Google today reached the final milestone in a browser-extension transition that has been years in the making, all remaining Manifest V2 extensions were removed from the Chrome Web Store.
The irony is that Chrome’s rendering engine was a fork of WebKit, which was a fork of KHTML, a free and open source rendering engine created by KDE for Konqueror. They basically took something free, used Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics on it. Now KHTML is vestigial, only found in the UserAgent string.
But we could have had a truly free open source cross platform browser with Konqueror.
Best we have now is Firefox, but the bulk of Mozilla’s development funding comes from setting Google as the default search. So it is also hijackable.
The irony is that Chrome’s rendering engine was a fork of WebKit, which was a fork of KHTML, a free and open source rendering engine created by KDE for Konqueror. They basically took something free, used Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics on it. Now KHTML is vestigial, only found in the UserAgent string.
But we could have had a truly free open source cross platform browser with Konqueror.
Best we have now is Firefox, but the bulk of Mozilla’s development funding comes from setting Google as the default search. So it is also hijackable.