Interesting, I remember a lot of people switching from Google and even seeing billboard ads for DDG. Even Ecosia, the site I use myself, is just returning Bing results (which are somewhat less ideologically curated compared to Google results). I don't like Bing either (Microsoft are a criminal enterprise). Has anyone used another search engine to recommend for privacy and good social values?

  • kota [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    There are effectively only 3 remaining webengines and two of them are nearing their death beds. Blink, gecko, and webkit.

    Blink is of course the backend for chrome and all of the browsers based on chrome (chromium, opera, brave, epic, edge, vivaldi, qutebrowser, and so on).

    Gecko is the backend for firefox and pretty much JUST firefox. There are some browsers like icecat and waterfox which are older forks of firefox on life support with a few features added. Mozilla was developing a new rendering engine a few years ago which was very promising and was being used to modernize and replace large portions of gecko and hopefully allow for some new independent browsers to appear. Unfortunately, Mozilla fired that whole team and is rapidly spiraling out of relevance.

    https://drewdevault.com/2020/10/22/Firefox-the-embarassment-of-FOSS.html
    https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firefox-maker-mozilla-lays-off-250-workers-says-covid-19-lowered-revenue/

    The last one is webkit which was started a long time ago by the KDE developers, but today it only really exists as a fork powering safari and the ios browsers. Blink is actually also a fork of webkit and the only real reason we have more browsers than JUST chrome, firefox, and safari today is because those KDE devs were wise enough to license their work under the GPL. The situation is a bit more hopeful than gecko, but webkit is essentially only maintained and developed by apple. It's very hard to implement and even when implemented perfectly will struggle to play videos or render most complicated websites (apple doesn't quite release everything or make it easy to use).

    The remaining stuff on that wikipedia page are text only browsers and graphical browsers so old they can't render this site. At this point there's really no hope for http/html. Our only hope is to abandon the corporate internet and leave it for shopping sites, major social media, and other garbage. Projects like gemini and ipfs are neat attempts at this. Course you can't solve political issues with tech solutions so we still need to fix the things that led to our internet being taken over by capitalists.