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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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Oh look all the "chrome but in a different outfit" browsers are doing the same terrible shit? What a shocker, no one could have predicted that the many many things all on the same base where actuality just fake competition.
Firefox has webserial support now. I no longer need anything chromium. Let them rot.
What is it used for?
Communicating with external devices via USB or the old D-Sub connectors.
Printers, microcontrollers, instruments, etc... Directly instead of through the OS.
Notably, ESPHome Programmer uses it for flashing ESP32s wired. Other companies like Solo Motor Controllers use it for delivering a user GUI to customers that is always updated but that can switch between versions instantly for production without having to having to deal with window's broken method of having to manually search and download .exes for every program.
never heard of it till now. neat!
I had to use Brave earlier this year to flash firmware onto a Meshtastic device. It's good to hear that Firefox has that option now.
Even grapheneOS use it for adb into your phone to flash the images.
they use WebUSB in GrapheneOS
Really? Holy shit I can switch to zen fully at work and at home and uninstall chromium. Webserial was literally the only thing I needed
I heard about the web usb thing, it's also going to be a game changer for me (I haven't tried yet, hopefully it works)
Where oh where is my PWA...?
“Coming soon…”
It does? Guess I can finally yeet Chromium from my machine then.
They are all chrome with google scratched out and their name written in sharpie in its place.
Of course they are all doing it, cause they are all the same thing.
They don't even try to pretend to fight it.
because theres no fighting google.
Microsoft tried, and google won, which is why Edge became a chrome reskin instead of what it was before.
Everything dies.
Yeah, but the worse they are the longer they live apparently.
The winning move is not to do business with them, don't compete just exist and pretend they don't exist. Microslop played the game and lost, but it is a stupid silly game.
kinda hard to do when google holds the internet by the balls. and can twist at any moment to get what they want.
Microsoft and Mozilla employees have both accused them of doing this in the past, to sabotage non-chrome browsers on google services, to make chrome look better and drive users to chrome.
News to me, Does google hold this site by the balls? They have a lot of power yes, but they are not some unsinkable boat.
They only 'hold the internet by the balls' if you are using and reliant on Google products.
There are hundreds (if not more) tutorials and lists online to guide you through degoogling
I'm sure we can get thousands of websites and every major corporation to degoogle cause you said they should.
Where did I say they should? (I do think it, but didn't say it).
The only person here that spoke supposed 'facts' was you, saying that Google holds the internet by the balls. Which is true only in your corner of the world. Google definitely has a majority control, but we already have a big (and growing) movement with European Digital Sovereignity, De-Googling and loads of others.
Up to you if you want to let Google hold the internet that you use 'by the balls'.
All the FF forks are the same. Soft forks.
God it still pisses me off what they did to my boy Opera. All of us left when they diverted after v12. We all saw this coming.
Then Vivaldi came which I have tried in quite a while but it sucked. Firefox it is.
I like Vivaldi except for two things: it uses the same engine as Chrome so facilitates Google's stranglehold on web standards, and it is closed-source. For functionality and design it's one of the best, but those are important downsides.
Chrome is death to a browser, there is little reason to exist if google gets to make the big calls.
What about vivaldi sucked for you?
It's a damn shame, I've always liked Vivaldi otherwise. I've been dual running Vivaldi and Firefox for years now, Vivaldi for casual browsing and Firefox for more serious stuff + YouTube.
Oh well, it's time to do a full switch, I guess.
Kinda funny, I've been doing the exact same thing with Win/Linux for approximately the same length of time. Needed Win because of dome software that just doesn't work linux, and sadly, I still do.
Google and Microsoft can go fuck each other with a frozen cactus for all I care.
The folks at Vivaldi have been doing some work on their internal ad blocker, I think with the intention to bring most of the functionality of uBo internally so that it doesn't have to be an extension. Not sure how far along they are, but maybe they're intentionally keeping it quiet.
Vivaldi have earned and deserve a lot of trust here I believe. All my chromium eggs sit in their basket.
Same here. I'm an Opera refugee so to say (and I had high hopes for Opera actually). I've been using Vivaldi since its first public alpha/preview/whatever they were calling it.
Aye, I'm just not sure how it's going to play out. One can hope, though. It's definitely one of the best options Chrome-wise either way.
I'm wondering what the decision making was when they were starting (which is now 10 years ago already, time flies, yo).
From today's perspective, a Firefox fork sounds way more logical. Back then maybe things with Blink/Chromium weren't looking so grim, maybe they were relying on the experience of that part of the team that moved over from Opera...
10 years ago Google was trusted and liked. The cracks were starting to show, but we're talking about the Google that was still open sourcing a lot of their products and loudly opposing government censorship of the internet.
I mean, on a technical level chromium isn't a terrible browser engine. Building your own engine from scratch is Extremely Hard™ and it's entirely possible to build a decent browser on top of it, so I can understand why most alternative projects have done just that.
It's just... google's control over chromium is concerning.
And an ecosystem of one engine is not healthy. Even if google was not google, this is a massive risk to take for the Easy™ way.
It's not an ecosystem of one, though one is very dominant.
You can compare it to Linux. It's not the only Unix-like kernel, but it's similarly dominant. If you want to create a new distribution, it doesn't make any sense to spend a decade trying to write your own kernel rather than just using the Linux kernel (insert GNU Hurd jokes here).
Is that an unhealthy ecosystem then? I don't think it is.
What makes the chromium situation unhealthy is Google's ownership and control, not that it's the preferred engine for other browsers. I mean, even a company as large as Microsoft gave up trying to create their own engine.
Your example is a poor choice, Linux overall is one example of an OS for users. There are more OS choices then Linux, that is good. Nothing like web browsers where people where actively trying to make everything chromium based. The ecosystem is unhealthy when there is one choice for an entire type of software (so for OS you have Linux, Windows, and Mac as big players) and outside of Firefox and its forks all web browsers are Chromium based. Oh and although there are other fringe options they don't matter much, much like in the OS world Temple OS is not a real choice.
My point was that it would be very very bad if Firefox was not there (or turned into chromium) as an ecosystem of one is a massive risk regardless of who controls it.
Illusion of choice