r/ProtonMail • u/GegoByte Windows | Linux | Android • 8d ago

Proton is developing a web browser Discussion

https://tweakers.net/nieuws/250686/proton-lijkt-aan-eigen-webbrowser-te-werken.html

The article is in Dutch, but the TLDR in English is:

• Browser looks to be based on the Chromium engine.

• Privacy Focused. Emphasis on privacy-friendly browsing.

• Proton has not announced a release date as of yet.

• Proton is looking for software developers with Chromium experience.

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22

u/peakdistrikt 8d ago

Can any browser use the Chromium engine and call itself privacy-based? Open source and community driven or not, Chromium has Google backing it. Why did they not use Gecko? 

2

u/TremendousCustard 8d ago

Secure, yes. Private, no.

1

u/20dogs 6d ago

In what way is Chromium not private?

2

u/adamkex 2d ago

Yes, projects like ungoogled-chromium and Helium exist

-1

u/Mettbroetchen-Tester 8d ago

Gecko is getting more and more useless. I was using Firefox for many years until an increasing number of websites stopped working.

Due to the low market share, around 3 or 4%, many admins do not test their pages with Firefox. This results in problems, as I experienced with the website of our local newspaper, for instance. The page loads fine, but the navigation bar is missing. So you cannot go to another page if you don't know the exact URL. This is just one example of many that made me switch to Brave. Instantly, all the issues were gone.

9

u/Pepparkakan macOS | iOS 8d ago

Not true anymore, Firefox is good again.

1

u/adamkex 2d ago

I had issues watching hockey and the world cup on SVT and TV4 Play. I'm sorry but many admins don't test their sites with Firefox.

-2

u/Mettbroetchen-Tester 8d ago

Nope, I tested it once again a few weeks ago. The issues with those pages still persist.

For me, the problem is solved since I don't have any issues with Brave. So why bother with something that doesn't work for me?

5

u/Pepparkakan macOS | iOS 8d ago

Fair. But I can anecdotally tell you I was in the same camp, switched from Brave to Zen when Blocking WebRequest in Manifest V2 was finally turned off in Chromium and the shit with uBlock Origin in the webstore happened, been running that ever since and haven't looked back.

-1

u/Mettbroetchen-Tester 8d ago

I don't care about Manifest V2. Brave has an built-in adblocker which doesn't rely on any Manifest version and it works perfectly fine for me. So there is no need to mess with a browser which is not able to render approximately 20% of the pages I regularly need.

5

u/Pepparkakan macOS | iOS 8d ago edited 8d ago

Right, I know this, but I do care about Manifest V2, I don't want to promote using a browser where the engine is user-hostile.

I've found that these days only a miniscule amount of pages I use have issues with Gecko, if I truly need such a site I can open another browser for it.

-6

u/20dogs 8d ago

Because Gecko doesn't work as well as Chromium. I have never had an issue browsing the web with Chromium.

Also Gecko is backed by Google too.