The Linux Foundation announces the Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers
The Linux Foundation has launched an initiative called the Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera are members of the group.
While the news comes as a surprise, the list of members who have joined the group is unsurprising to say the least. Brave and Vivaldi, DuckDuckGo are not members, and it is not clear why they are not part of the project, given that their browsers are based on the Chromium open source project.
It seems rather silly that Google, Opera, Vivaldi joined hands with other browser makers to fight against Microsoft Edge as part of the Browser Choice Alliance, and now they themselves are part of a group that includes Microsoft. I suppose it is for their perceived version of the greater good.
What is the purpose of Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers?
Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers is an initiative that has been created to aid innovation, improve the adoption, and enhance the open development of projects in Chromium's ecosystem, according to the official announcement. As you may be aware, Google Chrome, Opera Browser, Microsoft Edge use Chromium's Blink engine to power their respective browsers.
The browser makers have partnered with The Linux Foundation to foster an open source environment and support the developers financially and continue the technological progress of Chromium. Basically, this sounds like a second foundational pillar for Chromium, which Google maintained to a large degree on its own until now.
You can find the press releases from Opera, Chromium, Microsoft, and The Linux Foundation on their websites.
How will this affect Firefox or Safari?
But what about other browsers? The whole thing seems rather bizarre, given that most Linux distros ship with Mozilla Firefox preinstalled.
Why would the Linux Foundation support Chromium? By expanding adoption and removing barriers to innovation within the Chromium ecosystem for the entire web industry, are you not hurting other browsers like Firefox (and its forks), Apple Safari and others? Everyone hates Manifest V3 and its aftermath including the removal of uBlock Origin and other extensions from Chrome, will this new initiative fix things, or make it worse?
And the timing is uncanny. Just when the Department of Justice is trying to push Google to potentially sell Chrome, and split Android from the company, suddenly the Linux Foundation declares its support for Chromium browsers? What are the odds of that happening? Is there something happening behind the scenes?
The Linux Foundation will manage the fund of the Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers, and handle things transparently with open governance and community-driven development. Google says that it is "committed to being the responsible steward of the Chromium project and to the massive investment necessary to keep Chromium working well for the entire web industry."
On the other hand, we do have to wonder what would happen if Google is ever forced to sell Chrome. It is possible that the Linux Foundation could take over the development of Chromium from Google, or at least oversee the project.
Some users claim all this could be a PR move by Google in the antitrust case, and that this could help it retain Chrome. Others are saying this could be a big loss for Mozilla. Do you remember Servo? It is an open source browser engine that was created by Mozilla, but the Mozilla Corporation laid off its developers in 2020. The Linux Foundation took over the governance of Servo, and now it supports Chromium. I guess we have come full circle.
What do you think about all this?
Good news, the 13 last remaining Firefox users are now up in arms. Haha! xD
They can’t pull their head from the sand accept reality that Chromium/Blink is the only viable rendering engine. Gecko is a relic that is dragging everything backwards, the less web developers support it, the better. In fact, it should be better if they ban it if they detect it so anyone using Firefox or a fork can’t even view the website unless they use a Blink-powered browser or something else, like WebKit or something entirely different.
Librewolf, Firefox, Fennec etc. is not popular so lets ban it. I find your pro-censorship/pro-cancel culture views disturbing.
Linux Foundation should support Palemoon browser. ?
The one thing I find Chromium doesn’t handle well at all is bookmark management (at least IMO!). And one small thing that Chromium hasn’t fixed for years, and that keeps me on Firefox, is that I can’t simply paste bookmarks into Chromium as I can Firefox. If I have 10 URLs, copy, paste, they’re in Firefox. If I have 10 URLs, they do not go into Chromium nearly as simply.
You are avoiding a part of the big picture.
Alphabet, or Google if you insists, is still likely to be ordered to divest Chrome & control of Chromium.
Lots of “parties”, small and large, from appdevs to gamestudios, through chromium based browsers to the big heavies, want to avoid the disruption since they have a lot of code and work tied into using that.
So what is happening? A group is being put together that can take over as the steward of Chromium/chrome, specially since none of the big players trust each other to hold it nor do the many companies that embed chromium (almost anything that uses web content, short of the apple garden) trust the big ones.
They have basically come to the mutial understanding that chromium is the defacto web standard and default toolkit, so they are sort of pulling a ‘lets make the browser equivalent of the jpeg group, but without all the nasty patents and licensing’ because of the overlap of interests – being in the same boat: SOL if chromium was pulled/abandoned/locked away in proprietary interests.
Put a bit more plainly, to in effect have some sort of stability and minimal rocking of the boat if the court decides to go through with it.
Mozilla/firefox OBVIOUSLY does not fit in that picture. It is so far from it being a replacement for the many chromium uses that it is not even considered. Even if it had “parity” with chromium, there is mountains of code in tens if not hundreds of thousands of projects that hypothetically would have to be rewritten for that. Not happening if a simpler, shorter, faster, cheaper alternative is around… like, dunno, putting the chromium project in the hands of others that have similar interests… and carrying on as usual with no or little extra effort.
Some people have hard times to understand that Chromium is better than Gecko, in fact, the only positive things about Gecko is UI customization and some people would say “containers”, but if people stopped thinking about silly stuff, they would understand how Chromium has made things better than Mozilla.
For example, Mozilla has always done and awkward job when it comes to implement features, for example, Profiles support in Chromium has always been okay sharing resources and keeping things clean, while in Firefox each profile is loaded as a new instance of the browser multiplying the resource usage.
But if people just check Chrome status page, they would understand the many things Chromes adds, I am talking about APIs web devs can use and they are great additions, while Mozilla can barely keep up with existing standards like when they took months to bring :has() support.
Or compare something like using Document picture-in-picture which is used in Tiktok vs not having document-pip, while not a web standard, it gives something to Chromium users Gecko can’t have unless they add it, and even if Mozilla is slowly improving something like adding tab groups, but Chromium already had all the advantage that there is synchronization between mobile and desktop, so for Mozilla to reach that parity is going to take a while.
But people forget Mozilla uses a lot of Chromium implementations, regex, widevine, webextensions, safe browsing… so Chromium has shaped things around even indirectly, so it is crazy how people get triggered but pretend Mozilla has been 100% true independent alternative.
But it is easy to see the weird contradictions when people praise Firefox as ‘private’, yet, they never bothered with a native Adblocker, their excuses are that there are extensions and devs, and since mobile can use extensions then everything is fine, but that’s mediocre mentality, because Firefox mobile is not great, and they just don’t want to hire people who will deal with web compat for having an adblocker until they can do what Brave does, add features until 99.9% of uBlock lists work, currently Brave is missing some rule support, few important rules, but Brave is a smaller company than Mozilla, and Mozilla gets millions from google for their search deal, making it a dumb excuse not to implement a native adblocker only because extensions exist, that’s just not wanting to do the job and just release the Tracking Protection Lists which is limited.
Not just Brave, I was testing Vivaldi’s adblocker yesterday, and now it finally got ABP parity minus the Procedural Cosmetic Filters, but ABP Snippets can do the job, since it has “hide if contains” and stuff like that, so you can hide just the same as a Procedural Filtering.
Of course, I doubt Vivaldi developers understand adblocking at the rules level, and want to hire someone that can make compatibility happen.
Vivaldi based their Adblocker on ABP, which is the problem since less features and less resources/scriptlets than uBlock, but it works if done right
Brave’s adblocker is just better made and more native with rust language, but that can cause some limitations in some ways. But for example, Brave for using uBlock resources can add extension functionality that modify web content natively, easily get userscripts and without or too much modification get SponsorBlock, ReturnDislikeButton without the need of an extension (yes, even on Android).
Desktop already supports Developer mode to easily add Scriptlets too, so eventually mobile will get that feature so no need for long Adblock rules to add SponsorBlock or ReturnDislikeButton in Youtube, or twitch with FFZ and BTTV (not supported in mobile but TwitchTheaterTV works fine with both scriptlets/userscripts), and then with this power of injecting any JS people want and not being limited to be ABP dependant like Vivaldi, is the reason why Brave is the best browser today.
But the real question is how small small companies like Vivaldi and Brave can do it, but not Firefox? they just don’t care and think extensions, which can cause performance issues are the best alternative, while getting millions for doing nothing.
So yes, In the end, it is better if Linux people start realizing using Firefox as default is not the best future, not even Brave, whose started as a Gecko fork and whose CEO worked with Mozilla for so many years decided to stick with it, and he still doesn’t even regret it.
I currently use (not much, because I use Windows and like Windows) RefreshOS which has Brave as default, and there is also Biglinux, so few ones have done some difference and not the usual Firefox everywhere, which I know works better, so I hope this support brings better things for Linux users (not me, but I have sympathy for people who chose to go away from Windows)
What is it with Brave fanboys and text walls?
Very disappointed in the Linux Foundation. They are picking the wrong side. This is not the way to go.
They are being rational and realistic. Firefox is dead and outdated, it only gets worse with time.
I’m annoyed that Linux Mint, which I use ships with Firefox rather than Brave, Yandex, Vivaldi, Opera or something more advanced. Every time I install Linux Mint, the first thing I do is open Synaptic Package Manager and mark everything Firefox-related for Complete Removal, I don’t even want to start the browser as to not taint my SSD with it. It disgusts me so. And to think I used to love Firefox between 2007 and 2010, before Chrome came about. Firefox was slow back then, bloated, but it was customizable and beautiful. Now it’s still bloated, slow, less customizable and ugly and they change the UI every year for good measure, to trick some senile users that the browser is changing when it’s in fact the same outdated garbage with a new paint on top, uglier and less functional than the previous one. Now the tabs and other elements are greatly oversized and take up more space than needed. On small screens it doesn’t automatically resize to be smaller so people can see more of the webpage. If they were smart, which they aren’t they would make their UI auto-scale and allow users to manually scale it too. If you have 1366×768 screen, the UI should scale to x0.7 of the size or something like that and if you have a 1920×1080 screen, the UI should scale to x1.2 or something and then be able to manually set it up however you want.
But they are too incompetent and can’t even think of this. They still have Downloads and History either in a sidebar or a separate window. When they clearly copy everything Chrome does, they still can’t copy it so History and Downloads are opened in separate tabs rather than separate windows. Either they are too lazy and incompetent, or their browser is so outdated code-wise that they can’t even do it.
Overall a good move by The Linux Foundation, I commend it. My main browser on Android and Linux PC is Brave and I wish it was the default for fresh Linux Mint installs. Blink/Chromium is the future and the only capable and supported rendering engine, Gecko is a relic from the past that the sooner it dies, the better. Under the current management, Firefox has been a disgrace for over 10 years, it’s better to kill it to save what little dignity it still has left.
Mister funnybunny here calling Firefox dead and outdated and then goes on saying how he uses Linux Mint…
Unavoidable fact that should be written with letters of gold:
Linux + Chromium = the winner team, everything works like a charm.
Absolutely priceless truth.
Google won.
Another nail in Firefox’s coffin.
For there to be freedom on the internet, Google must disappear.
Even so, I’ll keep using Firefox. I’ll go down with it. ?
Reading the headline, it initially sounded good. Perhaps Google being aware that they are in violation of antitrust and there being a very real possibility they may be forced to split Chrome/Chromium off from the parent company.
However, the fact that Google, Meta and Microsoft are members of the group (three publicly-traded companies that can never be trusted), but Brave, Vivaldi and DuckDuckGo are not, makes me suspicious. It will be interesting to hear what those three companies and Mozilla have to say about this move.
I would never adopt Chromium lookalike browser.
Like Firefox? Which has been copying everything Chromium does since 2010. What will you be using then? Lynx?
Ashwin, for real now… Of course they are looking at other options, given that Firefox is below 3% overall market share by now. As a web admin in the year 2025, what would be my incentive to test my website against Firefox? Seems like a waste of time and resources based on its user count, as a result testing for it is done less and less, a vicious cycle. Chromium is open source and it seems inevitable to me that Linux distros will ship it as default by the end of the decade. This is in preparation for this.
Chromium could be transferred to either the Linux Foundation or some other foundation if Google is forced to give it away, which would be good for us users because then Chromium may not be quiteas tied to Google anymore as it was before. However, they will be fighting very hard to keep it, so personally, I’ll only believe in this when I see it. I think Chromium will remain under Google’s influence for now.
Another comment mentioned Manifest V3 lol, you know, only a small techie bubble that never goes outside to touch grass, ever thought that Manifest V3 would have had a major impact on market share. Most people out there don’t care about adblocking and even for those who do, Manifest V3 is still… fine? Acceptable? Workable? Don’t know how to say it but, adblocking didn’t become abysmal because of it for most people, so very little incentive to switch or really do anything there.
I wonder what’s with your obsession with Firefox and your shilling of Brave, Iron Heart. Did Firefox kill your dog or something? Did Brave raise it from the dead?
“Firefox!” “Firefox!” “Firefox!” “Firefox!” lmao rent free
>As a web admin
lol you wish brave soiboy
Ah, it’s good to see that I still have my fans here who were of course absolutely expecting me to comment under news like this. But guess what, total mentions of Brave in my comment: = 0 (zero), total mentions of Brave in the replies of my fans = 3 (three). So far. So much for rent free.
@Unknown user, if it is indeed true that I hate Firefox, I seem to be in good company, according on this news, the Linux Foundation hates it too.
I think we already have several browsers that can run on Linux based on Chromium. How many bottom feeder browsers do we need? It’s sort of like the hundreds of Linux distributions that you can install. Has more of them actually helped Linux desktop or hurt with all the fragmentation.
I am all for new ideas in web browsers and Chromium is a good base to start from. But I am skeptical about the need for even more web browsers.
Yes indeed; choice is a terrible thing, isn’t it. /s
Well, since Windows is slowly and surely going to Hell, it makes sense for the ad-browser to try and linger it’s way into Linux. Rather sooner than later. Google has endless bribe money, that’s what this is all about. Not even hardcore Linux developers and maintainers have the willpower to resist mansions with golden toilets. It worked for a while for woke-Firefox, so why not go straight for the throat and target Linux instead? Won’t take long until we start to see announcements from various distros about how Chromium browsers are best for all of us, safety-wise, and how adblocking is not important at all. Everyone has a price for going from a hero to whore. The Linux Foundation just announced theirs. Despicable.
Why do you think Firefox is “woke.” Please don’t tell me it’s because its former CEO stepped down after making a *2008* contribution to California Prop. 8, which reversed same-sex marriage.
Holding a grudge for almost 20 years over the resignation of a CEO who couldn’t care less about you is insane. Will you hold a grudge for another 20 years because Mozilla let Mitchell Baker go as CEO?
@Tim Garner
Go ask Mitchell Baker, she’ll be in one of her mansions sitting on her golden toilet.
Spot on.
This right here.
I use Firefox because it’s the only stable browser that supports extensions on Android. Used to use Brave but along the time the crypto stuff etc became annoying.
Your words must be carved on stone