Comment by arunabha 8 days ago
Is there an alternative to Firefox that is not controlled by big tech? One of the saddest outcomes of what seems to be the inevitable demise of Firefox would be that there would be no viable alternative to big tech browsers.
Konqueror has been written in webkit since back when it was called KHTML. It's where apple got the original source code to make Safari.
The KDE folks did some impressive work back then. That the world basically runs on derivatives is quite the achievement.
But you can't say anymore that Konqueror is an alternative to big tech.
I wish we still had a live khtml developed by KDE today but we don't.
We don't have any non big tech alternative today. Firefox is funded by Google.
There's hope with servo and ladybug.
Netsurf seemed like a very nice codebase but somehow it seems to remain small and too limited for most uses.
WebKit has mostly splut from Blink. Really as long as you aren't using a repackaged Chromium you aren't getting all of Google's harmful features by default and are resisting the monoculture.
Safari definitely isn't the best option to diversify into (Apple shares lots of Google's harmful ideas such as their own version of Web Environment Integrity) but I consider it a significant step up from Chrome.
Why don’t they do so now if they don’t even use it anymore?
Konqueror was always the only sensible choice, the only browser built from the ground up as open-source, and still the best I've ever used.