- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
“It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox.”
What I don’t get: Isn’t Vanadium Chromium under the hood?
It is.
My understanding is that you go to Ironfox to optimize for privacy and Vanadium to optimize for security.
It depends on your threat model.
Either way, both are better on both fronts when compared to default Chrome or Firefox.
The truth is that Chromium is really good. It has the best security and performance.
Vanadium takes that and makes changes to make it more secure and private.
I think the problem with Chromium isn’t so much that Blink or V8 is bad or anything, it’s that it’s entirely under the thumb of Google. We’re essentially being set up for another Internet Explorer scenario, only Google unlike Microsoft won’t just be sitting on their laurels. Google is an advertising company, their entire business model is the web. Google Search is the tool used to find things, and with Google Chrome being the go-to browser for a lot of people, Google essentially ends up in control of both how you access the web and what you access.
That sort of power is scary, which is why I personally avoid anything Chromium based as much as I am able to. Chromium itself is fantastic, but I don’t like the baggage it comes with.
That’s valid.
That’s also part of the reason I like Webkit. It’s in a nice spot between Firefox and Chromium when it comes to security and performance. And importantly, is not from an ad company and often passes on browser specs that would be harmful to privacy and security.
I forget what the site is called, but I saw one that nicely layed out different browser specs and gives the explanation why one of the engine developers decided against supporting or implementing it.
I just wish there was a good Webkit browser on Linux. Unfortunately, Gnome Web just feels slow and unresponsive despite good benchmarks.
Gods I wish Epiphany/Gnome Web was better. The Kagi people are working on bringing Orion to Linux, which I believe will be using WebKit there as well.
It’s kind of funny that we don’t have a solid WebKit browser on Linux, since WebKit has its roots in the KDE Projects KHTML engine for Konqueror.
I guess that kind of ties in to my anger at these massive tech companies profiting off of FOSS but doing almost fuck-all to contribute. Google opening LLM generated bug reports in FFMPEG when all of the streaming media giants are propped up by this one project is just one example. There should be some kind of tax for this, I feel. They’re benefitting greatly, and provide nothing in return.
Yes. Chromium isn’t bad in itself though.
Wrong. You are both popularizing Google tech and decreasing web browser diversity when you use any chromium variety
Vandium is all about not standing out from the crowd. You use it to not make a statement and hide your activity within the majority of useragents. If you want to make a statement that’s great, but you should only do it when you’re ok being fingerprinted.
Who says I’m “making a statement” by using firefox? That’s not the goal at all.
I didn’t mean that in a negative way. All I meant was that using a non-chromium browser to help move the needle is a privacy tradeoff. I keep both vandium and ironfox installed and use them at different times for different things.
Chromium is open-source. It doesn’t belong to Google or anyone else.
Are you serious? Chromium is very much mostly written by Google and the direction it takes in every way that matters is entirely controlled by Google.
This still doesn’t mean Google has some kind of ownership for it. Nobody stops you from forking it and taking it into a different direction.
I mean technically, yes. However the sheer amount of LoC chromium has and the costs of actually hard forking (and properly maintaining it) makes it quite difficult. That’s why right now we only have the choice of Firefox based browsers and Chromium, then hopefully a good third contender being the Ladybird browser in the future.
You could also go build a house (or even a cabin) with your own two hands, but most people typically go and buy one or pay for one to be built for them instead.
It actually does. You’re still supporting a browser monoculture unless you change it so radically that it makes no sense to call it a fork anymore