Comment on "Best" Mac browser: Your view
Toes@ani.social 8 months ago
Fun fact, there’s only 3 real choices.
There’s Firefox, Chromium and Safari.
Every other browser is essentially a skin of one of those.
I would suggest using Firefox or one of its spin off versions.
With respect, I disagree. Rendering pages quickly and reliably is table stakes and all browsers do a good job of that. It doesn’t really matter at all what rendering engine is under the hood as long as it works well.
What really separates one browser from another is the toolbars and other user interface elements around the webpage. And Blink/WebKit/Gecko don’t provide any of that.
Sure, let me know if I’m following this train of thought by drawing a parallel.
If we swapped out rendering engine with game engines. It would be best if we kept to a few game engines and focused on the game mechanics and story?
In that spirit, I would agree with you. Much like the examples you provided, its more about who or what controls the full stack of experience. It’s just, quickly thinking about this I’m struggling to find a compelling reason to use a browser beyond the basics. Since the core features I seem to require are satisfied in any browser that isn’t provided by an entity that puts capital interests before the user too harshly. Plus the addition of an adblocker and custom theming.
Ultimately, it just needs to show the webpage safely and precisely how it was intended to be seen, without ads. Through the support of extensions, I suspect that would satisfy any additional requirement someone could desire or imagine without the need to delve much deeper into custom browsers. At least, a browser for general use without a specific purpose. But perhaps I’m misjudging the capacity of those potential extensions in the face of a customized browser?
I suspect, how opera paints a bunch of features down the left side may be hard to replicate on another?
Game engines are a lot simpler than a web rendering engine, so I’m not sure it’s a good comparison.
Gecko (the FireFox rendering engine) dates back to 1997. And KHTML — the common ancestor shared by Blink/Webkit (Chrome/Safari) is maybe one or two years younger - I wasn’t able to find a source. An insane amount of work, by millions of people if you include minor contributes, has gone into those rendering engines.
Creating another one would be an insane amount of work.
Sure, Gecko, WebKit and Blink are the 3 big rendering engines, but browser chrome isn’t just a colorful skin. The browser chrome can be have a pretty big impact on experience.
schmurnan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah I know they’re all based on one of three, but they are all subtly different in what they offer.
So whilst there are three main engines, there are definitely more than three choices.
Bottom of the pile for me is Chrome - I don’t use anything Google knowingly/willingly.
Toes@ani.social 8 months ago
Personally, I use the ESR version of Firefox so I don’t regularly get unneeded updates.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Google might be the primary maintainer of Chromium, but they don’t really control it. Literally hundreds of other companies and thousands if individual developers contribute to Chromium every day and if Google did something they don’t like the engine would be forked in a heartbeat.
In fact it has been forked — thousands of times (according to GitHub). It’s just none of those forks have gained much traction. If Google really messes things up, such as if they actually go ahead and remove cookies as they’ve threatened to do for years, then one or two of those forks will gain traction. Likely enough traction that Google themselves would struggle to keep up and could end up killing Blink and basing Chrome off one of the forks.
AProfessional@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Over 96% of contributions are Google, terrible take.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 7 months ago
chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/…/AUTHORS
The vast majority of names on that list are not google employees.
schmurnan@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Sorry, I wasn’t classing Chrome and Chromium as the same thing. I’m a software developer of 20 years so I understand they’re not the same thing. I guess I just took that opportunity to state that I don’t use Google services/products if I can help it.
In work we’re a Windows house, but I’ve managed to get my hands on an M2 MacBook Pro. For now I’m still using Edge but would like to get my iCloud exemption so I can use some of the apps on my personal MBP for work, and I’m wondering whether I should continue using Edge for work and A. N. Other browser for personal (and mirror this on my iPhone); or whether to use profiles, for example, on Safari and split it that way. I might be limited to what I can download on the work machine, but I’d like to synergies everything as much as I can where possible rather than having two completely different Mac experiences with my iPhone sort of thrown in the middle of both.
Which browser do you prefer? I assume a Chromium-based derivative?