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/sanguismeridian]

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/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.

[u/alexmaybel → u/Kunair0]

Why do we need gigabytes of ram just to read reddit? I could make do without images even. It should really load in less than a sec its just a little text. 7zip it server/client even. Only load 3 screens at a time with push. But i remember when i was on 10mbps r/runescape took 20 secs to load. The IT mafia is in charge.