In this blog post, I discuss the major issue of Chromium, its dominance in the web browser market, and the best solution to prevent it from completely taking over the web. Also discussed is why Firefox is not the solution, but a surprising alternative.
Blog #3: The Chromium Monopoly:
https://inferencium.net/blog/the_chromium_monopoly.html
@inference
Good point, but how exactly do I support Safari? I'm not going back to Apple hardware. I'm never going to use anything Chrom(ium)-based either. I'd probably just give up on web when FF dies out. TBH despite its dominance, web does look like a technological dead end to me, it's in way worse state than it was in the IE times.
There is embeddable webkit2gtk, but it is farther from "just working" than FF is. Browsers based on that can't even run web "apps" like Element or Skype.
@inference This I agree with!
Unfortunately opensource WebKit is nowhere near to being usable in terms of supported APIs.
MS could have done a good thing by opensourcing old Edge's engine even if they decided to go with their rebadged Chrome. It was still quite usable only a couple of years ago. It still is to a certain degree, I know because I don't have WebView2 installed — I'm not letting THAT touch any of my machines even the poor Windows ones 😅
@inference Edge wasn't bad, it was Google who forced them abandon it. Mostly by making changes to YouTube. Chrome didn't have any problems rendering that, but Edge did that with inferior performance. The higher ups at MS realized that this cat and mouse game can go on forever and made the decision to butcher it.
I think they had security concerns not to opensource it as it would open door to exploits and not everyone has upgraded to new Edge and they didn't have embeddable WebView2 at the time.
@inference I'd honestly prefer WebKit, but the question is: do sites work? Firefox, while I'm not a fan, is at least not dead in this regard. Even Midori which I was fond of a decade ago uses Chromium now.
I mean most of the stuff I use does work, I've been using TUI-only environment for two whole weeks with gomuks+mutt+tut+w3m(with w3m-img)+amfora+vim+cmus… and I've got most of my bases covered, I've only opened FF a handful of times.
But that's me 😁
@inference Speaking of Amfora and Gemini — that is the real solution to the problem. Maybe not Gemini, given its non-commercial nature, but some kind of "small web". Web got too bloated, engines too complex — if you aren't big enough you'll lose this competition sooner or later. I don't really want VM with JIT to perform better, I don't want WebAssembly and whatnots, I want my pages to not have that bloat.
I should host my own Gemini capsule and do my own writeup on subject☝
WebKit doesn't have a terrible history behind it like Mozilla and Firefox now do, and WebKit forks could do something great to make it catch up with Chromium, or at least keep it held down so it can't take over more of the web.
There is GNOME Web as a non-Safari WebKit alternative, and there's no reason people can't fork WebKit instead of Chromium. Firefox and Gecko is dead; people should let it die and move over to WebKit, which actually has a fighting chance. Firefox is dead to me now; it's completely irrelevant and stands no chance.