memes

Plenty of alternative to Chromium already exist, not all good.

a program like any other that just needs to be able to access each websites’ server and display its files right?

In software engineering "just" is often considered a dirty word.

Rendering HTML and CSS correctly is not trivial.

Doing JavaScript to spec also is not trivial.

Doing all your http verb network request stuff is also not trivial.

Plus the interface (probably graphical) is a lot of work.

There's also probably a thousand other things that would eat up time. Displaying all the different image formats, for example.

Time and knowledge. Browsers are basically almost an OS nowadays in capabilities. Yes you can build a basic HTML renderer quickly. But anything beyond that just takes a enormous amount of effort and time especially if you want to make it performant and secure. Like it’s very easy to accidentally introduce a vulnerability that can be exploited by someone. Like the last few generations of Nintendo consoles were hacked and jailbroken trough the browser. And that’s a browser build with WebKit by a team of engineers. Good luck doing it on your own, especially without Chromium or WebKit.

It's possible. But it's a huge undertaking. If you just wanted to fully understand all of the specifications for HTTP, JavaScript and CSS, it'd take you days before having written a single line of code.

Then you need to write all that in a performant way.

Then you need to keep up with all the new features.

Then you need to keep up with all the new security threats.

Browsers nowadays are practically little operating systems. So the question is not that far off from asking what prevents you from writing an alternative to Windows.

You can. But it'll cost millions, or maybe billions, to build something good.

Because they're giant applications that do a lot under the hood that you don't see. Of course you can write your own, we did that during my degree but it was extremely basic.

The Reddit hive mind behaviour is seeping through the cracks.

For me personally, the experience is allowed to take a hit, hell even a major hit, if the browser respects me as a user. FF seems to be better on that front although I'll confess I use Vanadium on my phone. Its GrapheneOS' default browser.

Welcome to Lemmy where having an opinion even slightly different from the open source/Linux fanboys grants you downvotes to oblivion, no questions asked 🙃

Mull is great on Android.

Chrome doesn't support browser extensions so it is an awful experience for me

It feels very weird to say but

I think maybe

the world was better when Trident existed??

Pfft. I'm going back to the og Netscape Navigator 😎

Three if you count Webkit/Safari

Vivaldi contains Chromium, but it isn't itself open-source, by the way.

They say of themselves that "for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit". I would not fully agree with that either, but I guess, at that point the open-source purists have already lost interest anyways.

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-source/

It's still the same rendering engine. There are two browsers.

Is there a mobile Vivaldi counterpart? It doesn't make sense for me that I can't share history with desktop and mobile together