Simon Walter - 15.07.24, 23:27:29 CEST:
> > I hope one day browsers will be developed with ethical integrity
> > again.
>
> At the risk of triggering some people, I will share this anyway:
> https://ladybird.org claims to be that. Maybe you have heard of it.

I have read of it.

We will see whether they deliver on their promises.

Unfortunately the days where browser engines have been highly modular and
could very easily embedded are gone. At least for now. Again KHTML comes
to my mind. Browser engines have become so complex and it is very
challenging to keep up with the pace of introducing new crap^W^W standards
into the web.

WebEngine is very huge and as far as I read it took the Qt people quite a
bit to tame it into something that could be embedded at least to some
extent. And its a big maintenance burden for them.

The Firefox engine… I have not seen it embedded into a browser using a
different GUI toolkit than Firefox so far. Tor Browser is basically a
modified Firefox. Arkenfox is a modified Firefox. The Mullvad Browser is a
modified Firefox.

Unlike with WebEngine and the formar WebKit I am not aware about a variant
of the browser engine of Firefox that could at least embedded to some
extent.

A browser with clearly defined modular elements… that would be something.

But it also has to do with the current web being broken to some extent.
More and more JavaScript to introduce proprietary software through a
backdoor. Google and others are seeing the browser as a controllable
backdoor to run just about anything on user machines, with or without
their consent.

From the article:

"The advertising industry and Google in particular have been trying their
hardest to reverse this dynamic, to turn browsers into a locked-down piece
of viewing software under the total control of the servers it's
accessing."

https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/

It is a mess.

A huge big mess.

And it all started to deteriorate with the commercialization of the
Internet.

Maybe that point of view is a bit one sided. But I remember the old web.
It has not been as fancy, not so much blinking, not so many fancy
animations. But it had content. It may not always have looked that good,
but it was much easier to find the actual content of a web site than often
enough it is now.

We will see whether the battle for control is won by the good people. I
bet in the end it will be won by them. And energetically this may already
have happened. But in this denser matrix like world… it still looks quite
dystopian to me.

--
Martin