Dæmon S.

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A few days ago, I had to use the Graphite image editor to refine a 3D scene I rendered in Blender. I’m a daily user of Waterfox, but for some reason, whenever I access the Graphite WebApp, it instantly grows in RAM usage, as the whole Waterfox freezes and crashes (which I found out to be a specifically a “core dump” kind of crash when I launched the browser from a terminal). Same for Librewolf. Then I had the idea of accessing Graphite through a spare Chromium (not Chrome, but still a Google thing) I unwittingly have to keep for development purposes, and suddenly it worked without a hassle, it didn’t even require that much RAM.

This happens because Graphite, just like many webapps out there, was made with Chromium-based browsers in mind, likely using some esoteric features which are unavailable or badly implemented in Firefox-based browsers (an incompatibility of which indirectly affects Waterfox).

This, I guess, is part of why people still use Chromium-based browsers: because it became indistinguishable from Internet Explorer and its idiosyncratic features (ActiveX) back in 2000s, with most developers (including myself) coding webpages that used said features (think about having to deal with the filesystem: devs would either have to use Java or devs could use the cool FileSystemObject ActiveX; similar thing applies nowadays with some HTML5 APIs that can be quite useful for some webapps but are only properly implemented in Chromium). At least we used to have a “This site is better viewed in IE7 on Windows XP with a resolution of 1024 x 768 and Macromedia Flash Player installed” back then, now webpages can simply crash the whole browser when it doesn’t refuse to load after an endless spinning animation.

Don’t get me wrong: I would neither recommend Chromium, nor anything Google-related, for anyone, not even my worst enemies (a daily reminder for people, especially we Fediversers, to stop recommending the damn Youtube)… but this is the depressing reality of Web, and IT in general: things (some of which are sine qua non for “living in society” nowadays, such as internet banking and government platforms) that can only function in a specific platform/browser, be it Windows (when it comes to desktop platform), Android (when it comes to mobile) or Chromium (when it comes to the Web).