this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Chromium really?
After the whole debacle of manifest v3 they're really choosing Chromium of all browsers to develop on?
Mozilla has made some controversial decisions but surely Firefox would be the better decision for the Linux and FOSS ecosystem.
Even better why not Librewolf?
Seeing this news makes me sad as there are better options available and the Linux foundation chose the worst one out of all of them.
Ironically I also just saw this here on the fediverse: Google loses in court, faces trial for collecting data on users who opted out
Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it as someone who has left Chromium behind personally, Chromium is kind of the only choice. I think people outside the browser implementation world underestimate the sheer scale and complexity of the modern browser stack and what goes into maintaining compatibility with web standards, much less advancing them.
We've reached the point where Chromium is essentially the de-facto web standard because Chromium engineers do the lions' share of feature testing and development, because Chromium receives the lions' share of funding.
Igalia, an OSS consultancy that does a lot of fairly-funded independent browser development, has lots of material about this. For example, the recent chat between Igalia members and someone from Open Web Advocacy about what to do if the anitrust ruling against Google jeopardize's Chromium's funding, and the options are pretty dire.
Edit: After reading the article, I think this is a really good sign. Bringing together the immediate stakeholders in Chromium's development and funding bodes well for the possibility of stewarding Chromium in a less Google-dependent, profit-motivated, ad-centric direction. There's unfortunately a lot of uncertainty about how this will all shake out, but it's possible that Chromium could become a truly independent project and move back in the direction of user value instead of user-hostile shareholder value.
With Mozilla's rudderless stewardship of Firefox, I reluctantly agree with this. Firefox, and Mozilla, used to stand for something more than just a browser, but that is sadly vanishing now. Chrome is really the future and while I'm clinging on to Firefox, I will succumb in the end.
It's very sad. I've been a Firefox user for so long I've lost count. But Mozilla has lost it's way and I don't see it making any noise about getting back on course.
I think having one browser engine is a very bad idea. But here we are.