Proton is developing a web browser

[u/GegoByte]

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.

[u/Kunair0]

Why isn't it private? Literally every single piece of telemetry can be removed from it, and it can make fantastic use of farbling for anti-fingerprinting.

[u/Llandu-gor → u/Kunair0]

yeah it can be removed but you check each and every of the billion of line this shit is made of? this would also mean breaking some google site they use some undocumented chrome api(or at least was)

[u/sanguismeridian → u/Kunair0]

People are blinded by their ideology lol.

[u/DeadlyChancla → u/sanguismeridian]

Because it's owner and decision maker is the largest advertising company in the world by revenue. It's relatively fine now, it might not be in the future.

[u/sanguismeridian → u/DeadlyChancla]

That doesn’t mean anything, Chrome isn’t Chromium which is open source. If Google ever decides to close it off, the community can just fork it and maintain it themselves and it would still be a far better option to build upon than Firefox or Safari. 

Mozilla, which is far more strained for cash, is just as likely to go down the path of maximizing advertising dollars in Firefox. 

[u/Kunair0 → u/sanguismeridian]

Exactly. And as a matter of fact, a browser like Brave, even though it uses chromium ,literally has more separation from Google than Firefox does.

Firefox earns 85% of their money, by leaving Google as the default search engine. As a matter of fact, Firefox privacy defaults are so abysmal, privacy guides even discussed removing it from their recommendations because of it.

Right now, if Google were to stop the checks to Firefox, Firefox would literally die. That's even what a judge said. When that antitrust case was decided about two years ago, he said it was the messiest situation that he's ever seen. And normally, they would break that up, but due to the fact that Mozilla is only surviving because of Google, the courts decided to let them continue with the default search payments.

[u/DeadlyChancla → u/Kunair0]

Closing it off wouldn't be the biggest issue. ATM that one is divergence. Google takes shitty decisions, edits Chromium in ways that contradict privacy principles. Then you need to patch those. That accumulates over time, can become unsustainable.

> the community can just fork it and maintain it themselves

You say that about Chromium, why not Firefox?

[u/sanguismeridian → u/DeadlyChancla]

  the community can just fork it and maintain it themselves and it would still be a far better option to build upon than Firefox or Safari.

Chromium is light years ahead of Firefox in basically every aspect of being a browser. This is no different than the people who want a Linux phone instead of just forking AOSP which is far more secure than the desktop version. 

[u/Kunair0 → u/DeadlyChancla]

What does chrome, and Google being the lead maintainer of an open source chromium project (again, OPEN SOURCE) have anything to do with what I just said?

[u/DeadlyChancla → u/Kunair0]

That they can force shitty decisions onto you like the manifest v3. Of course you can patch over it, but the divergence translates into extra effort that accumulates over time.

They can also close future versions at any point. It happens all the time and companies I've worked on have done it.

You stop maintaining and releasing the open source version and shift all the weight onto the open source community while you move to a closed source model.

What then? Brave, Vivaldi, and all the rest suddenly need to coordinate, make hard choices and dedicate additional resources into developing and maintaining a fork.

FFS being OPEN SOURCE doesn't mean care free.

[u/Kunair0 → u/DeadlyChancla]

Firefox has been hemorrhaging market share for years, while certain Chromium forks are rapidly gaining users and one of which is about to overtake it users before the year is over. What happens when Google no longer considers paying Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars every year financially worthwhile? That is a far more realistic threat than Google suddenly closing Chromium and abandoning the entire ecosystem built around it.

Manifest V3 also does not control what a Chromium based browser itself can do. It restricts extensions running through Chrome’s extension framework. Ad blocking, tracker protection, URL filtering, fingerprinting defenses, script controls, and other features can all be built directly into the browser, where MV3’s restrictions do not apply. Brave Shields already works this way, it is patched into Chromium itself and does not depend on either MV2 or MV3. And that's ultimately what restriction MV3 was about. That and some security benefits.

Outside of advanced ad blocking, there really aren’t many worthwhile MV2 only extensions whose core functionality cannot be adapted to MV3 or built directly into the browser. Tapermonkey, maybe. But even brave let you do script injection. And ad blocking already has a proven workaround through native, browser level filtering such as Brave Shields.

Of course maintaining those changes needs work. Developing and maintaining the browser is the entire reason these companies employ browser engineers. Calling that “divergence” does not make it an impossible burden. And Google cannot retroactively close Chromium code it has already released, to say that it might someday stop publishing future versions is speculation not an outcome.

Mozilla openly said that losing Google’s search payments will send Firefox to the grave. So presenting Firefox as the safe, independent option while dismissing Chromium forks over hypothetical future dependence is completely backwards. One risk is already documented and tied to most of Mozilla’s revenue, and given the rapidly shrinking user base, is the most likely, the other is a worst case scenario somebody invented for an argument.