I knew the "elephant in the room" section of the article was coming before I started reading... but then it wasn't even about the right thing! The other different, bigger, angrier, elephant in the room is about Brave being YACB (Yet Another Chromium Browser). A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.
I think Google created a "moat" in terms of hyperaccelerating browser development with disproportionate firepower that nobody else could keep up with. And one potential non-terrible use of AI might be diminishing that moat and with it Google's ability to steer the whole web into their ecosystem. So if you want to be an optimist maybe that's a silver lining that will grow with time.
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.
and? How does this all matter when you choose a web browser engine?
You can write your own, but you still have this problem.
So, this is not an argument against chromium at all.
It may be YACB, but that is precisely why it works for the author. Chromium browsers have the best compatibility because that is what is tested for. If it were any other way, then this post wouldn't exist.
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.
Same but for Safari. I use it as my daily driver and rarely get issues related to unsupported APIs. Everything seems to work fine, the only issues I ever hit are related to the Apple VPN.
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.
I was like you once. I still care - but Mozilla just insists on sabotaging themselves, and it's too far gone now. Honestly at this point I'm just waiting for Mozilla to implode, so something better can rise from its ashes.
I always try to parse this "Mozilla is doing bad" as I've been using Firefox for years and other than features I want (vertical tabs, firefox relay, and a few other minor things) I couldn't tell you the difference of Firefox now vs 5 years ago vs 10 years ago. And the "shooting yourself in the foot" things talked about are always something that pretty much all other browser companies do but 10 times worse.
I think the last major scandal was AI additions (cuz who is using AI these days? What an awful idea!) that you can now turn off with one click? Personally never saw the AI features presented to me once. Then the one before that I can remember was the Mr. Robot thing that was so long ago it's hard to remember what even happened. I think they installed a add-on that wasn't enabled and did absolutely nothing unless you went looking for it and specifically wanted it to do something? And then they removed it very soon after when nerds overreacted so hard that we're still talking about it 10+ years later?
Chrome: inability to block ads, new "cookie free" (nope they didn't get rid of cookies) ad tracking, monitoring people in incognito mode, the list would goes on for a long while. Brave: Crypto nonsense, all kinds of advertising for their crap everywhere unless you go through many hoops to turn it off. Firefox is one of the few pieces of software I can say hasn't enshitified itself to the point of using something else.
and gripe you have against Mozilla should be outweighed by looking at the other browsers but for some reason its not. People act like Mozilla is doing these awful things then switch to a browser doing far worse and say nothing.
If you don’t care about browser diversity, and choose to use a Chrome-based browser, that’s part of the collective’s decision. There are literally billions of people just like you, which is why Chrome wins.
You’re trying to act put-upon, but you’re actually supporting the dominant monopoly side. Your apathy is winning, why do you still feel the need to comment? A bit of guilt or cognitive dissonance, perhaps?
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.)
From what I can tell, Iceweasel is more or less a reskinned Firefox: there's some code changes to make it compatible with Debian's licensing guidelines, but it would be reasonable (in my opinion) to describe Iceweasel as 'Firefox for Debian'. And so are you also certain that the maintainers of Firefox comply with your requirements?
EDIT: Seems like they edited their comment instead of replying (kinda weird?), answering "yes" to my question. Perhaps I am a pessimist but I am doubtful that every single maintainer involved in Iceweasel complies with their requirements. And presumably this applies to more than just the browser: what OS are they using? What apps do they use? What phone do they have? What bank do they use? What car do they own? Etc. When you take such a hard stance against something over a refused pronoun PR (which btw was definitely chuddy of him), you nonetheless invite scrutiny against yourself, particularly when you say things like "You might be amoral, some of us give a fsck."
What I'm assuming is that 1attice is boycotting public statements, not actual impact. It's why JK Rowling is so hated but not Orson Scott Card: the latter is likely giving just as money money to objectionable causes but he's not being loud about it [anymore], whereas JK Rowling is being loud... very loud. And so buying Harry Potter merch becomes a litmus test for morality, but not buying Ender's Game merch. Alas.
Some people don't allow imperfection to stop them from achieving their goals to the best of their ability. Your takedown of Iceweasel completely misses the point.
Seems like Kling is a wee bit of a chud. The claim about human rights likely stems from the "trans rights are human rights" mantra and is likely is reference to this (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814) where Kling accused a contributor of bringing "personal politics" to the project for changing one instance of "he" to "they" in a markdown file. Since then he has, for example, apparently gone on to complain about anti-white discrimination in the workplace (https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1874518295350837401).
For what it's worth, the perpetually-offended progressive has become an annoying stock character in our culture. At risk of falling for Poe's Law, the commentor on that PR who said "The denial of non-male users and/or developers is sufficient reason to not use SerenityOS" is a perfect example of this. Another more contemporary example would be the seething outrage over Last Ditch Bar's new mask-optional Saturdays.
Ladybird have a "no politics" stance by the looks of things, what that really means is kind of up to you. Here's an article about it further, I'm biased against it and so is this article so take that as you will:
You mean the guy whose concerts went on as planned, and the online slacktivists screaming literal baby murderer at him have already moved on to the next $thing?
I originally had an comment about how the creators did support human rights but then I did more reading. While Kling is trying to be neutral with respect to this particular project, his (personal) politics outside of the project would have placed him in the extreme far right a decade ago (by U.S. standards, so ever further right by European standards).
Can you give some examples of these "extreme far right" beliefs, by which I assume you must mean beliefs that are so extreme that something like only 1% of the most right wing parts of the population could believe them?
Main reason I keep using Brave is its "good enfough."
The CTO at my company recommended Brave in 2019; I figured why not and have found a compelling reason to change.
The "elephant in the room" paragraph actually is making me consider Vivaldi. Its still Chromium, so it will support all my plugins, and I use NextDNS so most of ads will be blocked anyway. And its not like its amazing, but I've just never heard anyone rave of a browser that was particularly efficent either.
WebKit-based is probably the next best alternative. I switched to Orion from Brave and have _mostly_ been pleased with it. (I do miss the Chrome DevTools but eventually I'll get used to these.)
It would be the elephant in the room for both Brave and Vivaldi (though the author is not wrong that Vivaldi doesn't seem to to have captured the old Opera magic). The article is at least partially juxtaposing Brave against Firefox.
I think Google created a "moat" in terms of hyperaccelerating browser development with disproportionate firepower that nobody else could keep up with. And one potential non-terrible use of AI might be diminishing that moat and with it Google's ability to steer the whole web into their ecosystem. So if you want to be an optimist maybe that's a silver lining that will grow with time.