Hacker News Reader

Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Not OP but I've never used anything but Firefox. I simply want to keep using my favourite browser, the one I have most control over.

To me blink as a render engine is too closely coupled to Google. Even though technically chromium is disconnected and open source, the amount of leverage Google has is too high.

I dread the possibility that gecko and webkit browsers truly die out, and the single biggest name in web advertising has unilateral sway over the direction of web standards.

A good example of this is that through the exclusive leverage of Google, all blink based browsers are phasing out support for Manifest V2. A widely unpopular, forcing change. If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one.

Mozilla might be trying their hardest to do the same with this AI shlock, but if I have to choose between the trillion dollar market cap dictator of the internet and the little kid playing pretend evil billionaire in their sandbox? Well, Mozilla is definitely the less threatening of the two in that regard.

> If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one.

Only if your OEM prevents you from installing competing browser engines. For most real computers it's not a concern.

Yeah, what IS preventing you is the lack of competing browsers.

But notably not lack of competing browser engines as the power of these decisions come from the product and not the open source libraries the product uses.

Oof, maybe read his comment again...

Is there any Blink browser that allows you to install uBlock origin?

Brave has adblocking built into blink itself, so you no longer need to trust a 3rd party browser extention.

I think gorhill is far more trustworthy than a whole new browser based on crypto.

It's not based on cryptocurrency, there are just extra features that use it. Unstoppable domains is an optional feature. You don't need to visit them, but it gives value to people by letting them actually own their domain instead of leasing it from ICANN. Viewing ads to earn BAT is an optional feature. As I mentioned ad blocking is built in so you can have it show no ads if you want.

Not OP, but personally I very much prefer Firefox font rendering on Windows. Text in Chromium based browser looks blurry to me, which causes eye strain. Firefox also has a much sharper and better looking image down-scaling algorithm that again looks blurry in Chromium based browsers.

Have you used chrome? The depth of enshittifaction is staggering. Setting it up from scratch is like watching a Cory Doctorow documentary.

The only change that’d get me to willingly use the engine would be the DOJ mandating the return of manifest v2 support and then barring google from contributing to it for the next 40 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com