Chromium vs. Everything Else

[frostknight]

I haven't found a single one that does everything that I want. And what is your definition of bloat? Redundant features? Stock Chromium doesn't have whole lot of them. Binary size? Well, I can't say I care either way, but I found Chromium pretty efficient on under-resourced hardware.

Bloat is crap I don't care about.

For me that involves gross over the top graphical grossness like firefox quantum
Also, redundant features of ones I don't want.

Such as some chromium based web browsers have privacy issues that even ungoogled chromium cannot fix.

Hyperbola devs have a wiki as to what those are:

https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id ... mium_flaws

All of these are good reasons to avoid it. But for me, the DRM and proprietary codecs + the privacy issues are why I avoid chromium anything.

Also, I hate the bright and shiny look in general.

Oh and btw, I should add, it does MOST of what I want. The stuff it doesn't do is not palemoon's fault or its devs, but rather the morons on the web who adapt google's crap without any thought of whether it's worth it or not or whether its needed.

[UCyborg]

I'm just annoyed when shit breaks on Pale Moon. But other browsers are insufferable in other ways so I never really switched from UXP based since Firefox went down the toilet drain. I guess it helps I have no bill pay sites that break on Pale Moon, or that I don't care for DRM encumbered media, or whatever the hell government sites people supposedly need, or some WebRTC stuff...

Well I have Firefox based Floorp at work for Teams (:sick:). These modern communication programs are such an abomination, from Teams to Discord...anything Electron based, bleh...

[andyprough]

Mullvad browser and Brave have both completely crapped the bed this past week and basically are non-functional on the systems at my office. Seems to be due to some slightly wonky internet connectivity issue where I'm working. Pale Moon is the only browser right now that will access much of anything reliably at work and so I've added it to several co-workers' systems. Maybe Pale Moon is somehow more robust when dealing with connection issues?

[Moonchild]

Maybe Pale Moon is somehow more robust when dealing with connection issues?

It is more robust. It's inevitable when relying on net-local DNS that doesn't require a tunnel and building on stateful protocols for connections that are supposed to be stateful, instead of moving networking up to the application layer like with QUIK/HTTP3 and losing optimized flow control in the transport layer as a result

[frostknight]

Mullvad browser and Brave have both completely crapped the bed this past week and basically are non-functional on the systems at my office. Seems to be due to some slightly wonky internet connectivity issue where I'm working. Pale Moon is the only browser right now that will access much of anything reliably at work and so I've added it to several co-workers' systems. Maybe Pale Moon is somehow more robust when dealing with connection issues?

Probably because its faster if I had to guess. Less bloated, less resources needed... just a thought

Although you can tell me if it makes sense.

[UCyborg]

Pale Moon is the only browser right now that will access much of anything reliably at work and so I've added it to several co-workers' systems.

I put it on mom's laptop few years back, but she keeps using Firefox even though the latter struggles with videos... Maybe I should've done it when the laptop was new circa 2019, but I wasn't confident about web compatibility at the time.

Work, ugh, another place infested with NPCs. I got one dev to load PM on his machine some time back to convince him something in the app they're doing is wrong. Of course typical reaction is "it's the weird browser". So Firefox was weird too years ago?

Pale Moon being weird, I find this remark particularly absurd coming from co-workers that run Linux at home. You're weird bro, being all about FOSS at home, then developing proprietary DRMed software 'cause it pays your bills. Richard Stallman would have you starved to death for your sins! And you still haven't made the darned thing run on Linux!

[frostknight]

Pale Moon being weird, I find this remark particularly absurd coming from co-workers that run Linux at home. You're weird bro, being all about FOSS at home, then developing proprietary DRMed software 'cause it pays your bills. Richard Stallman would have you starved to death for your sins! And you still haven't made the darned thing run on Linux!

There is definitely some heavy irony there. Unfortunate as it is... alas.

This being said, I make a distinction between proprietary and non-free software.

One is just not libre and the other has built in malware. That's how I prefer to look at those two options. Of course the third option is libre software.

[UCyborg]

But proprietary doesn't necessarily have malware.

TBH, I don't really know those co-workers personally (I'm more on asocial side), so I'm not sure how much libre they prefer. Stallman like types are more of an exception than rule I think. I know fully libre distro would be considerably more restrictive. So it would be more for those to whom ideology means more than practical usability.

[andyprough]

Maybe Pale Moon is somehow more robust when dealing with connection issues?

It is more robust. It's inevitable when relying on net-local DNS that doesn't require a tunnel and building on stateful protocols for connections that are supposed to be stateful, instead of moving networking up to the application layer like with QUIK/HTTP3 and losing optimized flow control in the transport layer as a result

DDG's AI is telling me that chromium and Firefox have moved networking up to the application layer implementing HTTP3 application layer protocol over QUIC transport layer network protocol, but that Safari has disabled support for HTTP3 by default. I assume from your response that Pale Moon never implemented HTTP3 over QUIC at all.

That is very interesting. I've noticed that when the network connection is choppy or degraded that chromium-based browsers and firefox-based browsers will just completely fail to fully connect or render most sites. But Pale Moon will just keep working away at it, sometimes getting slowed down a bit, but generally rendering the sites that aren't acting as web applications.

[RealityRipple]

I assume from your response that Pale Moon never implemented HTTP3 over QUIC at all.

The community concluded that we'd give QUIC a miss.

[UCyborg]

...but I found Chromium pretty efficient on under-resourced hardware.

A little update on this one, this was said mostly going off the experience on an old smartphone, using a web browser using Android's Chromium WebView. And I guess Edge using MediaFoundation was quite smooth at video playback specifically on an underpowered laptop, but of course, that's just one factor. RAM consumption wise...it goes quickly in general.

[chrisriley+3000]

I just spotted this interesting thread. What are we talking about here? I used Google Chrome starting in Christmas 2008 when my parents bought me my own laptop so I could use it in High School. I remember using Chromium to use Google Chrome and Edge which helped me surf the web rather quickly. It worked for 5 years until my computer died September 28th, 2013. Have any of you had anymore positive outcomes and reviews for this web-browser project?

[Mæstro]

What are we talking about here?

Because you are new here, you can be forgiven not knowing the subtext. Few users here think fondly of Chrome. Since the early tens, Google has aggressively promoted Chrome as part of its business plan, ultimately to advertise more to Chrome users. This has involved many actions which make the daily lives of Pale Moon users and developers actively worse. Before 2010, new browser versions released occasionally and web standards had matured and were mostly static. Google opened an arms race, concocting non-standard browser quirks in far more frequent ‘major’ updates than is traditional, favouring these in its search results and encouraging other software developers to bundle Chrome with their installers. These caused Chrome to become so popular as to become more important, in many web developers’ minds, than the actual standards promoted by the not-for-profit governing body overseeing the World Wide Web, which were fixed since 2007 until it surrendered to a cartel made of Google and its allies in 2019.

Google continues to promote its monopolies through abnormal browser specifications and the rest. The commonest reason sites break in Pale Moon is that their developers choose to neglect us because ‘everyone uses Chrome’. Keeping up with Google’s latest stupid ideas for ‘living standards’ demands lots of Moonchild’s and his colleagues’ time, effort and energy. It makes all our lives harder and offers nothing in return. Google uses evil means for evil ends, and it is hardly surprising so many of us, me among them, despise it to its core.

[andyprough]

I just spotted this interesting thread. What are we talking about here? I used Google Chrome starting in Christmas 2008 when my parents bought me my own laptop so I could use it in High School. I remember using Chromium to use Google Chrome and Edge which helped me surf the web rather quickly. It worked for 5 years until my computer died September 28th, 2013. Have any of you had anymore positive outcomes and reviews for this web-browser project?

I was using KDE's Konqueror browser on GNU/Linux as far back as about 2001-2002, and Apple later took parts of Konqueror and turned it into webkit and Safari, and Google took parts of webkit and turned it into chromium. So I'm probably one of the only ones here that used Konqueror before it was branched off into what would become webkit/Safari and chromium/Chrome.

At that time Konqueror was the only real native browser on GNU/Linux distros, and Mozilla didn't work all that terribly well. Of course, by the time 2003-2004 hit, we all had moved off to various beta versions of Firefox and then I and nearly everyone else on GNU/Linux stayed with Firefox until Pale Moon came along and Firefox became an electrolysis mess and killed its own extension system.

Chrome/chromium never became much of a thing on GNU/Linux, and until very recently in the past 4-5 years you never needed a chromium-based browser for anything. Unfortunately now all kinds of banks and government agencies and insurance programs and so forth absolutely require a chromium browser or they will not work at all in many cases, so in those cases I'll usually just stop using that online service altogether.

As for what I think of Chrome/chromium, I would never use Chrome, not since the Snowden revelations about how Google was helping spy agencies do mass surveillance. For chromium, it uses too much memory for my purposes. I run large virtual machines and large programs for work, and I constantly have to be aware of my system's overall memory usage and memory availability, because out-of-memory crashes are very bad for me and can cause a lot of chaos. I prefer a browser like Pale Moon where I can fairly tightly control it and its resource usage and limit its network connections.

[UCyborg]

Chrome was meant to be simple no bells and whistles browser, not for someone used to customizing Firefox of its day. Pale Moon continues the spirit of the old Firefox. Although it's noticeable extension developers moved on and the force that was behind Mozilla specific extensions is no longer there. Sorry, but it's not fair to compare the few that are left to the number that used to be.

[Mæstro]

Of course, the distinctive power behind Mozilla extensions would wane by deciding to replace its extension format with Google’s. When I experimented briefly with Chrome, as just another random browser I was testing for fun in 2012 among many, I thought its extension variety seemed comparable to Firefox. Whole Flash games (I remember Flow in particular) had been turned into Chrome extensions, which impressed me. I settled on Firefox, but I forget why. I never used Google as my search engine or email provider, for its simplified homepage in the good, old days struck me as barren against the complex, fun web portals everyone else offered. Google also had no children’s version. YouTube (and then Android) were the only Google thingies I ever used much at all.

…until very recently in the past 4-5 years you never needed a chromium-based browser for anything. Unfortunately now all kinds of banks and government agencies and insurance programs and so forth absolutely require a chromium browser or they will not work at all in many cases, so in those cases I'll usually just stop using that online service altogether.

I have never experienced this, as far as I can recall. Waterfox has sufficed as my backup browser since adopting it late last year, and the vague community consensus here seems to endorse it just in case.

For chromium, it uses too much memory for my purposes. I run large virtual machines and large programs for work, and I constantly have to be aware of my system's overall memory usage and memory availability, because out-of-memory crashes are very bad for me and can cause a lot of chaos. I prefer a browser like Pale Moon where I can fairly tightly control it and its resource usage and limit its network connections.

It seems that I can keep Pale Moon with 15–18 tabs open, as well as Waterfox with up to ten and my XP virtual machine, but not both the latter and Pale Moon with 20+. The period when I was using both Chromium and the VM was too short for me to have taken notice of whether there were any RAM constraints there. In any case, since I should have no more need to keep Waterfox open in the background from March on, thanks ot having made my choice to forsake Discord by then, so I should better then be able to tell whether what you say also holds for me.

[UCyborg]

I have an old folder of extensions lying around somewhere, about 50 extensions. Some day, I'd have to check what those I collected were. Were they mostly web altering or browser altering? Pale Moon definitely lacks web altering ones (hey, there's not a user script for everything). Well, maybe it could be, but not everyone chooses to go this way.

Not sure what things, if any, are better done with web extension rather than user script. Though I do prefer a user script over an extension if it gets the job done.

[Mæstro]

Not sure what things, if any, are better done with web extension rather than user script. Though I do prefer a user script over an extension if it gets the job done.

My lay impression is that literally nothing can be done better. WebExtensions, I understand, can only deploy ordinary JavaScript, and therefore cannot achieve anything which JavaScript run otherwise, as through user scripts, cannot. It makes me wonder how something like Firefox’s µBlock is even capable of functioning.

[Moonchild]

It makes me wonder how something like Firefox’s µBlock is even capable of functioning.

It's because Mozilla purpose-built specific APIs for the most popular extensions so they could work as a WebExtension.

[Gemmaugr]

google chrome/ium will be moving from a 4 week update cycle to a 2 week update cycle.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/chrom ... ek-release

Expect more talk about "security" and sites made with google V8 site frameworks, or chrome only in mind, to have "missing" features..