Honestly the more I think about this the more I think Chromium has become actively harmful to the Internet overall.
The problem isn’t Chromium itself. The problem is that we’re going back to the old days of Internet Explorer, where every popular site is optimized for Internet Explorer (including its non standard quirks) and thus other browsers don’t render it right. And some websites would detect a non-IE useragent and just refuse to load.
The problem is the dependence. Google announces that MV2 is going away and suddenly 5 other ‘independent’ browsers (which are all just Chromium reskins) say ‘yeah it’s going away, sorry too bad so sad but there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it our hands are tied’. No one company should have this much control over the browser ecosystem, not even Google. (or these days, especially not Google since they seem to embrace their shedding of the ‘don’t be evil’ mantra).
I think there’s an opening, but it requires resources. A good web rendering / javascript engine isn’t a weekend project. But I think it’s worth the effort to make a new one. And like Chrome’s origins, it should be focused on speed and efficiency.
I say that as a student of history-- used to be IE for normies and Firefox (with a ton of extensions) for nerds. Then Chrome came along, and could often render a page in under 100ms. So everyone (nerds and normies) adopted it. Only now it’s full of Google bloat, web pages cram megabytes of javascript bullshit (to the point that if you hit a major news site, your browser is literally running a live auction in javascript to see who wins the pleasure of showing you an ad), plus a ton of tracking crap. So unfortunately javascript isn’t going away, but a new rendering engine is necessary.
Honestly the more I think about this the more I think Chromium has become actively harmful to the Internet overall.
The problem isn’t Chromium itself. The problem is that we’re going back to the old days of Internet Explorer, where every popular site is optimized for Internet Explorer (including its non standard quirks) and thus other browsers don’t render it right. And some websites would detect a non-IE useragent and just refuse to load.
The problem is the dependence. Google announces that MV2 is going away and suddenly 5 other ‘independent’ browsers (which are all just Chromium reskins) say ‘yeah it’s going away, sorry too bad so sad but there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it our hands are tied’. No one company should have this much control over the browser ecosystem, not even Google. (or these days, especially not Google since they seem to embrace their shedding of the ‘don’t be evil’ mantra).
I think there’s an opening, but it requires resources. A good web rendering / javascript engine isn’t a weekend project. But I think it’s worth the effort to make a new one. And like Chrome’s origins, it should be focused on speed and efficiency.
I say that as a student of history-- used to be IE for normies and Firefox (with a ton of extensions) for nerds. Then Chrome came along, and could often render a page in under 100ms. So everyone (nerds and normies) adopted it. Only now it’s full of Google bloat, web pages cram megabytes of javascript bullshit (to the point that if you hit a major news site, your browser is literally running a live auction in javascript to see who wins the pleasure of showing you an ad), plus a ton of tracking crap. So unfortunately javascript isn’t going away, but a new rendering engine is necessary.