except the entire design makes it unsuitable to port, evidenced by us having a native working webkit browser and no firefox based one, despite the firefox port beeing first.
Yes my statements are subjective.
From a technical standpoint I don’t like chromium either, they implememt way too much api surface and clearly want to be more than “just” a browser, also as evidenced by chromium OS.
Good examples are bluetooth api, webmidi, location api, web notifications etc.
The webblocking api is also unreliable and replaced with a far less powerfull one.
Firefox includes malware per default called “firefox studies”, and generally seems to follow in chromiums footsteps in the UI way, seemingly making the browser worse each version.
Webkit is “just” an engine, it has a powerfull adblocking api, doesnt include webmidi and we can control ourseöves pretty much which of these terrible apis we have to ship or do not ship.
We also don’t have a malware side channel in the browser as a default feature, so that’s a plus.
Edit: note that most used is a moot metric. By that argument you could just use windows on the desktop, or android overall for most used. : )
Don’t you consider “malware” a bit of a stretch? Spyware, maybe, but in my experience over the past two decades I can’t recall any malware I could “opt-out” of, or leave out entirely, in the case of porting a piece of software.
A side channel to install malware with, which was used for that purpose by the browser developers doesn’t shine a bright light really.
Also, the setting is not named anything like what it was used for, and enabeling this by default is kind of insane. Yet here we are.
In addition porting “Firefox” might just not leave you the option to disable or remove such channels, because they wield the trademark on the name as a potential weapon. That is also why firefox was not called firefox on debian for many years because of packaging disputes.
Why do these browser topics always get so emotional?
First of all,I agree that Chromium sucks and I really hope we’ll never have a port,because it doesn’t make sense at all.
It’s Google spyware,and they couldn’t care less about alternative systems.
The BSDs have to maintain huge patchsets that change with every Chromium version,because patches to make it work there don’t get merged upstream.
That’s clearly a waste of work. But with Firefox the situation is different.
Yes,they do a lot of shady stuff,like those “studies” or the big amount of telemetry Spyware that Firefox has built-in.
While I dislike a lot that Firefox does,I still haven’t found an alternative that makes me happy.
I tried many WebKit based browsers on Haiku,Solaris and BSD,but they all lack tons of features and don’t support extensions which could add missing features.
Even with the Firefox UI getting worse with every version and always removing features,it has still a lot more to offer than all of the WebKit browsers.
By finding an alternative name for Firefox,we would also have the possibility to remove Studies,Telemetry and other bullshit without violating their trademark rights,as it’s not Firefox anymore.
Maybe we could also use LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net) instead of upstream Firefox for our port.
They have already removed Studies,Telemetry and other anti-features,and they may allow us to ship their branding if we ask nicely.
Honestly,I prefer LibreWolf over vanilla Firefox very much,and don’t really understand why so few libre OSes ship it in their repo so far.
Maybe Webkit itself supports extensions, but no browser based on it does so.
GNOME Web is working on adding extensions support, but it’s highly experimental and hidden behind a Dconf flag.
I don’t use extensions to fix deficiencies in the browser, but in the web.
Sure GNOME Web has an Adblocker, but I want to customize my blocklist to also block all that Google cancer like Analytics, Fonts,… which want to track me.
uBlock Origin allows me to do so, GNOME Webs Adblocker has a hardcoded filter list that doesn’t block that evil Webfonts spyware on nearly every site.
Also, the DecentralEyes add-on can load most popular CDN resources locally, avoiding the call to a big CDN provider that may (and probably does) track me.
GNOME Web doesn’t have that functionality at all.
Things like that are really important to make the Internet a little bit less awful and disgusting, and Firefox allows me to use them.
That’s definetely false. I use webextensions on my iPhone. I’ve just had no interest to add this functionality to webpositive.
Gnome web has no need for an extension to change the filterlist, you can simply pass it on the commandline. Your usecase seems to be fixing the browser though. This should not be an extension.
Tiny, invisible scrollbars that will cause eye problems (and RSI problems via mouse overusage) in the future, and no file menu. Also, pages with just ONE scrollbar do not obey Up/Down Arrows, or PageUp/Down, unless the focus is there (and the mouse wheel is the same issue, you have to click an active area on the page to get the wheel to scroll). This often occurs when switching between other apps, but also from tab to tab or in normal browsing.
People just don’t understand how large these two little issues are, and they are encountered by millions every day, and the users are just ok with the web being crappy!
Part of it , like the scrolling, is by the page designer choice, not the browser´s fault.
Scrollbars & menus yes, they should be active by default, and if someone wants to hide them, have the option.
But most of those are personal preferences, so if the browser does it one way and allow changing it to the other configuration, OK. Just do not make the user go hunting for some obscure configuration to enable visible, usable scrollbars ( I´m pointing at you, Chrome and Windows 1x )
eh, seems shady, looking at their page I can’t easily find the source code but can spot a few NordVPN ads and that spyware neocities page (however overreacting it might get) didn’t have a good opinion about it, though it doesn’t seem updated in quite a bit.
I’ve heard better about Ungoogled Chromium or maybe Bromite for Android
EDIT: oh darn now looked at when this was posted and I am sorry