this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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You currently only have three choices in web rendering engine, unless you want to go REALLY esoteric:
Blink
WebKit
Gecko
Blink is Chromium, meaning Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc, Vivaldi, ug-c, Konqueror, etc. It is built, maintained, and controlled by Google, and currently has an approximately 81% market share on the internet.
WebKit is Safari, and is only really usable on Apple products (and is the only engine available on Apple's mobile products outside the EU). It enjoys about a 9% market share as a result of its wide install base.
Gecko is developed by the Mozilla Foundation for Firefox, yes. But if you want any sort of web independence, you have to have a browsing engine that is not controlled by a major corporation. Otherwise, you're just going to have a duopoly that can make whatever web decisions they want to.
I don't really consider Firefox soft forks to be alternatives. I use librewolf but I consider myself a Firefox user. In reality you could make Firefox work exactly like all of these browsers with just config changes
Maybe so, but I would say they're more alternatives to Firefox than any of the Chromium forks are to Chrome (except Arc, I guess) by nature of the fact that you don't have to strip telemetry out of the Gecko codebase in order to ship a private fork.