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YACF: Yet Another Chromium Fork
It’s not a fork at all though. On macOS they use Webkit, and on Windows they use Blink.
For web page rendering, the browser uses the underlying operating system rendering API. (In this case, it’s a Windows WebView2 call that utilizes the Blink rendering engine underneath.)
(source)
Blink is part of the chromium project and it was forked from the Webkit codebase
YACF?
Yet Another Chromium forK
TY!
TY?
I dont see much advantage over Firefox with some extensions. Plus I’d rather support a non-chromium based browser as we’re dangerously close to ending up with the www == chromium only and I think that’d be terrible.
It’s not impossible to deeply fork Firefox or put a new browser around Gecko. After all, Firefox started as a radically reskinned Mozilla.
This takes engineering talent though, and I don’t see anyone who wants to invest. Brave could’ve, but I suspect Eich had some hurt feelings which prevented it. So it’s just Yet Another Blink Browser.
If Safari/WebKit loses its market share, the internet will become a darker, more proprietary place led by the world’s largest Internet advertising company.
The only reason I can think that people who want to make a new browser dont fork Firefox is because firefox can already do whatever it is they want to do in their new browser via extensions. This is only a recommendation for firefox in my eyes.
I now use Kiwi in addition to Firefox Mobile for this specific reason. No version of this can be too official (see removal from add-on store), but Chromium seems easier to sideload. If you know a current way to install xpi on Android, I’d love to know.
Firefox FTW here.
A lot of people saying this is a Chromium fork, but According to their blog, that’s not fully the case.
What’s under the hood
DuckDuckGo for Windows was built with your privacy, security, and ease of use in mind. It’s not a “fork” of any other browser code; all the code, from tab and bookmark management to our new tab page to our password manager, is written by our own engineers. For web page rendering, the browser uses the underlying operating system rendering API. (In this case, it’s a Windows WebView2 call that utilizes the Blink rendering engine underneath.)
So it uses Window’s default web renderer. It just happens that the default renderer for windows is the same as Chromium’s renderer. In this way it does contribute from the chromification of the web like the Chromium forks, but the browser itself isn’t a chromium fork. (This is also why the macOS version uses Webkit and not Blink.)
Blink is a fork of Webkit. And Webkit was the original rendering engine of Chrome, before Google replaced it with Blink. So the DuckDuckGo browser belongs to the chromium family.
EDIT: And Safari is a distant cousin of Chromium.
And WebKit is itself a fork of KHTML.
I’d like to see if this makes an impact to the file size of the application since they don’t have to bundle all of Blink with the browser.
I’m not convinced. There’s already plenty of choices for chrome reskins. I’d rather they make their search engine better. Maybe get independence from bing.
Maybe get independence from bing.
The only alternative to dependence on Bing is dependence on Google. Indexing the entirety of the internet is such an expensive project that there are only two companies on the planet that can afford it.
Even then, there’s the theory/circumstantial “evidence” that Google’s indexing is a big farce. Forgot where I saw the video, but someone pointed out that the average person only relies on the 1st page or two of search results. To try to go beyond that, most searches very quickly drop from “millions of results” down to a few hundred/thousand at best. Going beyond the first couple of search result pages, the page count seemingly drops off a cliff.
However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.
If you’ve got some time to kill, check out some stuff related to the “Dead Internet Theory”. While I cant say how accurate the information presented may be, it certainly opens up the idea that there’s something funky about the internet and how we perceive it.
However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.
Gigablast went down 2 months ago. The crawler is available as free software, though.
Mojeek’s Search Engine Map gives you a good picture of the search engines out there. You can also see Seirdy’s very informative post on all the different search engines out there, which is fairly regularly updated: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/
I mean, Brave seems to have done a good job of it, better results than Google in many cases for me.
mojeek has it’s own crawler.
I guess I could just search for it, but is this chromium based?
Edit: The mac and ios versions are based on WebKit, the android one is based on chromium. I would guess the windows one is based on chromium as well, but cant find anything definitive.
Yes, they also haven’t implemented extension support yet.
That’s a pity. I never quite understood why these privacy-focused browsers always reskin chromium, instead of firefox.
There are many privacy focused browsers that are built on FireFox
Reason is money, I guess.
Mullvad did Firefox at least
they’ll have to wrench firefox from my cold, dead hands
Sadly it’ll die on its own likely due to mozilla mismanagement. The real question I have is how long will the FF forks survive without mozilla?
Tldr what’s going on?
So would the “best” browser be Firefox? Because I hear Brave is good as well but isn’t Brave a chromium skin-esque browser?
There are also Servo and WebKit. Servo was kinda dead for a while, but the project was recently transferred to the Linux Foundation and revived by Igalia, with funding from Futurewei. Not suitable for daily use yet, but worth keeping an eye on. WebKit is of course used by Safari (which I guess makes it the second most used browser engine after Chromium), but also Epiphany on Linux. I’m not aware of any Windows browsers using WebKit. Fun fact: Chromium was forked from WebKit, which in turn was forked from KDE’s KHTML and KJS engines.
I can’t seem to get used to the firefox webtools, but I did migrate to it already. I just wish the android version had a translator addon. My contry has several languages and I only speak one.
As long as you don’t want to set the new tab page to something custom.
Brave is tainted with crypto-coin nonsense and web3 fluff. It’s also not a truly independent browser as it relies on chromium.
If you want an independent browser, there is only Firefox.
Don’t forget Eich’s bigotry.
I really enjoyed Brave. I ignored the crypto currency stuff but took advantage of Brave Talk which is a nice alternative to zoom. I switched to Firefox recently b/c I hadn’t used it as a browser for a while and wanted to check it out. I’m very happy with it and plan to stick with it for now.
I like DuckDuckGo, but as others have said it’s a shame it’s using Chromium. I’d probably recommend this to someone non technical as an all in one privacy focussed browser, but it’s not for me.
It’s a bad move to strengthen to chrome hegemony.
I really don’t get duckduckgo. I use firefox and all for privacy and cause it’s better, but I’ve found duckduckgo to be quite inferior to google’s search. Is there some nuances I just don’t understand about duckduckgo?
Everything you do with Google Search is tied back to you as an individual, stored, and analyzed. They know what you searched for, how that fit into your search history, how long you looked at various parts of the results, which ones you clicked on, and what you did after that. That data is then used by Google to target you with very specific advertising. It is also sold to other entities that want to target you for marketing, demographics, and sometimes less wholesome things.
DuckDuckGo does not retain any information about your searches.
Google is definitely a better search engine, but 19 times out of 20 I can get what I want from DuckDuckGo just as easily. And on the rare occasions when I can’t, I resort to Google. That gives Google a lot less to work with and causes me very little inconvenience. Everything involves tradeoffs, but that is not a painful one.
I get what google does, but I find the trade-off the be really convenient.
A funny creepy story I have is that I used to use a specific video to go to sleep, and apparently yt’s algorithm got so good at figuring out my sleep schedule that it would start recommending me that video when I started getting ready for bed.
recently youtube shorts started recommending me “alpha male” andrew tate videos despite me constantly ticking the “don’t recommend this channel again” posts and i guess in response spotify is now recommending me Karl Marx audiobooks
If youtube figures out that you’re a single male, nothing will stop then from throwing Andrew Tate and other right wing garbage in your feed. Literally as soon as I got into a relationship I immediately stopped getting them. Now I get weird relationship based stuff. But it was so bad, I blocking channels but new channels kept getting in there.
This is hilarious. I hope their code is literally something like
if (user.pref == hate("andrew tate") { user.is = "communist"; }I wouldn’t even be mad.
If I wanted a browser fork from another company I would just choose Mullvad Browser. At the moment, though, Firefox with arkenfox.js and uBlock Origin will do
I’m very happy with LibreWolf as well. I try not to use any Chromium-based browsers on my personal devices.
Yeah, LibreWolf is also pretty neat. I used to use it, but now I like the faster updates of Firefox and the ability to customize the arkenfox user.js to my likings. In the end Firefox + Arkenfox should be about the same experience as LibreWolf
Please forgive the spam – if you use Firefox and would like to join the Reddit diaspora from r/firefox, check us out on Kbin/Lemmy.
DuckDuckGo always boasts they are not Google but they won’t put in the effort to make a non Google browser.
It’s really dumb because Gecko and WebKit are right there. Putting them in your own browser may be a bit more difficult than reskinning Chromium, but it’s not some monumental engineering effort.
They do say their MacOS browser is made with WebKit, so it’s definitely weird to use Chromium for Windows.
Apparently it doesn’t block ads, so no thanks.
Isn’t that like step one for a privacy focused browser?
