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Comment by approxim8ion | Hacker News Reader

Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to.

What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway.

Other than Firefox and Brave, I can't think of any "mainstream" browser choices that can be considered free software or open source.

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For many many people Facebook down means internet is broken. Can’t even tell me if using browser or App.

When driving somewhere I often ask the navigator which app they are using, google of Apple Maps. 5 years still can’t tell the difference. Oddly She knows Waze.

Tech people concerns don’t line up well to normal people.

I've discovered a new one recently: I asked people what browser they were using on their Android, and they couldn't tell me. When I asked them to show me, they showed me the Google search bar on the homepage.

People don't even use a browser anymore, they're using a previewer for browsing the web. I was kinda sad to see that they used that thing, but in a way we should be happy about that; when people want to check the recipe for a cheesecake, they go and get a recipe for a cheesecake. They don't care about what tools are in the way and they shouldn't. We tech people tend to forget about why we build software. If Google wasn't Google I'd be very fine with people forgetting about the name of their browser, but in this instance they're using one of the worst ways to browse the web.

Apple's webkit is open source as well. All major browsers are based on open source engines. The situation could be much worse.

That's true, but Safari uses a closed source JavaScript engine.

Seems to me it doesn't count for much unless the whole browser is Free and Open Source. A single non-Free component is enough for them to sneak in functionality that you don't want.

See also: the VSCodium editor/IDE. Official builds of Visual Studio Code do not correspond to the published Visual Studio Code source-code, as they ship with additional telemetry code. The VSCodium project releases binaries more faithfully based on the Open Source code.

Safari's JS engine is open source: https://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/JavaScriptCore

My mistake, thanks. TIL.

Is it used in any fully Free and Open Source browser?

Yes, many. Every WebKitGTK based browser [1] will use JSC, so that includes the "GNOME Web" web browser, Midori, and a host of smaller niche browsers.

[1] https://webkitgtk.org/

Neat. Konqueror uses a different engine, right?

It can. Historically Konqueror used KHTML, however, the default has been changed to QTWebEngine, which is based on Blink i.e. Chromium.

It also supports (supported?) rendering using WebKit, or, you can manually change back to KHTML. However, all recent versions of Konqueror default to WebEngine. https://wiki.debian.org/Konqueror

These browser war threads always attract the worst kind of pundits: ones who have strong opinions but no idea what they're talking about.

> That's true, but Safari uses a closed source JavaScript engine.

No.

These thread always attract the worst kind of commenters: ones who make strong claims without providing any explanation or evidence.

It's good that we agree.

And Webkit itself started a fork of KHTML, if I recall correctly.

Correct. As a former die-hard KDE user, KHTML/Konqueror was my daily browser, until I switched to OS X Tiger. Been using Safari since that. Also for web development.

If you’re running a closed source operating system (or large parts of it are closed source) why would you be particularly concerned about your browser?

Your question doesn't make sense except from a very, very narrow ideological perspective.

It's useful to have an Open Source browser since:

- most of the standards that a browser implements are also open standards

- if it's under a permissive license, you can port it to either your own device, or unsupported devices.

- proprietary browsers are influenced by business goals to do untoward things with regard to privacy and incompatible changes.

- cross-platform abilities. I use Firefox across Mac OS, linux and Windows, though mainly Mac OS.

Source: ex-Netscape,was a member of a well-known browser protocol committee.

> if it's under a permissive license, you can port it to either your own device, or unsupported devices.

You can do that even if it's copylefted. What difference does it make? As long as it is free software you can do it.

You don't consider chromium open source?

I think OP does because Brave uses Chromium.

My understanding is that chromium can't be run on Windows or Mac. Chrome Canary or some testing variant can but not Chromium. It's hard to consider it a mainstream option in that case for me.

EDIT: this is untrue, chromium builds are available for all platforms from chromium.org. Please ignore

>can't be run on windows

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. chromium.org doesn't offer chroimium builds on their website but there are a number of places you can get someone elses build, for example https://chromium.woolyss.com/ or https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/tree/master or presumably just build it yourself if you wanted to.

My comment was poorly worded, of course they can be built and run. I just feel like the extra hoops one would have to go through, finding a build or building from source (which is a very power-user use case) would be disqualifying it from being considered a mainstream choice available to the masses.

But yes, that is fair.

The Chromium project does maintain an official alternative to those: download-chromium.appspot.com. I think it's discoverable via documentation on chromium.org albeit perhaps (I don't remember) not from the main download page.

(Disclosure: I work at Google on Chrome.)

or even easier:

choco install chromium

choco install ungoogled-chromium

https://chocolatey.org/packages?q=chromium

and if you want extensions the easy way in ungoogled-chromium :

https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store

FWIW, I don't think that is true.

https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium

Confirm, just click and run a pre-built package. I recently downloaded Chromium 79 for Mac in order to debug an issue in Tesla's browser which is based on that. Neat.

I didn't realize they were using a user-agent to determine which platform to serve executables for. Was just getting Linux which confused me.

Oh, that's good to see. I stand corrected.

most people don't even think that deeply about it, firefox and chrome are both trusted, end of thought.

ease of use beats moral advantage most times (almost every time)

I switched over to Waterfox after their recent blog post[0]. Not a political matter, it just reeked of paternalism. I'll hold on to Gecko as long as I can, but Mozilla keeps making decisions that force me to hold my nose.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...

I don't see at all how that post is forcing you to hold your nose.

It is a straight and simple denunciation of the attack on the US Capitol, and a call to critically investigate the role social media played in it. How is that controversial?

No, I absolutely agree with the sentiment of the post. It was a singular sentence that indicated Mozilla's comfort with intermediating between the user and the content they consume.

>Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.

It's an innocuous sentiment, but one with significant long-term implications for the behavioral norms of web-browsers.

I've held my nose at a few decisions pertaining to the general direction of the browser, such as the by-default inclusion of Pocket - which I resented, but could understand their need to find ways to become financially independent, and the browser otherwise improved consistently.

shrug I'm not the biggest fan of the post, but unless their opinions become downright offensive or affect their product in any way I'm not inclined to drop it. Different strokes for different folks, of course.

Waterfox seems nice enough but I'm not sure how I feel about it being a fork of an older version essentially. It'd help if I had an idea about the technical stuff that goes into the browser, but I'm just not sure if I can trust it as much as I do Firefox for example.

"we need more than deplatforming" and auto-enabling fact checkers which thus far are plainly partisan hacks is a nope. They're just fine creating a political monoculture, and I can't get the taste of vomit out of my mouth. The browser used to stand for privacy and choice first and foremost. We'll see how they end up but I don't want to support shit like that.

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