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Comment by emerged | Hacker News Reader

Stop supporting Mozilla.

They are controlled opposition at best, and are completely ideologically possessed and controlled by politics at this point.

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To do this, one has to acknowledge that there are limited options at this point, and very limited potential for a viable browser alternative. Sure, there are 100 or more browsers out there, but the discriminator of viable makes it really tough. By viable, I mean no funny business, no basing it on chrome, no crypto-anythings attached, no bundled pockets.

This might just be me showing my ignorance, but for the common person to be able to stand a chance of writing a full browser that people want to use, we will have to create something new that overlays or subverts the WWW portion of the internet. The current system of RFC's and even knowing which ones we acknowledge and which ones we silently dont, is so byzantine that someone born today could spend the next 30 years of their life trying and they won't be able to make a browser and keep up with web standards and expectations. This here is a big reason why only big and wasteful tech juggernauts can do this.

Im old enough to remember the birth of the WWW, and I never thought things would or even could get this good and bad at the same time. This web needs to be taken out behind the barn so we can think about something new, and maybe this time protect it at all costs.

>By viable, I mean no funny business, no basing it on chrome, no crypto-anythings attached, no bundled pockets.

Lynx does not have any of that

If you encounter a website that does not work in Lynx, complain to the website admin

>If you encounter a website that does not work in Lynx, complain to the website admin

Cool, let me go submit 5,000,000 complaints to a few megacorporations real quick

Lol

Is it possible to log into a Google account with Lynx these days?

Lynx is my main browser, something to reconcile is that most of the web does not work without the new trendy design stuff. Single page apps are a big one. I'm a nerd, and willing to make sacrifices, others might not be.

There is no-one else to support. We either give up and let Google win or keep supporting this side, which is broken today, but one day may not be.

On a different thread today, someone mentioned LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/), which might be a viable browser to support (a fork of Firefox), and for macOS, there's Orion (https://browser.kagi.com/), which is built on WebKit.

When you consider browser engines, you can use Blink (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera), WebKit (right now, Safari and Blink only?), or Gecko (Firefox, LibreWolf, others?). I would suggest just supporting anything other than Blink if you want competition. Firefox isn't the only alternative. At least with WebKit there's someone who isn't Google who wants to make changes that won't fill their engine with ads.

Forks of Firefox are no good, if you don't support Firefox. If Firefox dies, there's nothing left to maintain the fork.

This is a really important thing that people often seem not to care about.

It also applies to Chromium forks like ungoogled-chromium.

What does it mean for Google to "win" and why would it be so terrible? Also we should not forget Apple who has a monopoly on what browser functionality makes it into iOS, which is IMO a much bigger threat to the openness of the web than Google.

So one (user-hostile) company having a complete monopoly on the web is less of a threat than two companies having a duopoly?

Stop supporting Mozilla. Stop supporting Chrome or any Chromium-based browsers.

What now? I'm already using Safari but it's not cross-platform.

Dillo? NetSurf? IE?

Only half-serious. If web developers hadn't totally drunk the Goog-Aid and went with 100% JS SPAs when forms and static content would do, we would certainly have more usable browsers and sites.

Safari just means wrangling control from the company who will stop at nothing to sell ads, to hand it to the company who will stop at nothing to sell overpriced hardware.

Ok then, what's the viable alternative?

Webkit is still there, most things still work in it.

I guess I'll try librefox, iceweasel et al.

Controlled opposition to what, precisely?

Chrome

Who's controlling them? Is that a reference to the money Google pays them every year, presumably to ward off accusations of a browser monopoly?

I think it behooves people to be precise and explicit when they accuse a large non-profit (with a wholly owned corporate subsidiary) of being "controlled opposition."

Yep, only for the „we got no monopoly“ theater

Controlled opposition in the sense that they are literally funded by the opposition. That is plainly not a reasonable situation for healthy competition. Mozilla doesn’t exist without Google’s money and they don’t even allow users to fund the browser itself.

and support which Chromium fork?

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