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> A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.

You can give away all the insanely expensive base software to build a browser and you'll still get blamed for not encouraging enough competition.

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Chromium being open-source is a red herring here. The web is not an application, it is a protocol between clients and servers. Google has immense influence on both sides of that protocol, and regularly attempts to use that influence in an anticompetitive way. Chromium being open source just means you can fork the client, but that gives you essentially no influence over the web as a protocol; if Google wants to take the web in a direction that your fork doesn't agree with (e.g. adding new APIs that you don't want to support or getting rid of APIs that you do), then you're out of luck regardless of your ability to compile the code.
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What are the two sides of the protocol?
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Browsers and websites / web servers.
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Thanks KHTML and the KDE Project!
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I'm excited for ladybird to reach alpha
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No thank you, I prefer supporting creators who respect human rights
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Fair enough. Which browser are you currently using?
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Iceweasel
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And you are certain that its maintainers comply with your requirements?
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Yes

EDIT: Yes to the reply repeat comment as well. Lose the FUD. I have been in the scene for years, and I have researched and sourced carefully.

You might be amoral, some of us give a fsck.

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From what I can tell, Iceweasel is more or less a reskinned Firefox: there's some code changes to make it compatible with Debian's licensing guidelines, but it would be reasonable (in my opinion) to describe Iceweasel as 'Firefox for Debian'. And so are you also certain that the maintainers of Firefox comply with your requirements?
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I originally had an comment about how the creators did support human rights but then I did more reading. While Kling is trying to be neutral with respect to this particular project, his (personal) politics outside of the project would have placed him in the extreme far right a decade ago (by U.S. standards, so ever further right by European standards).
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Can you give some examples of these "extreme far right" beliefs, by which I assume you must mean beliefs that are so extreme that something like only 1% of the most right wing parts of the population could believe them?
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What's the story?
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Seems like Kling is a wee bit of a chud. The claim about human rights likely stems from the "trans rights are human rights" mantra and is likely is reference to this (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814) where Kling accused a contributor of bringing "personal politics" to the project for changing one instance of "he" to "they" in a markdown file. Since then he has, for example, apparently gone on to complain about anti-white discrimination in the workplace (https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1874518295350837401).

For what it's worth, the perpetually-offended progressive has become an annoying stock character in our culture. At risk of falling for Poe's Law, the commentor on that PR who said "The denial of non-male users and/or developers is sufficient reason to not use SerenityOS" is a perfect example of this. Another more contemporary example would be the seething outrage over Last Ditch Bar's new mask-optional Saturdays.

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Ladybird have a "no politics" stance by the looks of things, what that really means is kind of up to you. Here's an article about it further, I'm biased against it and so is this article so take that as you will:

https://kvibber.com/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/

Also I'm seeing comments suggesting that the lead behind it, Andreas Kling, is quite openly on the DHH side of things

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deleted
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This is vague. Care to elaborate on the accusation?

Ok, I researched this. A PR that changed one word in a string - he to they was rejected 5 years ago (first and only PR of that person)

https://kvibber.com/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5823666/ladybird-web-browser...

https://media3.locals.com/images/posts/2024-07-03/102127/102...

Is this the human rights issue you were talking about or did I miss something?

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I regret to inform you that Mr. Kling and his browser have been pre-canceled on Mastodon due to his politics (support for DHH, Charlie Kirk, anti-DEI stances, etc.)
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likewise, as we all should be
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It's okay, soon everybody will switch to their own vibe-coded browsers, right?

(https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender this looks so dead...)

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no license file :(
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Main reason I keep using Brave is its "good enfough."

The CTO at my company recommended Brave in 2019; I figured why not and have found a compelling reason to change.

The "elephant in the room" paragraph actually is making me consider Vivaldi. Its still Chromium, so it will support all my plugins, and I use NextDNS so most of ads will be blocked anyway. And its not like its amazing, but I've just never heard anyone rave of a browser that was particularly efficent either.

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It may be YACB, but that is precisely why it works for the author. Chromium browsers have the best compatibility because that is what is tested for. If it were any other way, then this post wouldn't exist.
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If anyone is reading this and sees compatibility as their primary reason for staying with a Chromium browser: I have been using Firefox as my main browser for many years now, and I can count on one hand the number of times where I've been hit by compatibility issues.

The big one is anything to do with video calling — things often work but not as well, or you can voice call but not use video, or something like that. Most of the time the call works well enough, or I use a native app anyway, in which case this isn't a problem, but I suspect this is the thing people are most likely to run into in practice.

The other one is WebUSB, which is useful for certain tools that flash hardware (e.g. keyboards) from the browser. This is rarer, but I still have Chrome around so I can still use these tools. And mostly there's another option anyway, it's just that WebUSB makes things more convenient.

I have heard people complain about Cloudflare, but I've never noticed this. I suspect this is less to do with Chrome/Firefox, and more to do with privacy settings that Firefox makes more accessible. But again, I've never had an issue with Cloudflare myself, so I can't say much about this.

Other than that, I genuinely can't think of the last time I wanted to use a website but couldn't because of Firefox. And even in the above situations, it's rare that I actually run into issues, it's just something I'm aware of as a possible cause if something happens. Most of the time things work perfectly well.

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Slack is what makes me use Brave every day because its stupid huddles feature doesn’t support Firefox. But other than that, yeah. Firefox is fine.
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Same but for Safari. I use it as my daily driver and rarely get issues related to unsupported APIs. Everything seems to work fine, the only issues I ever hit are related to the Apple VPN.
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Unfortunately, by switching to YACB, the user is effectively making Firefox less relevant.

So if you want it to be relevant, you actually do have to use it. Otherwise you can just as well give up and not care at all about the browser monopoly.

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I was like you once. I still care - but Mozilla just insists on sabotaging themselves, and it's too far gone now. Honestly at this point I'm just waiting for Mozilla to implode, so something better can rise from its ashes.

A Phoenix, if you will...

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I always try to parse this "Mozilla is doing bad" as I've been using Firefox for years and other than features I want (vertical tabs, firefox relay, and a few other minor things) I couldn't tell you the difference of Firefox now vs 5 years ago vs 10 years ago. And the "shooting yourself in the foot" things talked about are always something that pretty much all other browser companies do but 10 times worse.

I think the last major scandal was AI additions (cuz who is using AI these days? What an awful idea!) that you can now turn off with one click? Personally never saw the AI features presented to me once. Then the one before that I can remember was the Mr. Robot thing that was so long ago it's hard to remember what even happened. I think they installed a add-on that wasn't enabled and did absolutely nothing unless you went looking for it and specifically wanted it to do something? And then they removed it very soon after when nerds overreacted so hard that we're still talking about it 10+ years later?

Chrome: inability to block ads, new "cookie free" (nope they didn't get rid of cookies) ad tracking, monitoring people in incognito mode, the list would goes on for a long while. Brave: Crypto nonsense, all kinds of advertising for their crap everywhere unless you go through many hoops to turn it off. Firefox is one of the few pieces of software I can say hasn't enshitified itself to the point of using something else.

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I'd assume that isn't the elephant in the room since Vivaldi is also YACB
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It would be the elephant in the room for both Brave and Vivaldi (though the author is not wrong that Vivaldi doesn't seem to to have captured the old Opera magic). The article is at least partially juxtaposing Brave against Firefox.
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It's really a shame Opera didn't open source the Presto engine.
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