NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


ticky
@ticky

Genuinely feeling like we need to organise an anti-Chrome movement in the same way we needed an anti-Internet Explorer movement a decade ago, the difference I guess being that Microsoft eventually joined the movement to kill it, whereas Google are unlikely to

Chrome is almost as dominant now (north of 60%) as Internet Explorer was during the second browser war

Unlike Internet Explorer, which did much of its damage by becoming the market leader and stagnating, the team behind Chrome is taking steps to actively sabotage user safety features and the standards upon which the open web is based

There are at least a couple of attempts to combat this but they're very basic

Anyway tl;dr for the health of the web please stop using Chrome and its derivatives1; use Firefox or Safari, or consider other non-Chrome-based alternatives like iCab. Google do not deserve to be entrusted with this much influence in this post-Don't Be Evil era


  1. Yes, that includes Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, etc.; they all use Chrome's rendering engine and will almost certainly follow Google's lead on technical implementation and engine features. And that's on top of Brave being founded by one of the worst people in tech, and Opera being pretty much as bad these days.


blep
@blep
This page's posts are visible only to users who are logged in.

atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

"everything is chrome" is great because we can have things like Vivaldi, the most respectful and customizable browser ever made, and have them be dog fucking slow on a computer with an 8-core 4GHz CPU with 64GB of RAM, because the UI is written in fucking Javascript and is running on V8.

Slow and inefficient software makes CPUs throttle up to compensate. How much power are we wasting because everything is based on Chrome and Electron? How many thousands of tons of CO2 are being pumped into the atmosphere solely because of the modern web-based software development ecosystem?


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

but I'm sure that even if we're stuck with it and the abusive practices it encourages, it would still improve the situation if there was an alternative engine derived from eg Mozilla instead of it just being Carry Chrome And The Entire Google Ecosystem Around On Your Back Like A Turtle and no other options


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

Just because I don't want to eat a big pile of dogshit doesn't mean I want to eat a slightly smaller pile either


the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

Browsers are basically operating systems for everyone else's computers. We need to rethink the kernel architecture, because the story of electron is that we don't really have one to begin with.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @ticky's post:

i'm firefox on my pc laptop, but wondering about mobile. do android versions of other things exist that will continue to work with the other apps and stuff? your post made me really curious, because i always want to say "oh yeah i don't use chrome" but, of course, i do on my phone.

I use Firefox for Android as my default browser on mobile and have never run into any issues, in fact it's more stable than Chrome for me mainly because it can run uBlock Origin even for apps that want an embedded webview (if they're using the webview API that can use non-Chrome browsers, which not all apps use).

+1 for Firefox on Android - it's what i'm typing this comment on, and it supports "add a website to your home screen as a Progressive Web App" so that takes care of cohost on mobile.

Sort of tangential to this, I've found that Firefox mobile + uBlock + web YouTube is a VASTLY better experience than the YouTube mobile app. Obviously it gets rid of ads, but it also just, like, works better? If I watch part of a video, pause it, and come back a day or two later, it starts right back from where I paused it. With the app, that SOMETIMES works but usually it doesn't.

I don't use Chrome on my Google Pixel phone using stock software. Firefox is perfectly capable of spawning a browser popover for an app if it asks for one (which is nice cuz Firefox knows my passwords).

There's the odd app that depends on the system webview (which is Chrome and afaik not that easy to replace) but now that my reddit app stopped working I don't think any of the stuff I do regularly needs it

edit: I should add what I did to make this happen:

  1. install Firefox (and uBlock origin in it because it's nice)
  2. uninstall (disable cuz it's a "system" app) Chrome
  3. be happy

Stating the obvious here, but it's scary that literally the only two viable non-Chromium-based browsers out here right now are Firefox and Safari, with Firefox being the only one that's not locked to one OS ecosystem.

Hoping it stays excellent, and more alternatives eventually arise. Mozilla have generally been good stewards of the ideal of an open internet, but they sure haven't been perfect.

that said, Safari's engine, WebKit, is FOSS and famously on everything you might occasionally need a browser on, like game consoles or appliances so someone could totally put it into a general-purpose desktop browser

DuckDuckGo for Mac, iCab are both actively updated WebKit browsers, and Orion is now in public beta looks like.

But none on Windows, right. DuckDuckGo just released a browser beta on Windows, but it's also Blink.

Worse, Mozilla gets most of their funding from Google. Safari is the only mature Chrome/Chromium alternative that isn't directly funded by an advertising company.

Apple could ship Safari with an adblocker by default and in one fell swoop crater the entire online advertsing industry, but they choose not to. Hard not to imagine there's some kind of backroom deal behind it.

Apple has their own advertising business. they run it pretty different from google et al strategically, but they are not going to suddenly become a friend of ad blocking, or of the open web for that matter.

someday i need to sit down with a firefox expert, ive ran into an unusable state that i couldn't fix with firefox across all major mobile and desktop OSes :( hate chrome but i have no other choice

Bc I'm not super adept at this, is Brave a Chrome derivative? I use Brave bc of a lot of the surveillance economy/privacy concerns seem to be a priority but idk if there's a case to be made for why Brave isn't ideal?

Have you tried turning on hardware acceleration? Go to Settings > General > Performance > Use recommended performance settings > Use hardware acceleration when available

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

I think Firefox is important, but if it doesn't work on your machine its not worth feeling guilty over. I would recommend Vivaldi or plain Jane Chrome/Chromium over Brave though. Lots of reasons to not like that browser

Thank you, unfortunately the firefox thing seems to be a bug specific to Surface touchscreen keyboards, basically Firefox won’t let me use the keyboard and if I can’t type on the browser I can hardly do anything. Already researched some of the methods to fix it to no avail, but my partner who is more tech savvy than I has said she’ll look at it for me.

Have you considered checking out one of the FireFox forks? Personally I've been using Waterfox for ages back when it was the first 64 bit build and haven't had issues. LibreWolf is also an option though I personally have not used it.

I was excited about Edge when it had its own rendering engine. I was disappointed when they switched to being Chromium-based instead, but it's still pretty good. It's got Reader mode, text-to-speech, and vertical tabs built in. And Microsoft doesn't seem as antagonistic to ad blockers.

What are some good alternatives to Chrome on mobile? I've been moving away from chromium based apps for the most part, but idk what's a good mobile browser. I lowkey feel like Chrome is still as popular as it is due to mobile users

safari already does remote attestation, firefox at this point feels like controlled opposition, and that "wow a whole new browser engine!!" from serenityOS is by a very-weird-about-codes-of-conduct type of guy. it's gonna be really hard making a rallying cry against chrome without a positive message about what to do about it, which sucks because it's extremely necessary

the threat of killing adblock was enough to finally make me switch to firefox on my new windows install, but man i really wish there was an alternative that actually worked as well as chrome. every way in which my firefox experience has deviated from my chrome experience has been an annoyance, whether it's certain extensions not having a firefox equivalent that actually works, or hotkeys on video sites becoming fiddly and inconsistent, or certain websites just straight up not working and forcing me to open them in edge. every nerd online has loved to sing firefox's praises for ages, but for me in the ways that are actually visible and tangible in day-to-day use, it has in all respects been either the same or slightly worse than chrome. the fact that it's The Only Other Option and lacking in those small but very noticeable and obnoxious ways is frustrating

if my comment came off as "i think chrome is good and we should all just stick with it and give up on any alternatives" i promise you that is the opposite of my intent. i want firefox to get better and/or more actual alternatives to pop up. i want firefox to iron out the annoyances that are still present from the last time i tried and then gave up on it years ago. i want embracing other options to be something i can do and recommend enthusiastically instead of having to hold my nose and take firefox like a dose of castor oil because the option that tastes good is making itself more actively poisonous every month

and yes, websites getting away with being chromium-only, whether due to incompetence/laziness or deliberate malicious incompatibility, is a thing that can only happen because of chrome's chokehold. however, as one end user i am completely powerless to do anything about it. i'm disabled and can't drive so when the one food delivery service in my area breaks on firefox my choices are "never let myself order out again" or "keep edge on hand for this particular use case"

sometimes i wonder if windows firefox is completely different software, because the way people describe it every now and then makes it sound like it has bonzai buddy integrated or something. meanwhile my experience with chrome has always been marred by incredibly basic things like "tabs simply disappear if you open too many" and "text selection is a big mess", so it doesn't seem like the bar should be all that high

i don't think it's unreasonable to use another browser when a thing doesn't work. i guess i've just been through this rodeo once before, so it's disheartening to see website compat in a list of reasons firefox experience is worse. sorry for misunderstanding

I do think a full retreat from all chromium-derived browsers is perhaps a bit excessive.
Projects such as Ungoogled Chromium exist, and Vivaldi has previously shown their willingness to break from Google's technical lead on FLoC, at least, due to similar reasons.

That said, Vivaldi, at least, does still depend on and trust Google's security-related updates, so there is currently still a channel for these sorts of user-hostile features to infiltrate when Google's chromium team stops operating in good faith and includes them in "essential security patches".

It's not good enough, we have to break not only Google's first-party dominance but also the dominance of their rendering engine, if we are going to escape the curse of of sorry, you need to use Chrome to use this site.

Just leaving an extra comment here to say that if you've tried using Firefox in the past couple of years and had issues with it seemingly breaking at random that
(1) you're absolutely not alone there and
(2) try Firefox ESR on desktop. it's the version intended for use by businesses and enterprise types but it's freely available on mozilla's site as any other version of Firefox. feature related updates take longer to show up (and in some cases just dont at all) while security updates are pushed out as frequently as regular updates, sometimes more often depending on how severe it is.

you can still install all the usual extensions you'd want like ublock origin etc on ESR, it just basically makes it update less often with whatever random flavour-of-the-month feature bs that mozilla likes to jam into their browser because they're one of the most actively mismanaged tech companies ive seen in a long time.

I'm generally a happy Firefox user, like I'm very happy with the tracking blocking features and such. But I do find myself wondering, like Safari is built on Webkit as an engine, is there any kind of Windows port of Webkit that's usable as a day-to-day browser, or is the choice as a Windows user just either Firefox or one of the Chromium-based monstrosities?

No, unfortunately. Ever since Safari left Windows over a decade ago, because Chrome was using effectively the same engine and was much more popular, no one's bothered to maintain a WebKit port to Windows. The right time to start one was when Chrome forked WebKit to make Blink but for some reason Google was still relatively trusted at the time. At this point you'd effectively have to re-port WebKit to get anywhere.

Man, sucks to read that Opera is about as bad as Brave and Chrome. It was one of the ones I actually thought was cool when I found it.

Still, I'll gladly keep using Firefox. It's one of the few browsers I wholeheartedly trust. Hasn't let me down in the last 18 years.

Classic Opera was fantastic, it was a truly innovative browser with a really good engine at the time. They just decided to ditch it for Chrome's engine at some point. Probably because nobody bothered testing on Opera.

in reply to @blep's post:

as a professional Web NFC needer (for one feature), i still test in desktop Firefox, and only pull up desktop Chrome when i need to remote debug Android Chrome when that feature isn't working properly.

no current Chrome evil is worse than Apple's "no other browser engines on iOS" policy. you can probably run Firefox for Android (or for Linux, for that matter, yay Crostini) on a non-jailbroken Chromebook and get a non-Chrome browser engine on hardware that has Chrome in the name; Apple has no excuse.

and iirc the whole point of iojs was "you should do semver" and they started doing semver and iojs stopped, but then there was ayojs and the whole point was "you should have a code of conduct" and i forget if they started having a code of conduct but ayojs also stopped

Re: Electron alternative
Just wanted to throw it out there: There's a thing called Neutralino.js which uses native webviews instead of bundling Chromium and Node (and so, bundled apps weigh way less than Electron apps). It uses WebView2 (Edge (Chromium)) on Windows, but Webkit stuff on MacOS and Linux, so it's ⅔ of the way to not being Chromium!

it's kind of the long way round, but this is why i'm keeping such a close eye on Rust's UI frameworks. they usually run in the browser (with WASM) and have a hardware accelerated backend (compatible with WebGPU). so if you're doing something complicated on a web page and getting frustrated with how slow the web still can be, then they might become a reasonable option.

and then the exciting thing is that since you built your web site with native code, if you're making a desktop app version, then you don't need to wrap it in Electron, you can just... run that native code.

this doesn't apply so much to stuff that's just, like, dialog boxes and forms and stuff. but anything that's doing something complicated... it's starting to look interesting. i honestly think you could justify funding people to make the tools and libraries around this stuff good, purely from the eventual climate impact of people running fewer versions of Electron.

… I didn’t know node ran on chromium, oh man.

this is only tangentially related but the company i work at has mozilla as a customer (this is not private information), and they required that our product works on firefox - i personally thought that was a pretty cool way to force at least the acknowledgment of non-chrome browsers. obviously i have no idea if they do this with all vendors, or if this would be as successful for a company that isn’t the publisher of the browser they want to be supported.

in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

no idea about XUL, but it certainly could have been done some other way, and it would be faster. it's harkening back to the last presto-based versions of Opera. there are many ways it could've been done, but this was the easiest for their coders

in reply to @DecayWTF's post: