Google Chrome is the world's most popular browser by a wide margin.
But let's just say you want to be a contrarian and use some alternative browser, maybe Vivaldi
or Opera or Torch.
Unfortunately, those browsers are all actually the same as Chrome under the hood.
In fact, there are a lot of browsers and other apps that use Chromium, the open source
project that Chrome is based on. I mean, even Microsoft Edge, originally built to compete with Chrome since, you know, nobody
wanted to use Internet Explorer anymore, has transitioned over to being based on Chromium,
even as Windows tries to shame you for using Chrome when you open it up.
So what's the deal with that? Well, it turns out that coding a web browser entirely from scratch, then bringing it to
market is harder than you might think. Aside from trying to come up with features to set it apart from the competition, which
can be a challenge, because a web browser should just show you web pages and stay out
of the way otherwise. Every web browser also requires a rendering engine that turns a web page's underlying
code into what you actually see on the screen. Building a rendering engine is difficult work.
In fact, Microsoft developed a whole new one from scratch called Edge HTML for the original
Edge browser. It was built as being more interoperable with current web standards than Chrome, and Microsoft
spent a lot of effort and money both developing and promoting Edge.
Still, nobody cared enough for it to really mount a challenge to Chrome.
And this is Microsoft we're talking about.
Even with the resources at their disposal, they just couldn't make it work.
So it's no wonder that other developers have shied away from bothering to build their
own browser. So the market for browsers isn't a level playing field because, well, most web developers
optimize their sites for Chromium browsers, making it even harder to create something
that's functionally better. It's much easier instead to use Chromium as a base, and then tweak the browser according
to what the developers want it to be. For example, the aforementioned Torch browser includes features for more easily downloading
audio and video. Vivaldi is known for being more customizable than Chrome, and even the new Chromium-based
Microsoft Edge still steers users towards Microsoft's services such as Bing, which
makes Chromium viable for Microsoft. This Chromium is mostly just a code base and doesn't include Google services, a developer
that wants to tie their Chromium-based browser into their own services can easily do so.
Amazon does something similar with its Amazon Silk browser, which is also based on Chromium,
but runs on Kindle and other FireWest devices. And it's not just full-fledged browsers that are based on Chromium either.
There is pieces of code such as Electron and the Chromium-invented framework that provide
a Chromium-based interface, including web browsing inside other apps, including well-known
tools like Slack and WhatsApp for desktop, and also Discord too.
Of course, there are a couple of notable exceptions to Chrome's market dominance.
Firefox is based on its own engine called Quantum, making it the last major PC browser
that isn't based on Chromium. On the Apple side, of course, you've got Safari, and while Safari isn't entirely Chromium-based,
there's an interesting connection in that WebKit, the underlying code for Safari, is
also open source, and Blink, Chromium's browser engine, is itself based on WebKit.
So bottom line, nearly every major web browser has a lot more in common than you might think.
So hopefully Chromium's developers know what they're doing, and the world isn't brought
to its knees by another internet explorer like Fiasco.
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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