Thanks KHTML and the KDE Project!

Chromium being open-source is a red herring here. The web is not an application, it is a protocol between clients and servers. Google has immense influence on both sides of that protocol, and regularly attempts to use that influence in an anticompetitive way. Chromium being open source just means you can fork the client, but that gives you essentially no influence over the web as a protocol; if Google wants to take the web in a direction that your fork doesn't agree with (e.g. adding new APIs that you don't want to support or getting rid of APIs that you do), then you're out of luck regardless of your ability to compile the code.

The concern is embrace, extend, extinguish.

If anyone is reading this and sees compatibility as their primary reason for staying with a Chromium browser: I have been using Firefox as my main browser for many years now, and I can count on one hand the number of times where I've been hit by compatibility issues.

The big one is anything to do with video calling — things often work but not as well, or you can voice call but not use video, or something like that. Most of the time the call works well enough, or I use a native app anyway, in which case this isn't a problem, but I suspect this is the thing people are most likely to run into in practice.

The other one is WebUSB, which is useful for certain tools that flash hardware (e.g. keyboards) from the browser. This is rarer, but I still have Chrome around so I can still use these tools. And mostly there's another option anyway, it's just that WebUSB makes things more convenient.

I have heard people complain about Cloudflare, but I've never noticed this. I suspect this is less to do with Chrome/Firefox, and more to do with privacy settings that Firefox makes more accessible. But again, I've never had an issue with Cloudflare myself, so I can't say much about this.

Other than that, I genuinely can't think of the last time I wanted to use a website but couldn't because of Firefox. And even in the above situations, it's rare that I actually run into issues, it's just something I'm aware of as a possible cause if something happens. Most of the time things work perfectly well.

Unfortunately, by switching to YACB, the user is effectively making Firefox less relevant.

So if you want it to be relevant, you actually do have to use it. Otherwise you can just as well give up and not care at all about the browser monopoly.

likewise, as we all should be

I regret to inform you that Mr. Kling and his browser have been pre-canceled on Mastodon due to his politics (support for DHH, Charlie Kirk, anti-DEI stances, etc.)

no license file :(

I got fed up with ads in search results and invasive tracking from Google.

I've switched fully to Meta's Muse for all of my research going forward.

> Brave is a privacy-focused browser.

Isn't Brave's main source of revenue serving you ads based on information collected about you from while using their browser?

> I switched to Brave because Firefox no longer holds the technical or moral high ground.

Every time I see mention of "Brave" I'm reminded that Brendan left Mozilla because of his contributions to anti-gay rights causes, and then immediately founded a company called "Brave". In essence, to me, it felt like he was thumbing his nose and saying it was brave to be a homophobe.

So yeah, nah, comparing the moral high ground between Mozilla and quote Brave un-quote is not a compelling argument to me.

Brave blocks ads. What's the problem?

If you're going to take on doing personal tech support for Brave for your friends and family, why not let them keep what they're familiar with and switch their DNS to an adblocking provider instead?

Not license, it is the codebase and tooling. Waterfox and LibreWolf exist. However FF code base is a bit a mess compared to Chromium. Chromium has a better build system using Starlark. Starlark is quite resilient against exploding complexity and easier to keep C++ codebases sane. Mozilla's build system is a soup of multiple tools. Firefox used to use Mercury and only lately switched to Git.

The origins of Chromium come from KHTML which was designed to be embeddable and quite modular. Both Webkit and Blink forks retained that feature and improved it.

Chromium has V8 which is the faster JS engine (so it accommodates crappy bloated webpages better). It achieved HW acceleration early on, it is quite important for video decode. Many webdevs only optimize for Chrome for viewing.

There are Firefox forks out there. LibreWolf, Pale Moon, and WaterFox are the bet known. Unsure which, if any, are still active.

> support a political cause they don't really understand.

I'll accept this as a reasonable excuse for the non-HN crowd.

But the HN crowd should understand the cause. We've all experienced or heard stories of the IE6 monopoly days, and few of us trust Google.

And it's not much of a sacrifice to use Firefox, it's a great browser. Maybe not the best for everybody, but it is the best for some and OK for many/all. Calling yourself a martyr just because you use Firefox for political reasons seems a stretch.

>Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience

Every time there's a thread about browsers, at least one commenter presents themselves as a self-appointed representative of "the users" and declares what the users really want.

And it's not that these self-appointed representatives are wrong, necessarily, but they tend to say one of two things: either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments and no AI, or they want everything smooth and don't care about privacy. And whichever one it is, it's the most obvious thing in the world, according to the person saying it.

Firefox works on 99% of websites I use. In fact, it's always some weird AI product or SaaS product when something complains about user agents, so low quality and not worth looking at.

I think the issue is that Google has too much power to push features via Chromium. This would allow them to create new de-facto standards, which is what we had with IE back in the day.

Sure, the forks could choose not to implement whatever Google might come up with, but that's unlikely, I think.

Like?

Edge, chrome, chromium, brave, vivaldi, opera... its all just rebadged chromium.

There's chrome, Firefox, safari.

> but struggle with video playback of jellyfin, some dont even have option to use mt own serxng service as search engine

I happen to use both Jellyfind and Searxng, both self-hosted, and Firefox does not struggle with either. The issue is probably elsewhere.

I updated the comment to say that "... he no longer advocates". In the public record, to be clear, his total contribution to the discourse was a financial disclosure of a donation. We have literally no idea if he has made further donations, either in favor of or against this or any other policy (because smaller donations are anonymous) and he has refused to speak publicly about anything related to this, except to offer general support for "inclusiveness".

But this comment is of a type that I feel we have moved past. Ideological purity tests were always awful. If you want someone to set policy for how marriage should be considered in some context, then Eich is probably not the person to ask to do this.

But on technical matters unrelated to this I fail to see how it has any bearing at all, because his positions (based on indirect evidence) were not outlandish or out of the mainstream at the time.