DO NOT COMPLY.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

I think it's time for another browser war, this time not as corporation vs corporation, but users vs corporate control. Who are our champions? Not @Vivaldi or any other Blink or WebKit browser, for sure, unless they take it upon themselves to fork off the engines to preserve these features. The Firefox forks, perhaps? That landscape is currently a constellation of fragmented projects: is there anything documenting the difference between @palemoon @librewolf or @Waterfox and how many others?

[oblomov@sociale.network]

I appreciate that part of the #indieWeb is “running away” from the corporate controlled web in #GeminiSpace, and there are some very interesting idea being developed around there. There's something to be said about not wanting to share your environment with the poison that a large part of the web has become, but at the same time, there's also something to be said about throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The problem with the web isn't technical, it's social. The tech itself is fine.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

(I don't dislike gemtext. And I love the idea of a web built on lightweight markup. I would love it if user agents had native support for plain formats like markdown or asciidoc. I even like the #GeminiProtocol. And I see no reason why you shouldn't ship text/gemini over HTTP or HTML over Gemini.)

[oblomov@sociale.network]

This, by the way, is part of the same rant. There is absolutely nothing preventing, say, #Firefox from adding support for the #GeminiProtocol and for the gemtext format. It would have been a better time investment for their engineers than the time they wasted adding integration with #LLM chatbots that people now have to waste their time disabling (or removing from the code).

[oblomov@sociale.network]

I'm going to have to write up part 2 of my «Google is killing the open web» article, ain't I?

[nodami@hcommons.social]

@oblomov
Yes

[vanni@mibl.vannilla.org]

@oblomov
> is there anything documenting the differences between palemoon librewolf or waterfox
Yes, there is. Librewolf and Waterfox are to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chrome: the same browser with a different appearance and some built-in tools or settings.

@palemoon is completely independent, the dev team is re-implementing features in a privacy-preserving way instead of relying on existing "big tech" engines and it's effectively the only platform (UXP, powering other programs like Basilisk or Epyrus) that will survive if Mozilla were to disappear.
There's more to say but space is a bit limited here ^^;

These info are not centralized so one would need to look around to get the whole picture, but it's there all laid out.

Finally, a disclaimer to avoid misunderstandings: I develop and maintain extensions for Pale Moon, in addition to being an active user in the forum.

[kendricklmao8@hachyderm.io]

@oblomov servo when?

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@kendricklmao8

https://servo.org/

Used to be an experimental rendering engine developed at Mozilla before they fired the whole team.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@vanni @palemoon thanks for chiming in. My understanding was the PaleMoon forked much earlier, so their Goanna engine still started off from Gecko?

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@nodami *sigh*

[vanni@mibl.vannilla.org]

@oblomov
Yes, it's a "hard fork" of Firefox.
Most of it is still Mozilla code from the days of Firefox 3 (Pale Moon started in 2009), but over the years and especially after Electrolysis (Firefox's multi-process architecture) things diverged so much they are completely different products.

Unfortunately people see "Firefox 3" and scream "old and insecure!!!" like it's a religious mantra, but the platform is developed to this day and you can use it as your primary browser just fine, like I do. In some cases it's even more secure than the rest: when there are issues with certificates or TLS you are warned instead of connecting at all costs, certain abusable javascript API are not implemented or intentionally crippled, etc.