Comment by lazerl0rd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazerl0rd | Hacker News Reader

> If you look closely, you’ll notice that no-one has built a new engine from scratch in 20 years.

That's not true. Servo is new, which is where Mozilla are picking their changes to Gecko/Quantum from. These false blanket statements aren't convincing me to use Vivaldi at all. Sure it has it's fair share of issues, but it "works" to a degree and maybe it'll chug along enough to finally be used by 2022.

Currently I'm using Ungoogled Chromium [1] on Windows and Bromite [2] on Android, but the latter will eventually be replaced with the former when I end up building Ungoogled Chromium TriChrome (it's a build mechanism for Android 10 and above to have a shared library package, as well as a WebView and browser package separately for Android).

Ungoogled Chromium is great because it accomplishes all that Vivaldi does, except syncing, all the while keeping the nice UI of Chrome. I'm not a fan of syncing, so that doesn't matter to me.

I used to use Firefox on desktop (prior to and after the Quantum update) but WebGPU was just way to slow for me and I switched to a Chromium-based application.

[1] - https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

[2] - https://www.bromite.org

I guess you need to qualify it with how complete the engine is. Servo definitely qualifies as a new engine but it's not really anywhere close to being "complete" and unfortunately now that the team was laid off from Mozilla development has really slowed down.

You can donate to the project here: https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo

I've tried a Servo nightly build last week. After 20s from starting it, the browser window rendered only black and nothing was working anymore.

Wish them all the best but i'm not holding my breath it will be PROD ready anytime soon. The bar to entry in the browser space is simply too high now....

> Ungoogled Chromium is great because it accomplishes all that Vivaldi does, except syncing

I am a fan of Firefox and servo, but this is a little under selling vivaldi. Vivaldi's goal isn't to be a stripped down chrome with better security, it is geared for power users. Some might say "bloated", and others might say "featureful and freakishly customizable".

> Some might say "bloated", and others might say "featureful and freakishly customizable"

Those sound like the same ends on the same spectrum

Do you find having to audit Ungoogled Chromium’s patches or trust its contributors (and whoever provides the binaries) a worthy tradeoff compared to having your browser communicate with Google servers? I don’t know whether Eloston is a notable figure in the community, but their GitHub profile links to a parked domain.

Honest question. I am thinking of switching browsers and nothing looks appealing.

I use Firefox, and I've considered using Ungoogled Chromium, but I'm hesitant do so because there are no official, authenticated binaries (see readme notes [1]).

As far as I recall, Ungoogled also doesn't offer automatic updates, probably for the same reason.

I also dislike the fact that it's actually a fork that adds features that have nothing to do with "ungoogling". But that's a minor point.

[1] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#downloads

Ekioh "accidently" built a new browser engine. It is a commercial product, but has whole new engine: https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/

Linking to Servo: https://servo.org/

Their blog posts are an interesting read too.

Browser engine diversity aside, what I'd really be interested in as a user is basically Ungoogled Chromium with a simple plugin interface for sync providers, so you could use a Firefox account, Google account, MS account on a per browser profile basis.

I want the vendor services/additions to be plugins instead of forks.

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