WEBVTT

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Google Chrome is the world's most popular browser by a wide margin.

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But let's just say you want to be a contrarian and use some alternative browser, maybe Vivaldi

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or Opera or Torch.

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Unfortunately, those browsers are all actually the same as Chrome under the hood.

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In fact, there are a lot of browsers and other apps that use Chromium, the open source

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project that Chrome is based on. I mean, even Microsoft Edge, originally built to compete with Chrome since, you know, nobody

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wanted to use Internet Explorer anymore, has transitioned over to being based on Chromium,

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even as Windows tries to shame you for using Chrome when you open it up.

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So what's the deal with that? Well, it turns out that coding a web browser entirely from scratch, then bringing it to

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market is harder than you might think. Aside from trying to come up with features to set it apart from the competition, which

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can be a challenge, because a web browser should just show you web pages and stay out

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of the way otherwise. Every web browser also requires a rendering engine that turns a web page's underlying

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code into what you actually see on the screen. Building a rendering engine is difficult work.

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In fact, Microsoft developed a whole new one from scratch called Edge HTML for the original

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Edge browser. It was built as being more interoperable with current web standards than Chrome, and Microsoft

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spent a lot of effort and money both developing and promoting Edge.

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Still, nobody cared enough for it to really mount a challenge to Chrome.

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And this is Microsoft we're talking about.

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Even with the resources at their disposal, they just couldn't make it work.

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So it's no wonder that other developers have shied away from bothering to build their

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own browser. So the market for browsers isn't a level playing field because, well, most web developers

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optimize their sites for Chromium browsers, making it even harder to create something

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that's functionally better. It's much easier instead to use Chromium as a base, and then tweak the browser according

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to what the developers want it to be. For example, the aforementioned Torch browser includes features for more easily downloading

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audio and video. Vivaldi is known for being more customizable than Chrome, and even the new Chromium-based

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Microsoft Edge still steers users towards Microsoft's services such as Bing, which

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makes Chromium viable for Microsoft. This Chromium is mostly just a code base and doesn't include Google services, a developer

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that wants to tie their Chromium-based browser into their own services can easily do so.

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Amazon does something similar with its Amazon Silk browser, which is also based on Chromium,

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but runs on Kindle and other FireWest devices. And it's not just full-fledged browsers that are based on Chromium either.

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There is pieces of code such as Electron and the Chromium-invented framework that provide

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a Chromium-based interface, including web browsing inside other apps, including well-known

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tools like Slack and WhatsApp for desktop, and also Discord too.

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Of course, there are a couple of notable exceptions to Chrome's market dominance.

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Firefox is based on its own engine called Quantum, making it the last major PC browser

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that isn't based on Chromium. On the Apple side, of course, you've got Safari, and while Safari isn't entirely Chromium-based,

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there's an interesting connection in that WebKit, the underlying code for Safari, is

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also open source, and Blink, Chromium's browser engine, is itself based on WebKit.

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So bottom line, nearly every major web browser has a lot more in common than you might think.

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So hopefully Chromium's developers know what they're doing, and the world isn't brought

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to its knees by another internet explorer like Fiasco.

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I think it's going to happen. Thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, maybe check out one of our other videos, comment

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with video suggestions down below, and don't forget to subscribe and follow.