me is like using ski shoes for snowboarding.
It seems to work well, but only till u face ICE on the slope.
… and switch to Firef
x + Ec
sia ;)
browser and search engine
the browser is the program that runs on your device to connect to the internet, which renders the website and isolates the code that runs for the website from the rest of your device’s data.
while there are many different browsers out there all shipping with different highlevel configurations, designs and UX (there are even CLI browsers), they all need an underlying engine.
the browser engine
this is the heavy machinery of a browser. this does most of the work (rendering and sandboxing), is very hard to secure and hence to implement. this is why there are only three different such products out there:
| engine | vendor | market share |
|---|---|---|
| Blink | 80% | |
| WebKit | Apple | 15% |
| Gecko | Mozilla | 5% |
all browsers have to use one of these. while some people argue to use specific Chromium based browser like Brave e.g. for privacy or some other reason, the most important argument against all those browsers, that depend either on Blink or WebKit, is the dependence on their engine. the only independent engine - Gecko - has an almost irrelevant fraction of users.
this leads to web developers testing only for Chromium, sometimes youtube didn’t even work for Gecko anymore… leading to the risk of a web monoculture.
Then Google is able to change their engine, resulting in ad blocker being banned:/ … as they did in their V3 manifest.
the search engine
search engines are getting money through advertisement, obviously. whenever you don’t have to pay for a non open source product - you are the product.
search engines pay the browser a good amount of money to be its default search engine after installation, as many people will stick to it out of laziness. this is how Google got such a huge market share.
noteworthy alternatives are DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. i like trees.