Post #1434563

2026-02-26 06:33 UTC

@EdCates @dazo @graves501 @theorangetheme not everyone has ensuring a balance in html-engines as one of their top priorities when choosing their browser. Not sure why this is giving you headaches. Especially in today's world where there only are 2 usable browser engines and both are connected and depending on companies that are not exactly trustworthy. Firefox and chromium might be open source, but let's be honest, there isn't a community that could maintain them independent from Mozilla and Google. Would I prefer if there was a Opera 12/Vivaldi like browser with a third engine? Sure! For all the issues it caused for me I loved presto and I hope one day someone builds something of that type around servo. But also keep in mind: Mozilla killed Gecko as a standalone product, there is a reason why we only have lightly patched Firefox variants and not a single truly different web browser using Gecko nowadays.

Replies (3)

@dazo@infosec.exchange 2026-02-26 08:41

@mxk @EdCates @graves501 @theorangetheme What "gives me headaches" when a browser render engine gets a monopoly, we easily end up with the complete chaos we had with Internet Explorer roughly 20 years ago. Web sites had to account for IE3, IE4-5 and IE 6 version plus the "minority others". A web page would end up behaving completely different across all these aspects. The Opera browser was at that time one of the engines which was close to most compliant to the web standards. Microsoft extended IE without caring about standards and since it was the dominating browser at that time, they didn't care much about the standards. They had their own standards. But they also didn't care about compliance between their own versions even. Web developers at that time focused on getting the IE experience as best as they could and then came the minority browsers. This can easily happen again if Chromium ends up without real competition. Then Google can do whatever they want with Chrome, drop caring about standards since it "owns" the browser scope. And by doing that, websites starts to adopt to make sure web sites renders best on Chrome, resulting in people being locked in with Chrome. And somewhere along this path, Google can ditch the open source Chromium - just as they try to squeeze out the third-party Android apps these days. By not having a real competition in any market space, we users/consumers ends up as the losing part sooner than later.

Open ##1434564
@mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org 2026-02-26 21:29

@EdCates @mxk @theorangetheme @dazo @graves501 oh but lynx, links2, www-wo-miru, @dillo and Arachne are also very usable browsers, all with their own rendering engines with respective upsides and downsides. I know I switch between them depending on what site renders better where.

Open ##1434580
@EdCates@mastodon.social 2026-02-26 21:30

@mxk @dazo @graves501 @theorangetheme What gives me a headache is contributing to turning the WWW into Google's private playground while carrying on like they're the scrappy, unsung rebel's choice. Nah. It's just Chromium in a nicer suit.

Open ##1434581