In fact nothing crashed the system.
You have a plethora of good browser in linux, use them. Firefox, chrome and his many variants, opera, web, …
The situation with Google and all the products and services they distribute got worse than Microsoft with Windows and IE back then. People don’t perceive the problem in the same way because Google doesn’t charge directly for those products and services, they are “free”.
The “plethora” of browsers means one and something.
One is Chrome/Chromium and something is Firefox.
I suspect Google keeps Firefox alive just to have an excuse to say “see, it is not a monopoly, there isn’t just Chrome”.
I’d argue there are three browsers: Chromium, Firefox, and Safari. It’s definitely scary how big of a monopoly chrome has, but to me Youtube is even worse. In theory there are Youtube alternatives, but in practice there’s nothing else.
I was trying Vivaldi out of curiosity, but I’ve got to go back to Firefox now. Firefox has too many little quality of life features that I appreciate.
Anyway, I’m quite confident that changing to Xorg has stopped the issue I was having, I’ve been trying to push it into doing it again and it hasn’t quit to the command line even once, whereas on wayland I could make it happen very consistently. Thank you everyone who’s helped, if anyone knows why wayland is unstable for me (and/or anything I can do about it) I’d be interested to hear.
For years I only use Chrome for email lists since the information there is not personal, but I have health insurance from a company that uses email to send a login key that too often expires before reaching my personal email, and when you do succeed at logging in the web site says “there is a problem” and the information I need won’t display. Their tech support tells me to use gmail and Chrome. I’ve had similar problems with some financial sites.
That’s horrible. Also very unprofessional. I’ve not had to deal with anything quite that egregious, but maybe I’ve just been lucky.
Strange. I am just using something you do not mention at all. So it does not exist. Interesting.
@Alf:
We must agree about the meaning of words.
For example, Vivaldi is made by adding “features” on top of Chromium via Javascript.
Is Vivaldi a “browser”?
Well, since Chromium is a browser, Vivaldi is Chromium plus some Javascript addons, then Vivaldi is a browser.
When you add nuts to chocolate it is still chocolate.
The problem comes when they don’t say “see, we add some features on top of Chromium” or “we make Chromium better by adding some features” (like adding nuts on top of the chocolate) but they say “we develop a browser”.
It is like a car shop that repaint a Mercedes, changes the lights and the tyres, tunes the engine then says “we build cars”.
Is the customized Mercedes still a car?
Yes.
It is a Mercedes stock car plus some addons.
Does the car shop build cars?
No.
The car shop modifies an already existing car, designed and built by Mercedes.
Hopefully the car shop can improve the Mercedes car in some way. Maybe.
Now the real point of this discussion: is it worth it using Vivaldi instead of Chromium?
It depends.
If you drive a race car you would need all sorts of addons, tune-ups and changes to it.
If you drive a car going to work and back home you probably don’t need any change and most changes are going to make things worse, like shortening the car life, making it more difficult to drive, unsafe and so on.
If you need a feature that Chromium does not have and Vivaldi manages to add that feature, then Vivaldi is the best thing ever.
If you don’t need any add on, then you don’t need Vivaldi.
Then, if we consider the fact that there are only two big firms paying people to develop a browser, that is Google, way less Mozilla, then there are only two browsers.
We can add Safari but I don’t think Safari is actually at the same level, not only because of the features or the performance but also because of deciding the direction the whole Web is going, like proposing (or imposing) standards.
Nowadays when Google decides that “standardX” must be dropped for “standardY” that becomes the rule.
Mozilla may have a say on it.
Anybody else doesn’t exist.
What a sterile discussion. Here is a list.
Gecko, Webkit, Blink, KHTML,… and do not forget text based browsers.
Even emacs has one.
According to your logic, there is only one os around. And how your post is related to the OP question is a mistery to me.
Besides, some car and car repair shops do build their cars actually. I would take an Ultima over any mercedes, bar some amg models one could resell for big money. Provided they have not caught fire yet, of course.
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We aren’t speaking of 1998 Web pages and Mosaic.
It is 2024 and today’s Internet is GMail, Youtube, Netflix, Outlook and so on.
Even more than that, today’s Internet is ChromeOS with applications as Internet service.
That is the reason why there is one browser that makes the Internet (Chrome), one that struggles to stay relevant (Firefox) and anything else is fading and/or useless.
To not mention Android.
I am reading some chinese phone vendor is trying to switch from Android to their own mobile OS. Cool, problem is it doesn’t work with the whole Android apps ecosystem. Now you go to my own bank and tell them they must provide their “app” for the “HarmonyOS”. It is not going to happen. I must relocate to China.
I did not write “car shops” don’t build cars.
I wrote a “car shop” that takes a Mercedes and add some modifications, cannot say “we build cars”, the “car shop” must say “we modify cars” or even “we make cars better”.
Selling Brave or Vivaldi as “alternative browser” means to mislead the users in thinking they are something different while they are Chrome/Chromium plus some addons. That means the way the actual browser works is not decided by the Brave or Vivaldi team, it is decided elsewhere. The browser and then the Internet, as wrote above.
Does it makes sense?
Only if you need some feature that is not available in the stock browser.
On a side note: there is a reason why nobody can fork Chrome/Chromium. Nobody can maintain the fork so it keeps working with the Web as it diverges from the main body. The consequence is no actual innovation is possible out of the two (maybe one) browser above.