Ladybird seems to be the only hope, once available.
And how does that "ownership" look like in practice? Has Google ever decided how things should be done "or else"? What Google does is pay a protection tax. Without Firefox around and independent, the EU is almost sure to break Chrome away from Google, especially with the warm EU-US relations now. So Google pays and is going to pay as much as it takes to keep Firefox alive, kicking, and doing whatever it wants.
Google Chrome needs Firefox to be moderately successful more than Firefox needs that money. Or else it might become someone else's Chrome.
> Follow the money
Everyone has this revelation once. If it was that easy then customers would practically own the company providing them the services. Do you and your fellow paying customers feel like you own any company, especially big-tech? Do you all control Netflix? Amazon? Apple?
A million individual voices are just noise which is what your "fellow paying customers" line equates. A single monetary contributor is not that. It is the sugar daddy of Firefox. Conflating the two seems to be a bad faith comparison.
Talking about bad faith, with Google's single, enormously powerful voice surely you can hear what it says. So why not answer to literally the first thing I asked in my comment instead of skipping straight to the end to claim bad faith? You should have laundry list of examples to show how Google flashes the cash and the orders, and Firefox executes. That's a sugar daddy.
You understand that if Firefox ever just becomes a puppet on Google hand the whole setup crumbles? It's barely at the edge of plausible deniability even today. Why kill the golden goose when Firefox is anyway in no position to become a real threat on the browser market any time soon.
Plenty of companies lived and died by their customers' "noise", or at least got a bloody nose, so that's a shallow dismissal.
Expecting FF to listen to a million individual users is not a good expectation. Expecting FF to be prone to listening to a single powerful voice would be a better expectation. However, FF has not assimilated into yet another Chrome, so there's some evidence they are not giving in to the whims of that powerful voice.
If Firefox and Apple can't rein in Google with their competing engines, what exactly does Ladybird change?
Same reason some of us choose Linux over Windows.
In fact your example betrays you, because it would be like rewriting Linux from scratch while still attempting to maintain perfect compatibly with Linux. And then arguing that you've somehow weakened Linux in the process. Why not just fork it and maintain your own fork?
Straight from the source:
That doesn't really seem relevant these days though. Although I guess duopolies are totally fine.
I like Servo, but it's also very early in its development. There's no choice but to hold on for now.
Both projects (Chromium and Firefox) are open, so it's like Linux vs FreeBSD, but at least FreeBSD has a clear licensing advantage.
No defeatism though please, some of us will advocate till the end (pen & paper)
"Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the free and open-source Chromium project. Blink is by far the most-used browser engine, due to the market share dominance of Google Chrome and the fact that many other browsers are based on the Chromium code."
- Partner deals with search engines - Partner deals with bookmark partners - Partner deals through Direct Match - https://vivaldi.com/blog/privacy-without-compromise-proton-v...
How are integrated ads and dispatch of user data to third-parties sustainable sources of income?
beware, their sync will go down for weeks and you may lose all your data. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_s... https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1htf6l7/all...
They don't append their affiliate code when you type the full url (like brave did that one time) at least but I feel like adding undisclosed sponsored suggestions to the autocomplete counts as "injecting".
There exists a danger that very good hackers will be able to find vulnerabilities by looking through the source code, but very good hackers find vulnerabilities without source code anyway.
Consider the following: Would you rather walk down a busy street hundreds of other people walking by, including police officers, good samaritans, and maybe people who want to do you harm, or would you rather walk down a dark ally with only four people in it?
It's open in all of the ways that matter, basically they just want to protect their look and feel.
> A new project based on our code might implement features that are fundamentally in opposition to our ethics (e.g., damaging to privacy, human rights or to the environment). Even though we would not be associated with the project in any way, it can deeply affect how people see Vivaldi (and how we see ourselves), damaging a reputation we have taken pains to earn.
> You can’t test drive open-source and then close everything back off if it turns out that open-source isn’t working out.
At the same time they express regret that the Presto engine from their Opera roots didn't get open-sourced. Which was much more novel than just a Chromium re-skin.
The entire article can be summarized as "we worry that others might make a better product off our code" and "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community".
No thank you.
> "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community".
Lol literally all the code is visible. Also all the Firefox forks I've seen are low-effort forks that even piggyback off Mozilla's servers for stuff like user authentication.
I disagree greatly here. I'd argue that the engine is the part that matters the least to users, it's the added UI/UX they want to be able to analyze and modify.
Blink won't send my bookmarks and passwords unencrypted to god knows where. The vivaldi UI might. I'd want to see the source for their system. Blink also doesn't have a built-in VPN or remotely togglable experiment system that I'd like to analyze, that's in the closed source part of Vivaldi.
If I want to add features that aren't possible through webextensions, chances are that I need to modify the UI, not the engine, to make it happen.
If I'm a purist, of course I want it all open.
You literally can if you want, it's just JavaScript and CSS, you just can't redistribute it as your own.
It is very much in the spirit of the old Opera browser. I miss the days when software was trying to be as cool as possible instead of trying to be as lame as possible. (God what a concept!)
It's good to see someone still trying.
I ran it with no extensions and out of the other chromium-based browsers I’ve tried it’s the only one where I’ve had crash issues.
How are you paying them? And have you done any network analysis on it recently (I really would like to know!)?
And it is built on firefox's web engine itself which imo is an added benefit compared to blink on which vivaldi is from, @AegirLeet's comments about Blink hegemoney is true but also there shouldn't necessarily just be one web browser engine imo and that too created by google (blink), one can criticize mozilla/firefox and that is true but you aren't limited to firefox, there are zen browser, floorp, librewolf etc.
I highly recommend you to test zen-browser if you haven't already!