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> This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink

Chromium is generally fine, until Google packages it as Chrome. The issues are not inherent to Chromium, they're failures of principle at Google.

I know people like the idea, in concept, of engine diversity on the web, but the alternatives are terrible.

Anyone who says that Firefox runs anywhere near as well as Chromium on Linux is either incredibly lucky, extremely knowledgeable about custom building Firefox, or just lying. On Windows, the story is a bit better, but it's still just not comparable. On top of this, in my experience, I've found the Firefox UI extremely frustrating.

My take is that when Mozilla ousted Brendan Eich, something changed culturally at the place; it's no longer a culture of competence, but one of paranoia, reluctance, excuse-making, distraction, and (sometimes) bullying.

Regardless of the causes, we are in a situation now where the only competent browser which handles basic webpages the way normal people expect, without much fiddling with configuration, is Chromium. Everything else relies on excuses and wishful thinking.

Brave is looking good, it has all of the extremely popular and well-thought-out UI of Chrome, total compatibility, and a backbone. In the worst case, it can survive on its own.

Chromium is really great, and whoever packages a principled, non-user-betraying browser based on Chromium (and convinces people to use it), will be on the most pragmatic path to preserving the open web.



By default, google disables hardware acceleration for chrome on a large percentage of linux. As well, Ive never had it work well with open source graphics drivers or new products like wayland. And the desktop integration comes nowhere near firefox


+1 for your first point - surely Chromium can still be used to create an ad-blocking browser.

I disagree with you after there.


My understanding is that this change in the extensions API will land in Chromium first, and so any browser depending on the extension mechanism of Chromium will be impacted, like Opera and Vivaldi. If I'm not guessing wrong, Opera and Vivaldi are compatible with Chrome extensions because they use the extension mechanism of Chromium, so they'll need additional maintenance burden to keep the `webRequest` API working.


Since they're keeping the API around for enterprise versions I'd expect them to leave it in Chromium and just have it be disabled by default.


this was my thought, too...the code is still there, so surely it's possible to package up an "enterprise version for non-enterprise users"?


Anyone who says that Firefox runs anywhere near as well as Chromium on Linux is either incredibly lucky, extremely knowledgeable about custom building Firefox, or just lying.

Firefox used to be much sluggish on linux, but I tried out quantum and it seemed just as snappy as chromium. This announcement is enough to make it my daily driver, I think (I'll have to figure out the dev tools, hopefully it's straightforward).


I run firefox on linux on two computers. Works great, no tweaking/building required.


The same people that work on chrome work on chromium, and both are owned by Google.

Chromium is where this change is originating, not chrome.


>On top of this, in my experience, I've found the Firefox UI extremely frustrating.

Amen! I mean, the layout look as if it were something made in the early 2000s


Firefox runs great on linux in my recent experience.




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