their services demand it_. > Even webapps, which are more sensitive to browser environments due to their heavy use of JS, should not stop working on an ol…
Well, it's not like the entire web community haven't warned about it for the last 10 years. At this point, what can we do?
One thing could be to define layered standards for various use cases.
Like the archiving standard for PDF. Perhaps a formalized version of “graceful degradation” if you will with a known set of target.
One target could be a self contained, script-less, bundle f.ex.
Re: Otter Browser
#78I'm not well versed enough in the Browser Wars to say one thing or another about except this: I like the name. It lends it self to saying "I use the Otter browser" which is not just a great pun but the pun on 'other' defines what Otter is, the "other" browser. The web needs independent browsers. We need to get rid of the idea that websites are designed to work on any one technology. They should work on any browser th…
Do you like the name better than "Chrome"? If someone says "I use Chrome" what does than mean to you? Just curious. Perhaps some websites do not make use of all the standards, thus browsers do not need support for all the standards for these websites to "work". For example, HN does not require a popular browser. In fact it can even be used without a browser. Why are so many "web devs" using HN but few to none of them…
Web devs make the websites they are paid to make. I'm not sure why you think their output would reflect their taste rather than their employer's taste.
Re: Otter Browser
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The web needs independent browsers...[websites] should work on any browser Unfortunately, independence ends with the choice between WebKit (QtWebKit) or Blink (QtWebEngine), albeit with a faithful Opera 12-like interface that's less resource hungry than Vivaldi. Otter is still in development and it shows in some rough spots and occasional crashes.
QtWebkit has been deprecated for a long time, and removed from Qt6. If you use it, you'll run into 'not supported' messages on most Google websites.
There was an effort to revive QtWebKit some time ago, despite its removal from Qt proper
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=QtWebKit...
Re: Otter Browser
#80So does this still use Presto, and is there any forward movement on it?
Presto is ancient as this point, and the only source code out there was a leak, so legally unviable.