this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Finally, another web engine is being developed to compete with Chromium and Firefox (Gecko), and they're also working on a browser that will use it.

Here's the maintainer talking about the current state of the project, and a demo of the current functionality

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Web Bluetooth and web USB aren't web standards and are Chromium specific

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

AFAICT that's correct for WebBluetooth indeed, as it's only implemented by Chromium (and thus all browsers relying on it) but for but for WebUSB https://wicg.github.io/webusb/ it's still being discussed at the W3C level so even though not standards (which I don't think W3C even produce, only API specifications, e.g HTML isn't a standard whereas Bluetooth is) thus allowing others to possibly implement it.

To clarify Firefox is my main browser, but (sadly) for those very specific cases I'm relying on Chromium (WebXR on standalone XR devices, even now Wolvic switching to Chromium as a backend).

It's an important point as by doing this Google is pushing for it's own set of technologies and is pushing for it's own engine which comes with a lot of business (namely ads) related "feature" e.g Manifest v3 that aren't good for privacy.

That is also interesting to consider on "why" a browser keeps on evolving, i.e having the most "advanced" browsers does give an edge and pushes competition away.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

From a security and privacy stand point webUSB and web Bluetooth seem very bad. We already see webRTC and webGL being abused.