Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies.
The early results come after the EU’s sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a “choice screen.”
Cyprus-based Aloha Browser said users in the EU jumped 250% in March - one of the first companies to give monthly growth numbers since the new regulations came in.
Norway’s Vivaldi, Germany’s Ecosia and U.S.-based Brave have also seen user numbers rise following the new regulation.
How many of these independent browsers are based on Chromium? I tried looking into Aloha first, but couldn’t find anything to confirm either way.
According to softpedia (the descriptions of the web engine is somewhat buried in the texts):
AFAIK Ecosia is not a browser, but a search engine.
TL;DR all
Ecosia web browser for Android devices is based on Chromium too, see its Wikipedia article.
Gotcha. So really the only viable competition is Mozilla Firefox (+ forks) vs Google.
Ecosia isn’t even a search engine. The search engine is bing, ecosia is just a frontend for Bing
The web standard is so broken that it’s absolutely infeasible to write a new engine, and Chromium is much easier to embed into an application than Mozilla’s engine.
The web standard is horrible but it’s not infeasible to write a new engine, see https://ladybird.dev/. And there’s also still WebKit.
This seems a bit nihilistic. Yes, Google is in the driving seat but it still has to deal with Apple and even Mozilla within the W3C. So a framework for open web standards exists, and a new engine is always just one fork away. Surely what is lacking is exactly this kind of antitrust regulation, which might incentivize competition at last. So thank you, EU Commission. The web standard is all we have. If it’s broken then we need to get fixing it right now.
Would be interesting what would happen when the EU regulates that browsers aren’t allowed to render non-standards compliant pages at all in order to allow new engine development just based on the spec, rather than having to implement all error fallbacks as well.
The EU is just bureaucratic enough that they could do that without realizing what a tornado of poo that would cause.
Regulation works! Who didn’t think about it?
Vivaldi is employee owned and has no VC involvement. No AI hype, no crypto bs, no ads.
They seem pretty good, as far as non-FOSS options go.
See https://vivaldi.com/company/ for more.
I tried their browser the other week and was pleasantly surprised by some innovative features.
Then there’s Mozilla, which is an actual nonprofit and builds its own engine for Firefox, ie does not solidify Google’s grip on the internet (eg can feasibly keep supporting tracker blockers like uBlock Origin).
(Which is not to say that I’m not sympathetic to Vivaldi as well.)
