https://trisquel.info/en/forum/web-browsers-0

I have recently reached the conclusion that there are no good web browsers, by definition. Some web browsers are a little worse than others in that they are more freedom- or privacy-hostile, but all of them are bad, because by definition a web browser browses the web, and in order to do this, they have to implement web standards, and in doing so they become bad.

A web standard is a feature that has been implemented in Chrome, adopted by websites optimizing for Chrome, implemented by the other major web browsers in order to be able to browse those websites, and finally declared a standard because it has been implemented by the major web browsers.

Chromium is the reference implementation of a web browser. Normal standards can be reimplemented by other vendors, but web standards are different.[1] They proliferate at at approximately the same rate as Chromium features, so in order to implement a web browser a vendor must either use Chromium as a base, or reimplement Chromium's features and keep up with Chromium development, which in practice no one has been able to do. There some complete web browsers based on Chromium, some mostly-complete web browsers based on Firefox (which almost keeps up with Chromium development), and many other incomplete web browsers based on Webkit or written from scratch, which are not complete web browsers because they cannot completely browse the web.

Chromium is free software, so it can be modified to remove some of its antifeatures, like DRM and spyware. Ungoogled Chromium does a pretty good job at this. However, DRM is a web standard, so removing it makes the result no longer a web browser, and in general a downstream project cannot stray too far from Chromium and still be able to browse most of the web.

Firefox is also free software, so it can be modified to remove its antideatures, like DRM and spyware and trademark restrictions. However, the further a downstream strays from Chromium than Firefox already has, the less of a web browser it is.

It's possible to write a program from scratch or based on Webkit that can browse some websites, but it will be too different from Chromium to browse much of the web and therefore be not much of a web browser.

WebBundles[2][3] are a new Chromium feature threatening to become a web standard. There are some browser addons and partial web browsers that break web standards in the interest of user freedom and/or privacy, often by blocking certain non-free or privacy-hostile scripts or requests within web pages. If I understand correctly, a WebBundle dumps everything into a single .wbn file which the browser would load all at once, breaking addons like NoScript and uBlock Origin, as well as browsers with built-in adblocking or tracker-blocking like Brave (trash that no one should use, only mentioned because it's a relevant example) and Eolie, which rely on the ability to allow or block requests from particular domains. This is just the latest in a long series of "features" which make users of the web less free or private.

It is well-recognized in this community that user freedom can be restricted by copyright law or the witholding of source code. The GPL was designed to address these two threats to user freedom. The GPLv2, however, was vulnerable to another threat to user freedom: Tivoization, where the software can be modifed, but modified versions are not useful because they cannot be used with the needed hardware. The GPLv3 patched this vulnerability, but I believe there are other threats that have not received enough attention. One that comes to mind is client-side software that can be freely modified, but of which modified versions are not useful without non-free server-side software. The problem with the web is that although Chromium can be modified or reimplemented with modifications, the result is only useful insofar as it conforms to Chromium's feature set.

I think that attempts to create freedom- and privacy-respecting browsers like Ungoogled Chromium, Icecat, Abrowser, and Iceweasel-UPX, though they are valuable temporary mitigations to some of the problems with the modern web, are trying to solve the problem in the wrong place. The problem is not with web browsers, but with the web. If we want to have non-bad web browsers, it is not enough to fork or create an alternative web browser. We need to fork or create an alternative to the web. A fork might be some subset of HTML, with an emphasis on semantic elements that can be handled appropriately by the browser rather than relying on client-side scripting. An alternative might be something like Gemini[4] for document exchange combined with promoting desktop clients over webapps* for more advanced functionality. I don't know, I'm still thinking this through. There will need to be some strategic compromise between what is good and what websites can be persuaded to adopt that is less bad than what they were doing before. But I am pretty convinced at this point that users of web browsers cannot have real freedom while the web itself evolves according to the whims of Google, and while browsers have to race to keep up with what an advertising company decides the web should look like.

*And that means rejecting Electron too, which extends Google's influence over the web into the desktop as well.