cabbage

Seems to be a mix between what WeDistribute currently is, but aggregating content from different sources, and a Bonfire instance. So an effort to mix the old web with the social web. The best parallel to me seems to be websites with associated forums back in the old days, but a federated version.

I’m interested to see how it works out.

Yeah, that’s fair. I still occasionally boot up Firefox just to click the Zotero button. For the most part though the built-in ad blocker and cookie blocker do what I need.

Weirdly enough It’s FOSS wrote about support for Firefox extensions in GNOME Web several years ago, but I have no idea what became of that feature.

WebKit is not starting from scratch. It goes back to KHTML which was started by KDE for their web browser back in the 90s. Apple built Safari on top of KHTML, forking the engine and creating @[email protected]. WebKit continues as an open source project, with native web integration in GNOME running through @[email protected]. Ironically KDE and Konqueror stopped using WebKit, using Chromium these days. But WebKit is, at least to a degree, a natural choice for anyone interested in making an independent browser for GNOME or Mac OS.

Blink, the engine behind Chromium, is forked from WebKit, but it’s monopolizing the internet and is generally worth avoiding. I don’t think anyone is able to separate Gecko from Firefox, so a Gecko-based browser would just be a Firefox fork. Meanwhile @[email protected] competes directly with the KHTML family of browser engines by being more flexible, but it’s not ready for serious use yet. Once Servo is ready I suspect we will se a lot of independent browsers popping up.

Contributing to Firefox doesn’t make much sense these days. Mozilla, or at least Firefox, runs their own ship and have turned their back on the open source community. Those concerned about the open web are getting increasingly worried that Mozilla is not going to do a whole lot to counter Google’s influence, leaving it to Google to take the internet and destroy it in any way they see fit. If Mozilla does not fight for us any more the only thing we can do is to double down on independent engines such as WebKit and Servo.

I’ve started using Gnome Web as my main browser, and I’m super happy with it. I’ve been trying it occasionally for years, and only the last month or so does it feel mature enough to replace firefox.

I guess I have the advantage that I mostly avoid bloated websites, but still. For anyone looking to escape the web engine duopoly Gnome Web is very much worth checking out these days.