They also haven’t written a browser. It’s an apples and oranges comparison. There are plenty of Firefox derivatives that don’t have all the bloat that Mozilla, et cetera, is putting into there. That’s not the point. The point is how controlled they are by one of their competitors, namely Google.
There are only three main browser makers. Chrome by Google Firefox by Mozilla and WebKit/Safari now maintained by Apple but derived from Linux’s K desktop environment web engine. There are a lot of wrappers written around these, but at the end of the day, there’s still just the three.
The one real interesting bright spot though that I’m looking forward to is servo. Originally started by Mozilla, but now completely free of them. It’s not yet in a daily driver’s state, but it’s looking to be quite interesting.
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Out of curiosity, how are Konqueror and Fallon relates to the big three?
Their websites say they use KHTML or KDEWebkit (Konqueror) or QtWebEngine (falkon). Are these downstream adaptations of apple-WebKit?
athairmor@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Apple’s WebKit (WebCore+JavaScriptCore) was originally a fork of KHTML/KJS. They shared at the beginning but not very well. They eventually opened up their source and made changes that were more friendly to other developers. A lot of browsers and embedded renderers use WebKit, now, besides Safari and KDE based ones.
Google forked WebCore for Chromium. I don’t think they share a codebase, anymore. Edge, Opera and many embedded renderers use Chromium.
Anyway, I just think it’s interesting that most every browser out there is descended from KHTML.
Eldritch@piefed.world 5 weeks ago
Yes, they are both WebKit, though largely irrelevant. Personally, I’m a daily KDE user. I did install falkon out of Curiosity for a short while. But neither it or konqueror are generally in any distributions base install. Including KDE neon.
They are usable, so long as you don’t use any sort of add-ons.
Falkon is based on Qt web. So it is also WebKit.
thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
QtWebEngine is Chromium, not Apple WebKit
Eldritch@piefed.world 5 weeks ago
Ah you are correct. Thanks for the correction. I may have read otherwise, somewhere, but who knows that may have been an AI-tinted site. It’s been a hot minute since I last messed with programming using QT. I could have sworn it was webkit but the facts are the facts.
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
I wish Firefox was better integrated into KDE. Whenever I open a link in a different app, Firefox opens the link but stays in the background where it seems like it should come to the foreground.
Eldritch@piefed.world 5 weeks ago
Yes, that and the GTK window decorations are a slight annoyance as well.