Chromium project... what's it about?

[kiddingguy]

Referring to this thread/news 

Just a question... what's Chromium all about? It's an open-source project, as I understand? Because I also read that Google has the majority (of stakes) in it, and thus not really 'independent' (yet open source).

And organizations can play/fork with it, have features removed, or added etc. Right?

What's the big issue/controversy on tracking/advertising/advertisers etc in this source code? Especially if it can be disabled and/or removed. But than again... by which party? And which one is reliable and compatible enough with the interwebs?

[Brandon H Supervisor]

the Blink engine in Chromium is far superior to Mozilla's Gecko engine IMO and that's one of the main reasons it took off so much initially. Chrome was also the first to go full multi-process so web pages wouldn't bog down the UI.

These days though Gecko (and now Quantum by extension) have narrowed that gap. 

It really was a push pull situation that lead to currently popularity, Chrome gained popularity early on due to its solid engine and early HTML5 adaptions while Firefox was losing popularity due to still being single processed and they kept changing up their UI just because.

[kiddingguy]

On 01/08/2023 at 16:40, Brandon H said:

the Blink engine in Chromium is far superior to Mozilla's Gecko engine IMO and that's one of the main reasons it took off so much initially. Chrome was also the first to go full multi-process so web pages wouldn't bog down the UI.

These days though Gecko (and now Quantum by extension) have narrowed that gap. 

It really was a push pull situation that lead to currently popularity, Chrome gained popularity early on due to its solid engine and early HTML5 adaptions while Firefox was losing popularity due to still being single processed and they kept changing up their UI just because.

On Wikipedia I read: :" Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. It is used in Chrome starting at version 28, Microsoft Edge starting at version 79, Opera (15+), Vivaldi, Brave, Amazon Silk and other Chromium-based browsers and frameworks."

So, if "Google/Chrome is evil"  are the other mentioned browsers "more safe" to use to not have all this advertising bs involved?

[Brandon H Supervisor]

On 01/08/2023 at 09:49, kiddingguy said:

On Wikipedia I read: :" Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. It is used in Chrome starting at version 28, Microsoft Edge starting at version 79, Opera (15+), Vivaldi, Brave, Amazon Silk and other Chromium-based browsers and frameworks."

Yes, Blink is indeed a fork of WebKit. Chrome originally was on WebKit when it first released before they eventually forked it.

WebKit was always superior to Gecko IMO just from a web developer standpoint. These days though WebKit has gotten pretty stagnated because it's just Apple utilizing it now in Safari.

 

On 01/08/2023 at 09:49, kiddingguy said:

So, if "Google/Chrome is evil"  are the other mentioned browsers "more safe" to use to not have all this advertising bs involved?

Stick with the Chromium forks like Brave and the like and you'll be fine, most of them strip out the majority of Google's stuff already anyway. The forkers mostly just want the engine and access to the existing extension library.

[kiddingguy]

On 01/08/2023 at 16:56, Brandon H said:

Yes, Blink is indeed a fork of WebKit. Chrome originally was on WebKit when it first released before they eventually forked it.

WebKit was always superior to Gecko IMO just from a web developer standpoint. These days though WebKit has gotten pretty stagnated because it's just Apple utilizing it now in Safari.

 

Stick with the Chromium forks like Brave and the like and you'll be fine, most of them strip out the majority of Google's stuff already anyway. The forkers mostly just want the engine and access to the existing extension library.

(luckily) I have Brave as default browser