Um actually… Opera and Edge weren’t always based on chromium!
Chrome was not always based on chromeium. Chrome was based on Apple WebKit until 2013 when they forked WebKit and made the Blink engine.
Chromium was still the base before the WebKit/Blink fork. Chrome and Chromium were released simultaneously in 2008.
Chromium has always existed. Originally it was wrapping web kit and later they forked web kit into blink and diverged from Web kit. Chromium is a level above the engine.
Wha- hold up… I’m not sure I understand…
Chrome was based on WebKit?
I’m not aware about the old stuff as much so if someone could fill me in…
WebKit is a rendering engine which is one of the major components of a web browser. Chrome/Chromium was released in 2008 using a modified version of WebKit as its rendering engine. Eventually in 2013 they created a fork of WebKit called Blink, which is the current rendering engine for Chrome/Chromium.
In more history, WebKit is a fork of KHTML. That’s the reason why WebKit itself is open source.
Apparently there hasn’t been active maintenance since 2016 though and it’s officially dead since this year. RIP
Remember Konqueror? That’s KDE’s web browser, which still uses KHTML. I should try it out again and see how it’s held up.
I’m not sure, but didn’t Konqueror switch to qtwebkit at some point? Or was that a different qt-based browser?
I think thats falkon
Pre-Chromium Edge wasn’t even that bad. Sure, the engine had its issues and there was probably a bit of Edge-specific JS on some websites, but I’m sure they would’ve eventually got there.
But seeing that even Microsoft abandoned making their own browser engine, it goes to show how complex it is to make one nowadays and with new web APIs/features coming out every few weeks it feels like, it’s almost impossible to keep up.
But seeing that even Microsoft abandoned making their own browser engine, it goes to show how complex it is to make one nowadays and with new web APIs/features coming out every few weeks it feels like, it’s almost impossible to keep up.
No, Microsoft is just historically bad at making browsers. It was not until Internet Explorer 7 that they finally implemented HTML 4 and CSS 2 without major glaring bugs.
Microsoft was never bad at making browsers, their issue is that they tied browser release to Windows release cycle. IE6 was the best and the most compatible browser on the market in its release date. But it didn’t get a single update during its long life. 5 years old Chrome is completely useless today even if it was a pinnacle back then.
Sure, but Windows Update was already part of the OS and web users were a customer segment that had an Internet connection. They could have pushed patches and bug fixes.
That’s not Microsoft philosophy. Microsoft has strong backwards compatibility. If they would change how border box is rendered on the screen, that would break a lot of apps which use IE engine as a web view. Thus they only push security updates, but ensure that rendering stays the same within one Windows version.
Most compatible to what, itself?
To existing web standards at the time.
Opera was the shit back in the early days. It could pretend to be any other browser.
Can’t you do that with any browser by changing the user agent?
Yeah:
Sent from Internet Explorer 9
I’m not sure how long you’ve been able to change the user agent in config pages tbh, I just remember Opera had it as an option in the GUI settings and even the right click menu.
I have an installer for Opera 12.18, the last one to use their Presto engine. Every once in a while I test it out to see how it has aged.
It’s not pretty haha. It barely works.
I miss pre chromium Opera so much lol, lot of nostalgia
My favourite browser, abandoned it when they went chromium. RIP in peace Opera.
Always weren’t been
Always been’t
But they are now…
Right but that meme says ‘always has been’.
For the majority of current users, that’s the point. For them it always has been.
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Firefox with add-ons. Especially, but not only, Ublock Origin.
NoScript 🤌🏻
I love it in theory… but it just broke so many websites I needed to use. And not always in obvious ways.
uBlock does this occasionally as well. Still worth it.
UBlock is much more reliable than no script in my experience. It’s also usually obvious when it breaks; no script sometimes isn’t obvious until you hit submit and notice none of what you typed actually got sent.
Then just put those sites on your trust list?
You can go through all the sites the initial HTTP request calls out to and decide which ones get a pass. This is how I ensure sites like gstatic, googletagmanager, etc. don’t collect data even though the rest of the site works.
If that’s too much, just open the flood gates for that site and trust everything there. At least it isn’t just sending all your data out by DEFAULT.
That still breaks a lot of sites. For example, Wikipedia gets broken if you click any link and then navigate back. NoScript is just crap. If you want to actually block scripts for something without breaking everything else, use DevTools.
You can use Wikiless, an alternative frontend for Wikipedia which doesn’t have JavaScript, and LibRedirect.
I call bs. I am not experiencing that on mobile or desktop this behavior you’re describing. NoScript does not break Wikipedia.
It does it on my phone. 100% repeatable.
Yeah these days literally every website uses JavaScript in some format as modern reactive design is easier to do if you can execute client side code. Blocking JavaScript is a sledgehammer solution to the problem.
Same here. I used NoScript in the past and remembering whitelisting way too often so dumped it in the end. Now I just use uBlock with I think some built-in javascript block of known bad hosts.
You can use Ublock Origin in advanced mode, which allows you to block, blacklist/whitelist scripts.
uBlock Origin can act as adblocker plus NoScript combined if you enable advanced mode.
So you mean Librewolf
IMO any of the forks are inherently weaker than the main and there’s nothing stopping you from making Firefox work exactly like whichever flavor of fork you prefer, but with security updates the day they come out.
I also just like to support Mozilla where I can. They’re not perfect, but they’re doing a lot more good for the internet than Google are.
Add-ons are a pretty huge security risk, though. Someone was just posting an article about how tempting it is to sell out with your extension, and how many offers you actually get.
And I’ve already been burned once, and it’s not pretty. Also nothing you can do against this.
The best solution is actually not Firefox, but Mullvad. No need for extensions, based on Tor Browser and can be bundled with a VPN that’s full of other people using the same browser - so you have exactly the same fingerprint, and they can’t tell you apart. Not by extensions, not by IP.
Based on his history it seems unlikely that gorhill, the creator of uBlock Origin would sell out.
And if something did change, there would be enough news about it to notify you. (Like the extension Avast bought a while ago)Really? The whole story about uBlock and uBlock Origin is shady AF.
Which is why I think he won’t ever risk it again.
Really?
It’s pretty shitty to lump uBlock Origin in with those other, shittier ad blockers blindly. After all, anyone who knew the first thing about ad blockers even back then knew that there were plenty of bad ones around but that uBO wasn’t one of them.
How about crowdfunding for adblockers? Now THAT is something I’d gladly pay money for.
This is why I’ve stuck with firefox through thick and thin
Been using FF for about 2 decades now and I have never seen a single good reason to switch.
Ditto. As much as people pretend Firefox is niche, it is the only browser with lineage back to the start of the web.
Truly. I don’t get this new “switch to Firefox!!” hype, are the people writing this very young, or am I missing something? I’ve been using Firefox since beta, I’ve never seen a reason to switch since it’s always been the superior browser, why have people been running anything else in the first place?
I made the switch to Lemmy. Time to do the same with Firefox I guess.
If they ever fuck up big time I’ll go with the next obscure option.
What else is there that is not Chromium/Webkit based?
Now that KHTML is dead, not very much at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines
The SerenityOS browser! /s kinda
If a dedicated team wanted to work on it, there is the Servo engine which is currently developed by The Linux Foundation but is apparently entirely volunteer driven.
I’m not smart enough to do this kinda shit, but I’m sure there are plenty of others who would gladly work on it to make it bigger than it already is. You could then make your own browser based on that engine. Sure it would take years if not closer to over a decade, but the payoff for privacy and free web would be enough to make me spend all that time doing it.
NetSurf
Brave, Vivaldi, Edge and other chromium browsers are forks of the main chromium project. They can decide whether to include or exclude features from mainstream chromium.
As far as I know, Brave and Vivaldi will keep Manifest V2 extension support and said that they will not ship WEI (Web Environment Integrity).
Discord uses a modified version of electron, and it’s also probably an outdated fork as well, although I am not sure about that.
Steam, in the other hand, uses CEF, which they use as a way to render it’s interface and as a replacement of VGUI (a good example of this is the steam game overlay), I don’t know if they will ship WEI if it ever releases in chromium as there isn’t a statement from Valve yet.
Sources:
- ARSTechnica, Chrome’s “Manifest V3” plan to limit ad-blocking extensions is delayed, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/chrome-delays-plan-to-limit-ad-blockers-new-timeline-coming-in-march/
- GHacks, Brave confirms it will support Manifest V2 extensions like uBlock Origin even after Chrome drops them, https://www.ghacks.net/2022/09/29/brave-browser-manifest-v2-extensions-after-v3-update/
- Valve Developer Community Wiki, Chromium Embedded Framework, https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
- Github, Discord’s Electron Fork, https://github.com/discord/electron
If I missed something, please tell me!
Brave has an entire contingent of the FOSS community up in arms. They claim that it is doing more data harvesting than Alphabet, and the EULA prevents anyone from finding out what they are doing with all that data scraping.
I don’t have a dog in the fight, other than as a windows user I would like to see FOSS adopted as quickly as possible since they have predicted all this shit for the last 30 years at least.
ETA: I know basically nothing about Vivaldi, though having used it, it seems to function as lightweight as chromium did back in the day. I have no comments on Edge.
I mean, brave is an Ad company, I think they’re just using an ad blocker to stop other ad services other than their own from competing
Gosh, the more I hear about Brave the worse it gets…
Vivaldi is filled with bloat and feature creep to the brim now. They abandoned that “lightweight” philosophy ages ago.
Only if you want it (yes you still need to download a larger package).
Vivaldi is created by the former creator of Opera, with sort of the same goals it used to have: care for the power user. They are up for adding any customization and power user tool if people want it. It has never tried to be as lightweight as possible. Instead, it should be one of the most customizable and feature rich browsers out there.
It’s great, as I can add and remove features so it’s tailored to me.
Just to add the missing comment about Edge - MS is turning into the Microsoft version of Chrome. They removed Google’s ad bs and replaced it with their own ad and monetization bs.
Sources in a comment?! Even more proof lemmy is superior over reddit. Thanks fa those man, more people need to do shit like that
they will not ship WEI
I don’t really understand how this could work.
The whole outcry around WEI is that most of the web wouldn’t work if you didn’t have a browser that supported it.
Not shipping WEI would seem tantamount to just discontinuing.
@DogMuffins @amycatgirl, it is not so simple, there are a huge number of third-party pages that also depend on certain Google services, directly or indirectly. This is what happens when you depend on sponsors, because with this you lose your freedom of decision, especially if you make a pact with the devil, sorry, Google.
Mozilla has already suffered this in its own flesh, becoming a Google mascot from an independent platform, even with Google devs working on Firefox.
Discord’s electron still hasn’t received the patch for spectre/meltdown mitigation in the browser, I doubt they will ever have to deal with manifest V3 or WEI.
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I don’t think that Steam would consume less resources if it wasn’t a web app. Most of the resources usage there comes from crap loads of high quality images. You can’t have hundreds of images in a single window without eating loads of RAM.
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What do you mean there are no active windows? You can only have no active windows if the app is closed. If you don’t see it on the screen, it doesn’t mean there are no windows or related services running in the background. If you want to free up memory, shut the app down.
Also part of image quality is its resolution. And image resolution has grown a lot ib the last 10-15 years. Rendered images also went from 8 bit and 256 colours byte arrays to 32 bit byte arrays (already 4x bigger) plus colour correction and all kinds of other meta data stored in memory.
And then you should keep in mind that Steam main storefront page has hundreds if not thousands images in one place. And they are pre-rendered and cached in memory so that you have nice and smooth experience. People seriously underestimate how many resources are consumed by media. As a software developer I can tell you that you can easily have a few megabytes of code and then hundreds of megabytes of COMPRESSED images, fonts and sounds for a small app. Unpack everything into memory and no wonder modern mobile phones need 16+ gigs of RAM.
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Do you even understand what I’m talking about?
Bullshit. Steam works well when CEF isn’t working right, like no internet connection. Images are still loaded. It’s 100% thier storefront.
Wut?
Reading comprehension level: 0
Eh, after all, they are all chromium under the hood. So I’d expect similar cpu/ram usage from them.
Problem is that someone will have to keep maintain it all. We will see how it will pan out in the end.
Vivaldi is a great browser
Google accounts for some 80%+ of Mozilla’s revenue. Firefox struck a different kind of deal with the devil than chromium browsers, but Google is the one pulling the strings.
Bit of a weird thought, but I wonder also if they see Mozilla as a sort of controlled opposition too? As in, keep Firefox around so they don’t get in trouble over antitrust or something like that?
Mozilla.org is the corpse of Netscape that Google keeps animated so that it looks like they have competition when they really don’t.
The existence of Firefox is something they can point to to say they’re not a monopoly. The fact that 80% of the revenue Firefox receives is from Google means that Google effectively controls them. Mozilla has to weigh every decision against the risk that it will cause Google to withdraw their funding. That severely restricts the choices they’re willing to consider.
Firefox is only 5% of browsers, so it really doesn’t matter to Google if that 5% of users considers using a different search engine. Because of the Firefox user base, many of them will have already switched search engines, and because Google is such a dominant player, many others would switch back to Google if the browser used a different default. So, maybe 10% of that 5% would permanently switch search engines if Google stopped paying. Is that really worth billions per year? Probably not. But, pretending like you have competitors in the browser space and using that to push back on antitrust, that’s definitely worth billions per year.
Could you expand on this
Google pays Mozilla in exchange for google being Firefox’s default search engine
I see that as an okay compromise. Anyone who cares will also know how to change it easily.
A lot of people don’t bother with changing defaults and corpos like Google, Microsoft, and the likes are well aware of this which is why Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars per year to be the default search engine.
I understand the compromise at the surface level but the implications just result in Google gaining more power and data, making it harder for “alternatives” to replace it over time which puts us all in an a bad situation when they decide to pull shit like WEI.
That’s a good point, though I still think the average person is already entrenched in Google. Being the default on an alternative browser isn’t really going to make the difference to the average, uncaring individual.
In a perfect world it wouldn’t be necessary but on the bright side Google search is already doing enough itself to make the average person want to try something else.
Do you have any examples of how google is pulling the strings at Mozilla ?
For an example, Mozilla being forced to use Google Location Services as default even though Mozilla has its own. I am also a Firefox user but it always makes me wonder what other TnCs forced on Mozilla as part of the search deal.
go to about:config and type “google”
For default search.
I’m sure you’re aware Firefox isn’t in the search market. They are in the browser market and need to fund browser development. They’ve used Yahoo in the past and will go with whatever deal gives the best value. They could go with Bing if they wanted.
Funding from them does not mean control, and your insinuation is misleading and false.
Sshhhhhh you’ll destroy the narrative!
What narrative? Firefox is the only browser google doesn’t fully control. It’s the only choice if you don’t support the google monopoly.
Well, there’s Safari but that’s for apple only, and technically they don’t really control chromium-based browsers - they’d have to do yet another cycle of EEE to actually kill of competition. And firefox can survive without google for a while by downsizing massively and focusing on chinese market as they still have that baidu deal AFAIK.
But overall, yes, Google has in fact cemented themselves as the middlemen for all things internet, on both mobile and desktop.
This feels weird to say… I really think Microsoft should’ve stuck with trident / edgehtml.
Why? Because you liked the greater browser diversity or because you think it made a better browser?
Diversity. MS had made great strides with EdgeHTML, but it was still pretty bad
But at least opening the browser didn’t take all my ram.
And also at the very least you had another option. Which, in my opinion, wasn’t that bad, at least it could’ve been if they just gave up on Bing and MSN.
No way, they can’t give up on bing. They do that and all we have is Google for searches. We need the competition. For MSN, it’s all about content now, I kinda like that branding… It makes it easier to see that I don’t want to see it.
Microsoft could host their on SearXNG instance. /s
As a web developer, EdgeHTML was the source of so many bugs, including a few that were regressions, and it didn’t seem like Microsoft dedicated enough resources to the Edge project.
Wait STEAM AND DISCORD ARE CHROMIUM?
Yep, just like slack, spotify, and anything else looking fancy while wasting few gigs of ram to just open. They’re built on electron, which is practically chrome without tabs.
I wish they could bring back mozilla prism. Like all this electron web app shit is popular, so we don’t we use the faster and more efficient browser engine and use gecko!
Speaking of Mozilla, the project they dropped and fired all of their employees working on it all while giving CEO a million dollar raise, the same one that provided most of the performance improvements in the Quantum update, Servo is targetting being an embedded solution. https://floss.social/@servo/110780173168763670
Nice, I didn’t know Servo was still being developed!
This whole Chromium fiasco is partially Mozilla’s fault, they let Google grab the embedded browser monopoly by making Firefox hard to componentize and letting Electron take all the market share. No competition.
Do I still use chromium when I visit the steam website via firefox?
No, its the steam app that runs on Chromium.
Visual studio code is chromium.
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Yeah, just wrappers. Steam wasn’t untill fairly recently, but they were slowly switching to it for some time.
So that’s why it runs worse now.
It all makes sense
Not a good idea if Google be pulling some shit
Yeah, it’s weird for them to rely on Google considering how hard Valve has worked to make Steam independent from MS.
Chromium isn’t technically Google
Still serves googles goal of control over the internet.
It’s maintained by Google, which is pretty much the same thing - in the end, they get to decide what features get implemented and what doesn’t make the cut. Sure we can fork it, and we can make our own, but in the end as long as their code is the main base, they have a lot of control over all the different forks, as usually the forks will have to keep rebasing their code off of new updates to stay as secure and up to date as possible.
It is, good luck hard forking such a huge codebase.
I mean what would stop a company from doing that? I get why they don’t, because a lot of changes and fixes get implemented into the code from various companies/individuals, but if you had enough manpower and money, it could be done.
Exaclly money and manpower. Noone is going to do it.
I don’t think it’s too weird. So many apps today are just Chromium wrappers. It’s just easier to use a premade base, plus you don’t have to develop the web and desktop version independently, they can literally be the same code.
While that’s fairly typical and good practice in dev circles, we’re talking about a company that’s single handedly elevated an entire OS to prevent a big company taking too much power. I think the key here is they don’t really compete with Google.
Anything that uses the electron framework uses chromium.
Although in the case of steam they are using the Chromium Embedded Framework(CEF) to embed the steam store into their interface, as well as to power the steam overlays browser.
The worst part is, the CEF really is the only way to implement browsers inside other interfaces. OBS uses it too for it’s browser source. There really isn’t any alternatives - if only FF could create it’s own Firefox Embedded Framework to compete, but that’s probably not in the cards due to costs. Mozilla is a not for profit relying on donations and grants.
And electron is a method for creating desktop app interfaces using website code, it’s used for the interfaces of Discord, slack, teams, Streamlabs (yeah they ripped out the OBS Qt interface and replaced it with electron), and sooo many other modern applications that it’s hard to make track of. And it uses essentially the same thing as CEF at its heart.
Basically any website can be wrapped in an electron wrapper to produce a standalone desktop app.
Yeah, but Google putting their fuckery in it is the issue.
Mozilla doesn’t make it as easy to use the Firefox / Gecko engine in other projects, which doesn’t help for adoption.
I’m way out of the loop, but is the issue that they actively make it difficult to use the rendering engine or is it that the cost to modularize it isn’t worth the payoff to Firefox itself? A subtle but important distinction IMO. I always felt it was the second, but maybe I was being dense?
Back in the days it was possible to use Firefox engine to create apps. It was called XUL. Heck, Firefox itself was just a XUL app! But then they decided it wasn’t worth it for whatever reason and now their engine is tightly integrated.
I believe it might be still possible with UXP - a hard fork made for Pale Moon project.
Pale Moon is based on a derivative of the Gecko rendering engine (Goanna) and builds on a hard fork of the Mozilla code (mozilla-central) called UXP, a XUL-focused application platform that provides the underpinnings of several XUL applications including Pale Moon. This means that the core rendering functions for Pale Moon may differ from Firefox (and other browsers) and websites may display slightly different in this browser.
They don’t try to make it difficult, but they make code changes that make it clear they have no concern for anyone who might be trying to use the engine anywhere other than in a retail build of Firefox, without providing things like deprecation warnings or upgrade paths.
Firefox is kept alive by Google default search money AFAIK otherwise why don’t they sue google for showing different search results page in firefox
It’s sad. Google basically owns the internet
I don’t believe this has been the case for years?
It’s still the case, at least for Firefox on Android
They do have an extension that forces the new search results page, but I’ve noticed it freezes the browser if I tap on an image result, so I have it disabled.
I completely forgot I had added that extension (back when Google actually looked ugly on Firefox on Android without it) just disabled and oh my god not only does it not freeze it actually feels usable again (I hate the weird AI suggested tabs at the top in the chromium UI).
Ah yeah, seems not in every country! Had to go through 2017 bloomberg articles to find out lol
wait, the steam browser is chromium? no way
Basically every in app browser is.
Chromium/Electron is just super easy to integrate. Afaik Mozilla wanted to make Firefox more easily embedable as well, but that project was killed.
Closest these days is an extension for Firefox that enable progressive web apps.
Was IE for the longest time
Not only the browser. The whole app was built with CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
It used to be only the browser/store. Now it’s the whole app.
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I just wish Mozilla didn’t just tread Gecko as part of Firefox, the few who tried developing on it came to the conclusion that it’s not sustainable if the engines developer doesn’t give a fuck about you! :/
Damn, that sounds like a real missed opportunity. Hopefully they come around on that one.
Well, they always did it like that and basically cut all their bigger projects in the massive layoff so I wish they did too but I doubt it :/
Laughts in LibreWolf
Techically an FF fork !
Firefox or Netscape? I only ask since Firefox has its own roots in Netscape, and I understood that the Scape apps were ported from Netscape, not Firefox. Libre was a Scape app a decade ago.
Totally firefox , librewolf is rather a hardened firefox , with few features we can tweak in FF already !
Firefox, it’s only been around for a few years. It works as a soft fork where they pull in all the upstream releases after hardening their privacy
This is the way
It gets worse. All Electron applications are Chromium, too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if my electric toothbrush is somehow running chromium
How much RAM you got on that toothbrush!?
Can it run Crysis?
Only gamers get that joke
Chromium is everywhere…
Firefox user since before it was called Firefox.
Mozilla browser was great.
Netscape was amazing
I remember using Netscape to search the web with Altavista way back in the day.
Firebird gang
There’s a Phoenix metaphor here somewhere
Safari still uses the WebKit engine… right?
Google Chrome used to use WebKit before switching to their own weird engine that a whole bunch of other browsers now use.
When Google forked from WebKit to create Blink, they had genuine reasons for it.
Apple was stalling any progress of web by stalling new features in WebKit. They wanted to push their native apps and get big cut from developers’ money.
Google had to fork and progress web dev further.
And unfortunately for us, Google folks are greedy assholes who stop at nothing to own everything web even if they have to bend everything.
WEI is a perfect example.
I never expected to fall down a rabbit hole.
google uses blink which is forked from WebKit
@notenoughbutter @Resol, and WebKit is a fork from KHtml made by the German KDE.
Blink is the most used engine, because it’s the most compatible with current web standarts, even somewhat more than Gecko. If Apple’s Safari insist in it’s WebKit, the most outdated engine, it’s become the new IE in a near Future.Named as such because, like Weeping Angels, if you blink you’ll be sent back to a society without enforcement of antitrust laws
actually the name of Blink engine is quite interesting, it was named after the non-standard html
blinktag and ironically it never supported it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)#NamingI don’t understand this argument about antitrust laws. As far as i know Google hasn’t done anything to block other companies from making their own search engines or browsers. Nor does Value and Steam, nor Microsoft and Windows.
WEI checks if your browser and system is “genuine” and “unmodified” before letting you access any content “protected” by it, which inevitably leads to smaller and custom mods that don’t fit their predetermined criteria for “genuineness” being locked out, which in turn forces you to use Google (and Microsoft and Apple, they’re in on it too) products in order to access certain content and eventually the entire internet, just as surely as it’s almost completely impossible to avoid their Google Analytics malware.
And before you say “that’s a ridiculous slippery slope fallacy! That’ll never happen!”, Logitech is already requiring you to go to a website that will only open in Chromium browsers in order to pair devices with the Logitech Unifying Receiver.
Thanks for reminding me of what the hell it was called
