Eleanor SaittaOct 4, 2024

It really sucks to be in a world where you have to choose between two vendors for the tools you must use to access most of your life, both of which have clearly stated they are actively working against both your best interests and the best interests of society. Of course, there's an alternative — various third parties, many of which are actively malicious and none of which are remotely reasonable choices when it comes to security, feature parity, or anything else.

Today this is about browsers, but the fact that I have to specify is its own problem.

Show threadJacketOct 4, 2024
@dymaxion What is the duopoly for browsers?
Show threadEleanor SaittaOct 4, 2024
@jacket
Chrome and Firefox. Safari is still digging its way out of a decade of underinvestment, and all the third party browsers a) use either the firefox or chrome engine, and b) with the exception of Microsoft, don't really have the development and security lift to keep up with their upstream and ensure their fork isn't causing problems.
Show threadJacketOct 4, 2024
@dymaxion The other alternatives are ports of those or uses the engine they use. If we look at web engines there is only 4 that are actively still being developed. WebKit (apple), Blink (google), Gecko (Mozilla) and Goanna (M. C. Straver). The LST one is a for of Gecko. It's a bit of a old school Gecko. So we can say that there is only 3 engine for all the browsers, kind of. There is an interesting project that is being developed at the moment called #ladybirdbrowser. It's a new browser made from scratch, with it's own engine. Something we didn't see in decades.
Show threadEleanor SaittaOct 4, 2024

@jacket
Yes, I've been following browser development for 30 years and browser security for 20.

A browser isn't a rendering engine, and forking a browser, let alone a rendering engine, still leaves an amazing amount of work to do, in particular from a security perspective. While the alternatives may sometimes deliver interesting user experiences, I wouldn't ever recommend that someone use them in anger.

Show threadMiloWinterBurnOct 5, 2024
@dymaxion @jacket so now that we're here, what's your opinion on ladybird? Do they eventually have a shot?
Show threadJacketOct 5, 2024
@MiloWinterBurn @dymaxion Ladybird need to go fast to get up to date with the features that exists on other browsers I think. But it is going fast. I checked the repo and there is no day passing without a bunch of PR. The development looks solid. So, I don't know. Maybe? It's a fun experiment whatever happens to it.
Show threadMiloWinterBurn
@jacket @dymaxion so how does their progress compare to servo? Servo seems to have more funding, but it seems like it's not nearly enough to get somewhere
Oct 5, 2024 at 4:49pmMastodon for Android
Show threadJacketOct 5, 2024
@MiloWinterBurn @dymaxion I just follow ladybird by curiosity, and maybe to contribute at some point but I don't know much about servo. It looks interesting. I just know the challenge of creating a competitive browser nowadays is huge.