It’s too bad making a decent web browser is such a massive undertaking so there aren’t literally thousands of alternatives to choose from. :/
And they’re all chromium under the hood. The illusion of free choice.
As it stands today Mozilla is the only thing keeping google from being labeled a browser monopoly, but man can Mozilla let go of the footgun for once.
No, not Safari. While it’s technically true that Safari’s WebKit engine isn’t based on Chromium’s Blink engine, that’s only because the genetic relationship goes in the other direction: Blink was initially forked from WebKit (which was itself forked from KHTML, by the way).
Point is, Mozilla’s Gecko is the only major browser engine that’s fully unrelated to Blink.
I feel like you’d be interested in Ladybird. It’s a fully independent web browser under development, it’s still in its very early stages but they seem serious about it.
We need a better funding model for open source.
Praying that people will donate enough to support your browser isn’t exactly great and really doesn’t work for most open-source projects.
Unless they are doing something new in that space, it’ll just he smooching up to big donors in back rooms.
At least Firefox is open about their deal with Google.
The challenge for Ladybird and other independent browser projects is the enormous size and scope required of modern browsers, which is also still growing. Web browsers are now probably second only to operating systems in complexity in the personal computing space.
Plus even if they do reach technical maturity, they still have to convince people to use it. That’s not been going very well for Mozilla, and they already have a working browser.
Here’s the problem: there are three web browsers.
Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko - that’s it.
A “fork” that depends on the same browser engine and rendering engine is not really a fork, it is just a UI flavor. For the sake of security, privacy and data handling, this choice is as meaningful as changing your desktop environment on Linux.
If you access anything financial or personally identifying (taxes, banking, credit cards, medical services, driver’s license, an email that is linked to any of those accounts, etc) you should use the browser distributed by the engine’s primary developer (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). If you use something else, you are dependent on a downstream third-party developer to properly implement the engine and ensure that its data handling is properly integrated with the browser application and the OS, and you are dependent on their keeping the engine in their knockoff version up to date. You will always be behind the security patches of the main branch, even if the downstream developer is doing everything correctly. On the internet, this is an extreme risk.
Sorry, I missed the mobile part of your statement
For mobile I would recommend duckduckgo private browser.
What would it actually take? Google did it. Apple did it with WebKit.
Do you have to be as big as google, apple, or microsoft to make a browser? Is a browser as labor intensive as a whole-ass operating system? Or does it have to do with proprietary/patented tech roadblocks?
Please remember that Webkit is based on KHTML, the browsing engine that Konqueror, the webbrowser in the KDE suite, used.
So Apple forked KHTML, made WebKit, Safari, Chrome and loads of other browsers used it and improved it, then Google forked WebKit, and made Blink, their current browsing engine
You could technically fork Blink but the question is whether you have the resources to keep up with web standards. The Web is effectively the universal UI toolkit these days and the pace of development reflects that.