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Comment by cglong | Hacker News Reader

I'm wary of Manifest v3, but like you say, it isn't a mandate yet. Is there any reason today why Chrome isn't usable? There's also Brave, which I love on Android.

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It’s more or less ideological on my part. There being only 1 browser engine is something I would like to avoid. And unless Safari becomes available on Linux (or that Orion browser from the makers of Kagi), Firefox is the only other option. There is Librewolf and some other gecko based ones out there but other than the TOR browser, none of the others are large enough projects that I would trust with something as important as my Web Browser.

I support plenty of end users on Chrome and Edge at work and will happily oblige my wife by installing and configuring Chrome on all her devices. Firefox is what works for me and what I am comfortable using at this time. Unusable was certainly a hyperbole on my part.

Got it, thank you for explaining! :)

I've never used Linux full-time, but from my understanding, neither GNOME Web nor Konqueror are Blink-based. Are they missing critical power user features?

The lack or nonstandard support for extensions. But looking into it, I see that it looks like at least Gnome Web now can support extensions. Currently not using Gnome or KDE on my Linux install though.

Not sure if this helps, but according to Wikipedia:

> Despite being a component of GNOME, Web has no dependency on GNOME components, so it can be potentially installed on any system supporting GTK and WebKitGTK.

Do you want there to be only one browser, owned by a monopolist megacorporation that is striving for a world where everyone consuming ad 24/7 while having zero privacy? If so, use Chrome or its clones.

If not, your only way of fighting back is using Firefox and Safari, so that people still make websites that work in something else than Chrome and Google's monopoly isn't complete.

I'm fully empathetic to this argument, but IMO this wasn't clearly called out in GP's original post. It also doesn't meet my personal definition of "usable". "Ethical" might've been a better choice here.

> your only way of fighting back is using Firefox and Safari

Then I have no way of fighting back, because I don't use Apple machines and Firefox no longer meets my needs and I have significant performance problems with it.

Ephiphany (Gnome) web browser on Linux uses Apples' WebKit engine.

Over years I've found it really useful to accurately test web-page developments for Apple device compatibility on Linux distros without needing an Apple device or emulator.

That is not to imply the surrounding browser 'chrome' and UI is equivalent - but rendering certainly is close enough that most of the time pixel-accurate comparisons are valid.

Even Debian keeps up-to-date with latest webkit upstream. E.g. right now (Jul 5th 2023) Debian's libwebkit2gtk 2.40.2-1~deb12u1 (on Debian 12 Bookworm) shows this Changelog:

  webkit2gtk (2.40.2-1~deb12u1) bookworm-security; urgency=medium

    * Rebuild for bookworm-security.
    * The WebKitGTK security advisory WSA-2023-0004 lists the following
    security fixes in the latest versions of WebKitGTK:
      - CVE-2023-28204 and CVE-2023-32373 (fixed in 2.40.2).

   -- Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>  Wed, 14 Jun 2023 11:00:05 +0200

  webkit2gtk (2.40.2-1) unstable; urgency=high

    * New upstream release.
    * debian/rules:
      - Pass -VNone to dh_makeshlibs for javascriptcore to keep the behavior
        of the debhelper compat level 11 and earlier.

 -- Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>  Tue, 30 May 2023 10:19:01 +0200

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