[2Gkashmiri]

We have these cropping up like ants.

Mullvad

Brave

Opera

Vivaldi

Microsoft

Heck zoho is in on a browser now

What net gain does each of these companies provide over skinning chromium that isn't in Firefox?

Last time I asked brave fanboys why they don't redskin Firefox and the response was "Firefox is pita to build" all the while we have projects like palemoon and waterfox that are hobby projects. If they can work with firefox, so could someone else but no

[ArclightMat]

Mullvad is actually a Firefox fork and it directly uses Tor's privacy enhancements[0] to Firefox for a private web browsing experience. As a matter of fact, it really looks like Tor Browser but with a VPN baked in instead of Tor.

[0] https://mullvad.net/en/browser

[wallmountedtv]

Uh. "cropping up like ants" is definitely a take. Not a good one, as most the browsers here had their first release date of 199*. I will list them out.

Mullvad, is the Tor Browser with the Mullvad VPN included, and released 2023. However, the Tor Browser, which it effectively is, is from 2002.

Brave, the one in this article, is from 2019.

Opera is from 1994.

Vivaldi is from 2015, and is developed by Opera's previous dev-team after a bad sale to a Chinese company.

Microsoft's first browser, Internet Explorer, is from 1995.

I can not comment about Zoho's browser, as i know little about it.

[rglullis]

Have you worked in any project that required a forked browser?

I did. When we folded less than two years later, one of the CTOs biggest stated regrets was that he went with Firefox instead of Chromium. The extension story in Firefox was easily 10x harder. Interfacing with the OS as well. Getting dbus services to work was a fool's errand.

[2Gkashmiri]

Cool so your company folded but as I said, palemoon and waterfox seem to be running just fine.

Thunderbird also works.

I happen to own a brwoser extension and have both chromium and Firefox extensions. I kinda know myself.

[rglullis]

> palemoon and waterfox seem to be running just fine.

GNU/Hurd is also a very interesting alternative OS, the design is a lot more elegant than GNU/Linux, it's still under active development and it has a surprising number of active users.

It's still a very bad idea to build the foundation of your tech stack on it.

[throwawayadvsec]

opera offers a free vpn and builtin adblocker

i would use it daily if the UI/UX was better, or more similar to firefox

[Timber-6539]

If am not wrong, Opera is owned by some Chinese company and they are known for doing some really shady stuff [0][1] in African countries.

[0] https://blogs.opera.com/africa/2022/05/free-data-with-opera-...

[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/01/21/opera-predatory-loa...

[KORraN]

True, right now lots of folks from the original Opera team (including CEO) work on Vivaldi. If one day Mozilla forces me to ditch Firefox, I will probably switch to this browser.

[soundnote]

Brave literally started on Gecko.

[2Gkashmiri]

Is brave currently forking chromium or not?

By your logic, opera was having their own engine till 2013. So what?