I dont see much advantage over Firefox with some extensions. Plus I’d rather support a non-chromium based browser as we’re dangerously close to ending up with the www == chromium only and I think that’d be terrible.
It’s not impossible to deeply fork Firefox or put a new browser around Gecko. After all, Firefox started as a radically reskinned Mozilla.
This takes engineering talent though, and I don’t see anyone who wants to invest. Brave could’ve, but I suspect Eich had some hurt feelings which prevented it. So it’s just Yet Another Blink Browser.
If Safari/WebKit loses its market share, the internet will become a darker, more proprietary place led by the world’s largest Internet advertising company.
The only reason I can think that people who want to make a new browser dont fork Firefox is because firefox can already do whatever it is they want to do in their new browser via extensions. This is only a recommendation for firefox in my eyes.
I now use Kiwi in addition to Firefox Mobile for this specific reason. No version of this can be too official (see removal from add-on store), but Chromium seems easier to sideload. If you know a current way to install xpi on Android, I’d love to know.
I’m not convinced. There’s already plenty of choices for chrome reskins. I’d rather they make their search engine better. Maybe get independence from bing.
Maybe get independence from bing.
The only alternative to dependence on Bing is dependence on Google. Indexing the entirety of the internet is such an expensive project that there are only two companies on the planet that can afford it.
Even then, there’s the theory/circumstantial “evidence” that Google’s indexing is a big farce. Forgot where I saw the video, but someone pointed out that the average person only relies on the 1st page or two of search results. To try to go beyond that, most searches very quickly drop from “millions of results” down to a few hundred/thousand at best. Going beyond the first couple of search result pages, the page count seemingly drops off a cliff.
However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.
If you’ve got some time to kill, check out some stuff related to the “Dead Internet Theory”. While I cant say how accurate the information presented may be, it certainly opens up the idea that there’s something funky about the internet and how we perceive it.
However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.
Gigablast went down 2 months ago. The crawler is available as free software, though.
Mojeek’s Search Engine Map gives you a good picture of the search engines out there. You can also see Seirdy’s very informative post on all the different search engines out there, which is fairly regularly updated: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/
Brave search actually has its own index, and it works reasonably well
Firefox FTW here.
YACK: Yet Another Chromium Fork
YACF?
TY!
TY?
Yet Another Chromium forK
It’s not a fork at all though. On macOS they use Webkit, and on Windows they use Blink.
For web page rendering, the browser uses the underlying operating system rendering API. (In this case, it’s a Windows WebView2 call that utilizes the Blink rendering engine underneath.)
(source)
Blink is part of the chromium project and it was forked from the Webkit codebase
I guess I could just search for it, but is this chromium based?
Edit: The mac and ios versions are based on WebKit, the android one is based on chromium. I would guess the windows one is based on chromium as well, but cant find anything definitive.
Yes, they also haven’t implemented extension support yet.
That’s a pity. I never quite understood why these privacy-focused browsers always reskin chromium, instead of firefox.
There are many privacy focused browsers that are built on FireFox
Mullvad did Firefox at least
A lot of people saying this is a Chromium fork, but According to their blog, that’s not fully the case.
What’s under the hood
DuckDuckGo for Windows was built with your privacy, security, and ease of use in mind. It’s not a “fork” of any other browser code; all the code, from tab and bookmark management to our new tab page to our password manager, is written by our own engineers. For web page rendering, the browser uses the underlying operating system rendering API. (In this case, it’s a Windows WebView2 call that utilizes the Blink rendering engine underneath.)
So it uses Window’s default web renderer. It just happens that the default renderer for windows is the same as Chromium’s renderer. In this way it does mean that it has a lot of the same problems as Chromium forks, but the browser itself isn’t a chromium fork. (This is also why the macOS version uses Webkit and not Blink.)
Blink is a fork of Webkit. And Webkit was the original rendering engine of Chrome, before Google replaced it with Blink. So the DuckDuckGo browser belongs to the chromium family.
EDIT: And Safari is a distant cousin of Chromium.
And WebKit is itself a fork of KHTML.
I’d like to see if this makes an impact to the file size of the application since they don’t have to bundle all of Blink with the browser.
Apparently it doesn’t block ads, so no thanks.
Isn’t that like step one for a privacy focused browser?
If I wanted a browser fork from another company I would just choose Mullvad Browser. At the moment, though, Firefox with arkenfox.js and uBlock Origin will do
Yeah, LibreWolf is also pretty neat. I used to use it, but now I like the faster updates of Firefox and the ability to customize the arkenfox user.js to my likings. In the end Firefox + Arkenfox should be about the same experience as LibreWolf
they’ll have to wrench firefox from my cold, dead hands
Sadly it’ll die on its own likely due to mozilla mismanagement. The real question I have is how long will the FF forks survive without mozilla?
Tldr what’s going on?
So would the “best” browser be Firefox? Because I hear Brave is good as well but isn’t Brave a chromium skin-esque browser?
I like DuckDuckGo, but as others have said it’s a shame it’s using Chromium. I’d probably recommend this to someone non technical as an all in one privacy focussed browser, but it’s not for me.
It’s a bad move to strengthen to chrome hegemony.
i just tried it, they have some baking that needs to be done before you make this your default browser.
right now almost all JS is blocked OOB.
edit: nm, it wasn’t JS blocking but the tab crashing.
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Thanks for that link! I’ve been almost firefox only for a few years and a reskin sounds really nice
I really don’t get duckduckgo. I use firefox and all for privacy and cause it’s better, but I’ve found duckduckgo to be quite inferior to google’s search. Is there some nuances I just don’t understand about duckduckgo?
Everything you do with Google Search is tied back to you as an individual, stored, and analyzed. They know what you searched for, how that fit into your search history, how long you looked at various parts of the results, which ones you clicked on, and what you did after that. That data is then used by Google to target you with very specific advertising. It is also sold to other entities that want to target you for marketing, demographics, and sometimes less wholesome things.
DuckDuckGo does not retain any information about your searches.
Google is definitely a better search engine, but 19 times out of 20 I can get what I want from DuckDuckGo just as easily. And on the rare occasions when I can’t, I resort to Google. That gives Google a lot less to work with and causes me very little inconvenience. Everything involves tradeoffs, but that is not a painful one.
I get what google does, but I find the trade-off the be really convenient.
A funny creepy story I have is that I used to use a specific video to go to sleep, and apparently yt’s algorithm got so good at figuring out my sleep schedule that it would start recommending me that video when I started getting ready for bed.
recently youtube shorts started recommending me “alpha male” andrew tate videos despite me constantly ticking the “don’t recommend this channel again” posts and i guess in response spotify is now recommending me Karl Marx audiobooks
This is hilarious. I hope their code is literally something like
if (user.pref == hate("andrew tate") { user.is = "communist"; }I wouldn’t even be mad.
