this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
43 points (85.2% liked)
Technology
59589 readers
2891 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Google might be the primary maintainer of Chromium, but they don't really control it. Literally hundreds of other companies and thousands if individual developers contribute to Chromium every day and if Google did something they don't like the engine would be forked in a heartbeat.
In fact it has been forked — thousands of times (according to GitHub). It's just none of those forks have gained much traction. If Google really messes things up, such as if they actually go ahead and remove cookies as they've threatened to do for years, then one or two of those forks will gain traction. Likely enough traction that Google themselves would struggle to keep up and could end up killing Blink and basing Chrome off one of the forks.
If you don't trust Google (I don't), then don't use Chrome. But I wouldn't write off all Chromium based browsers, some of them are awesome. And the main problem it used to have (battery life) isn't an issue anymore. My M1 MacBook Air lasts forever on battery power and I always have a chromium based browser running.
Over 96% of contributions are Google, terrible take.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/AUTHORS
The vast majority of names on that list are not google employees. And that's nowhere near a complete list. Chromium dates back to kthmlw almost three deacdes ago. The vast majority of the code in Chromium was not written by Google.
The authors file is not the source of who writes it today.
Look at actual commit data, like here https://bkardell.com/blog/2023-Mid-Season-Power-Rankings.html
History is history. Those people won’t magically come back.
Sorry, I wasn’t classing Chrome and Chromium as the same thing. I’m a software developer of 20 years so I understand they’re not the same thing. I guess I just took that opportunity to state that I don’t use Google services/products if I can help it.
In work we’re a Windows house, but I’ve managed to get my hands on an M2 MacBook Pro. For now I’m still using Edge but would like to get my iCloud exemption so I can use some of the apps on my personal MBP for work, and I’m wondering whether I should continue using Edge for work and A. N. Other browser for personal (and mirror this on my iPhone); or whether to use profiles, for example, on Safari and split it that way. I might be limited to what I can download on the work machine, but I’d like to synergies everything as much as I can where possible rather than having two completely different Mac experiences with my iPhone sort of thrown in the middle of both.
Which browser do you prefer? I assume a Chromium-based derivative?