Brave, Vivaldi, Edge and other chromium browsers are forks of the main chromium project. They can decide whether to include or exclude features from mainstream chromium.
As far as I know, Brave and Vivaldi will keep Manifest V2 extension support and said that they will not ship WEI (Web Environment Integrity).
Discord uses a modified version of electron, and it’s also probably an outdated fork as well, although I am not sure about that.
Steam, in the other hand, uses CEF, which they use as a way to render it’s interface and as a replacement of VGUI (a good example of this is the steam game overlay), I don’t know if they will ship WEI if it ever releases in chromium as there isn’t a statement from Valve yet.
Sources:
- ARSTechnica, Chrome’s “Manifest V3” plan to limit ad-blocking extensions is delayed, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/chrome-delays-plan-to-limit-ad-blockers-new-timeline-coming-in-march/
- GHacks, Brave confirms it will support Manifest V2 extensions like uBlock Origin even after Chrome drops them, https://www.ghacks.net/2022/09/29/brave-browser-manifest-v2-extensions-after-v3-update/
- Valve Developer Community Wiki, Chromium Embedded Framework, https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
- Github, Discord’s Electron Fork, https://github.com/discord/electron
If I missed something, please tell me!
they will not ship WEI
I don’t really understand how this could work.
The whole outcry around WEI is that most of the web wouldn’t work if you didn’t have a browser that supported it.
Not shipping WEI would seem tantamount to just discontinuing.
@DogMuffins @amycatgirl, it is not so simple, there are a huge number of third-party pages that also depend on certain Google services, directly or indirectly. This is what happens when you depend on sponsors, because with this you lose your freedom of decision, especially if you make a pact with the devil, sorry, Google.
Mozilla has already suffered this in its own flesh, becoming a Google mascot from an independent platform, even with Google devs working on Firefox.
Vivaldi is a great browser
Discord’s electron still hasn’t received the patch for spectre/meltdown mitigation in the browser, I doubt they will ever have to deal with manifest V3 or WEI.
Problem is that someone will have to keep maintain it all. We will see how it will pan out in the end.
Um actually… Opera and Edge weren’t always based on chromium!
Chrome was not always based on chromeium. Chrome was based on Apple WebKit until 2013 when they forked WebKit and made the Blink engine.
Chromium has always existed. Originally it was wrapping web kit and later they forked web kit into blink and diverged from Web kit. Chromium is a level above the engine.
Pre-Chromium Edge wasn’t even that bad. Sure, the engine had its issues and there was probably a bit of Edge-specific JS on some websites, but I’m sure they would’ve eventually got there.
But seeing that even Microsoft abandoned making their own browser engine, it goes to show how complex it is to make one nowadays and with new web APIs/features coming out every few weeks it feels like, it’s almost impossible to keep up.
Opera was the shit back in the early days. It could pretend to be any other browser.
Can’t you do that with any browser by changing the user agent?
Yeah:
Sent from Internet Explorer 9
I’m not sure how long you’ve been able to change the user agent in config pages tbh, I just remember Opera had it as an option in the GUI settings and even the right click menu.
I have an installer for Opera 12.18, the last one to use their Presto engine. Every once in a while I test it out to see how it has aged.
It’s not pretty haha. It barely works.
I miss pre chromium Opera so much lol, lot of nostalgia
My favourite browser, abandoned it when they went chromium. RIP in peace Opera.
But they are now…
Right but that meme says ‘always has been’.
For the majority of current users, that’s the point. For them it always has been.
It gets worse. All Electron applications are Chromium, too.
Chromium is everywhere…
Why is steam and discord here?
Steam build-in browser is Chromium.
And Discord desktop app is a whole Chromium web browser with disabled tabs panel running only one website (https://app.discord.com).
Is the chromium like a huge part of steam application’s or is it just used to open links and such things ?
It’s the entire UI of Steam. Same with Discord. Basically, the UI is made with the same tech that websites are made with and Electron is like Chrome displays the UI just like a website.
Discord uses a framework called Electron. It uses, among other things, chromium to run the website on your desktop. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)
Steam at least uses chromium in its program for things like the store and built-in browser.
The discord software is actually a Chromium-based browser… but you can only access the Discord website with it.
Because it’s chromium bruv
Discord is known for being an electron.js app but I don’t know about steam
Not sure about discord but steam is definitely a web app. Not sure what tech they use but I’d guess something electron’ish
OBS should be there too.
Midori, Falkon, Vivaldi, Epiphany, and maybe if you have to - silk are all browsers I’d use over chrome.
Vivaldi is Chromium based too
Yeah but a bit despookified
I believe Epiphany uses something Safari based, but i am not sure on that
WebKit + JavaScriptCore
Laughts in LibreWolf
Techically an FF fork !
Edge wasn’t always chromium. It was their own engine and it was great, but too many people complained essentially that it wasn’t chromium so they switched to chromium.
it was great
Is this some Mandela effect speaking?
Yeah, it might have been “fine” at the normal web browsing part, but Microsoft kept trying to push their proprietary extension store. Also, didn’t they not support extensions for the longest time? I think that was the biggest reason they switched to chromium, so they could use all those existing chrome extensions?
Same with Opera, I miss old Opera with stackable tabs and before they got sold off to some shady company
Wasn’t old Edge just ie, revamped?
Yes but it was changed quite a bit, it supported way more standards and was getting way more updates to keep it up to date. The issue is that was expensive and also people complained that it some websites didn’t work on it, so it made more economical sense to switch it to chromium. I really wish they had kept it though.
Sorta, sorta not. Looking at the wiki page, it used “EdgeHTML” as the browser engine, which was a fork of ie’s engine (MSHTML). But it was a massive overhaul removing a bunch of legacy code and rewriting parts to fit modern standards and to make it compatible with webkit. It was maintained alongside ie11.
I remember testing it out and it being a lot faster than ie was when it first came out, but I’ve always been a ff user so I didn’t switch to it.
Steam is chromium, in every device/OS?
well probably except on iOS, there you have to use Safari
Build in browser is Chromium and I think Big Picture mode can be too
But… but… it’s an open-source…
Firefox is kept alive by Google default search money AFAIK otherwise why don’t they sue google for showing different search results page in firefox
It’s so sad that Presto didn’t get FOSSed.
Technically it already depended on plenty of FOSS technologies, like gstreamer etc.
We know this from the leak which allowed to compile a working browser.
If only it was legally released, it would still be alive, I’m sure of that - there were even patches for the leaked source adding functionality and fixing bugs.
Wait STEAM AND DISCORD ARE CHROMIUM?
Yep, just like slack, spotify, and anything else looking fancy while wasting few gigs of ram to just open. They’re built on electron, which is practically chrome without tabs.
I wish they could bring back mozilla prism. Like all this electron web app shit is popular, so we don’t we use the faster and more efficient browser engine and use gecko!
Speaking of Mozilla, the project they dropped and fired all of their employees working on it all while giving CEO a million dollar raise, the same one that provided most of the performance improvements in the Quantum update, Servo is targetting being an embedded solution. https://floss.social/@servo/110780173168763670
Do I still use chromium when I visit the steam website via firefox?
No, its the steam app that runs on Chromium.
Anything that uses the electron framework uses chromium.
Although in the case of steam they are using the Chromium Embedded Framework(CEF) to embed the steam store into their interface, as well as to power the steam overlays browser.
The worst part is, the CEF really is the only way to implement browsers inside other interfaces. OBS uses it too for it’s browser source. There really isn’t any alternatives - if only FF could create it’s own Firefox Embedded Framework to compete, but that’s probably not in the cards due to costs. Mozilla is a not for profit relying on donations and grants.
And electron is a method for creating desktop app interfaces using website code, it’s used for the interfaces of Discord, slack, teams, Streamlabs (yeah they ripped out the OBS Qt interface and replaced it with electron), and sooo many other modern applications that it’s hard to make track of. And it uses essentially the same thing as CEF at its heart.
Basically any website can be wrapped in an electron wrapper to produce a standalone desktop app.
Yeah, but Google putting their fuckery in it is the issue.
Mozilla doesn’t make it as easy to use the Firefox / Gecko engine in other projects, which doesn’t help for adoption.
I’m way out of the loop, but is the issue that they actively make it difficult to use the rendering engine or is it that the cost to modularize it isn’t worth the payoff to Firefox itself? A subtle but important distinction IMO. I always felt it was the second, but maybe I was being dense?
They don’t try to make it difficult, but they make code changes that make it clear they have no concern for anyone who might be trying to use the engine anywhere other than in a retail build of Firefox, without providing things like deprecation warnings or upgrade paths.
Firefox with add-ons. Especially, but not only, Ublock Origin.
NoScript 🤌🏻
I love it in theory… but it just broke so many websites I needed to use. And not always in obvious ways.
I just wish Mozilla didn’t just tread Gecko as part of Firefox, the few who tried developing on it came to the conclusion that it’s not sustainable if the engines developer doesn’t give a fuck about you! :/
Damn, that sounds like a real missed opportunity. Hopefully they come around on that one.
Well, they always did it like that and basically cut all their bigger projects in the massive layoff so I wish they did too but I doubt it :/
