There are many browsers based on Chromium like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Samsung Internet, to mention a few. Of all that I have tried, there is one I only recently discovered and immediately fell in love with, Naver Whale (네이버 웨일).

Naver Whale (네이버 웨일) is a multi-platform Chromium-based browser developed and launched by the Korean company Naver (네이버) in 2011. It is available in English other than its native Korean language and is actively maintained.

How to install

Installation is very simple, download Whale (웨일) from the official website and install the browser. The official link will automatically detect the appropriate operating system installer file to download.

Features

These are the unique features that comes with Naver Whale (네이버 웨일).

• Dual-pane tab
  • Linked and unlinked dual-pane mode
• Naver (네이버) specific features
  • Notice
  • Toolbox
  • Scrapbook
  • Papago (파파고)
• sidebar apps
  • Music Player V2
  • Webtoon (웹툰)
  • Memo
  • Now
• Other Naver (네이버) extensions
  • VLive
  • Vibe (바이브)

Dual-pane tab

Dual-pane tab is a cool feature in Naver Whale (네이버 웨일). A single browser tab can have two panes to give the user more freedom in viewing content side-by-side. There are two modes: linked and unlinked.

In linked mode, clicking an active link on the left pane will open it on the right pane. This is very useful when reading or doing research. Instead of switching between tabs, the user can check the referenced document with ease.

In unlinked mode, the two panes work independently of each other. Any links clicked on either pane will open on itself; or a new tab entirely (if desired).

It is also possible to merge two tabs into a single dual-pane tab. This is useful when sharing content in an SNS platform.

Notice

Notice is a sidebar built into Naver Whale (네이버 웨일). It shows the notifications and updates related to the user’s Naver (네이버) account. It is basically an easy access removing the need to open a dedicated tab.

Toolbox

This is a very useful sidebar section Naver Whale (네이버 웨일) have. It offers easy access to common tools like a calculator, exchange rate conversion, units conversion, and even to see the latest in the stock market.

The toolbox currently offers the following tools:

• Clock
• Alarm
• Calculator
• Calendar
• Convert (unit conversion)
• Exchange Rate
• Stock market updates
• Korean spell checker

Scrapbook

Scrapbook is, by the name itself, a scrapbook for quickly saving information. Compared to a regular memo or note taking app or extension, Scrapbook automatically categorizes saved information into notes, links, images, videos, and files which can then be accessed anywhere, like a mobile phone, a desktop PC or laptop, and through a web interface. If Mozilla Firefox have Pocket, Whale has Scrapbook.

It is also possible to further place information into more specific topics by creating new categories or tags. One cool feature of Scrapbook is the ability to connect another service which has to effect of auto-saving items or links by simply clicking Like or Watch Later or Wish List. Currently supported are Naver TV and Naver Keep; while Naver Shopping, and YouTube were recently disabled pending an update.

Papago

Naver Papago (네이버 파파고) is the company’s very own translation service. It is powered by a neural machine translation which uses an artificial neural network for its translations. A translation based on a neural network most often provide natural translations, as if a natural speaker did the translation. The name Papago is an Esperanto word for parrot.

This built-in feature also offers website translations. A flag icon will show up at the extensions bar when a site is in a language other than the default language set in the browser. If the browser is in English and a website is in another language, if Naver Papago (네이버 파파고) supports the language the icon will appear. The power of neural translation right at the user’s fingertips.

Naver Papago (네이버 파파고) offers neural translations for Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, and Hindi.

Music Player V2

Naver Whale (네이버 웨일) also comes with Naver’s Music Player sidebar app. It currently supports Naver Vibe (네이버 바이브), Bugs! (벅스!), Genie (지니), and YouTube Music; the most popular music streaming platforms in Korea with a web player.

Webtoon

A fan of Korea’s webtoons, in particular the Naver Webtoon (네이버 웹툰) platform? Naver Whale (네이버 웨일) browser comes by default with the Naver Webtoon (네이버 웹툰) sidebar app.

With the Naver Webtoon (네이버 웹툰) sidebar app, users can easily check the latest webtoon episodes; the rankings; and discover new ones.

Memo

The Memo sidebar app is useful for users of the Naver Memo mobile app. It give users an easy way to access their notes across devices.

Now

Naver Now was formerly known as Naver TV, the one place to watch live shows of K-pop acts, chat in real-time, and interact with fellow fans. It is focused more on a more professional production, like any usually seen on TV.

VLive

If Naver Now is focused on professional production of live performances, VLive is the platform for artists to interact with their fans, be more casual, and provide any content they can think of. On top of the free and no-IP restriction basic service, celebrities can choose to offer paid content through the service’s different tiers.

VLive is similar to services like Kumu, Chums Live, and Bigo Live but for established names in the industry. In addition, what makes this service more unique from other platforms is that fans can submit subtitles for the videos or past live streams.

Vibe

Naver Vibe (네이버 바이브) is the company’s music streaming platform. Their former music service was merged after the latter was closed in late 2020. Users of Naver Vibe (네이버 바이브) can easily listen to their favourite music or discover new ones by just opening the Naver Vibe (네이버 바이브) sidebar icon.

A good feature of Naver Vibe (네이버 바이브) is its use of artificial intelligence when creating music recommendations to its users instead of the traditional charts. The service also does not offer a monthly subscription fee, rather, users pay for the songs they want to listen to.

Bonus: Media control center

The Whale (웨일) media control center is a built-in feature which displays all the active (playing or paused) media from any tab, extensions, and sidebar app. As shown in the screenshot above, it provides control for three active media recently played during the browsing session.

In closing

Naver Whale (네이버 웨일) is a very good alternative browser for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other popular Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Vivaldi. Whale (웨일) is geared toward ordinary users and professionals who prefer to have an out-of-the-box experience where the tools they need are but a click away.

It is currently my default Chromium-based browser, and the services offered by Naver (네이버) are quite useful.

The recent announcement by Microsoft giving up on their EdgeHTML browser engine as well as their Microsoft Edge browser frontend marks the end of the Browser Wars 2.0. Their revelation that their next flagship browser will be Chromium-based and thus powered by the Blink browser engine, signals the beginning of Browser Wars III a war to control the Internet through browser engines.

To understand Browser Wars III we need to realise that there are two fronts in this new war: the Browser Frontend and the Browser Engine. Allow me to differentiate these two fronts.

Browser Wars III Front: Browser Frontend

A browser frontend is simply the browser that users see. In this case, we have Chromium and Mozilla’s Firefox [Quantum]. Before there was a Chromium browser (the frontend and the engine), the most forked browser was Firefox. Some of the most popular Firefox-based projects are Pale Moon (also forked the Gecko engine into Goanna), Waterfox, Comodo IceDragon, Tor Browser, and the original Flock browser.

When Chromium arrived in the scene, it slowly gained converts. Flock migrated from being a Firefox-based browser to a Chromium-based browser bringing with them their loyal users (much later though, Flock development has ended). Opera Software, the company behind the Opera Browser, ended development of their browser frontend and its Presto browser engine. From there, they created a new Chromium-based Opera! Exactly what Microsoft has announced they will be doing too.

If that was not enough, fans of the Opera Browser also created their own browser called Otter Browser and Vivaldi (which happens to be far better than the new Chromium-based Opera Browser).

Other Chromium-based browsers are: Yandex Browser; Comodo Dragon; Brave; Epic Browser; and Torch, to mention a few. No one is choosing Firefox any longer!

This brings us to the …

Browser Wars III Front: Browser Engine

The browser engine part of the Browser Wars III is the most important and largely ignored in the past two Browser Wars. Today, articles are interchanging Chromium and Blink. However, Chromium is a browser frontend while Blink is a browser engine.

Not interchangeable

The frontend and engine are not interchangeable. A developer can …

• … use an existing browser frontend but use a different browser engine
• … use an existing browser frontend but add additional browser engines on top of the default
• … use a browser engine but without the browser frontend (usually seen in software with a built-in browsing feature)
• … use a browser engine but develop a browser frontend from scratch

Gecko, the browser engine behind Firefox, had seen a lot of products with the use-cases mentioned above. Blink’s use mainly concentrated on Chromium; after all, why build a browser frontend from scratch when there is already Chromium? Why add a built-in browsing feature when one can use Chromium directly as if it’s part of the software or app in both the desktop and mobile platforms? (I came across software where its browsing experience was locked into Chrome itself even if your default browser was set to Firefox. Chrome is a Chromium-based browser by Google.)

Yet, it does not mean Chromium and Blink are interchangeable, especially when …

It’s the browser engine that counts

When frontend developers design software and websites, they test it against different browsers. The reality is they are testing it against the engine powering these browsers. As long as a product or website has been tested in any browsers powered by Blink, Gecko, and WebKit (Safari and all Apple products), a developer can generally interpret it as the same in any other browsers powered by the same engine (to reiterate, generally, there are other factors involved that may change the result even if the engine and its version is the same). There is no need to install Chromium, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and Yandex, these are all powered by Blink through Chromium.

With everyone choosing Chromium as their underlying browser frontend (developers) or daily browser (end-users) we are heading once again to the days of “this website works best with” and “please download a Blink-powered browser like Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Yandex, and Brave to continue to this website”. In addition, developers and companies who only cares to get a website running and money flowing as fast as possible, will only do tests against Blink now that it has the largest share of the market… today.

It puts an imbalance in the Internet. The Chromium developers, who are also the developers behind Blink, now have more power over how the Internet should be displayed. Not that they will abuse it, hopefully, but there were, are, and will always be decisions within the W3C Consortium (the group that sets Web Standards) based on numbers or how a particular element or attribute should work; or if a new web feature should follow Chromium’s version or Mozilla’s interpretation.

Conclusion

Chromium is just the surface. The browser engine is the real danger here. Chromium is simply the flagship browser of Blink. Since most do not want to start a browser from scratch, they obviously decided to use Chromium and tweaked it to their desired look and added their own features. But no one is stopping anyone from building a browser frontend from scratch and use Blink as their browser engine, Chromium have less count while Blink has a higher count.

It does not matter which browser frontend is the most popular because “this site works best on” and “this website was tested fully on” is all about the browser engine. It is about Blink, Gecko, WebKit, Goanna, and KHTML.

Use Firefox Quantum, yes, but if you do not like Firefox for whatever reason, then use a browser powered by the Gecko Quantum engine. A Chromium-based browser is not the only alternative, there are Firefox-based browsers too. If you are a frontend developer, test your website projects on Gecko Quantum powered browsers too. Let us not put the Internet in danger by letting one particular browser engine have a major gap and dominance in the market.

From my personal experience, Gecko has always been way ahead when it comes to implementing the W3C recommended specifications, always. There are also bugs in Chromium that are always ignored or were repeatedly closed as “not a bug” and/or “working as intended”, for example, in its font fallback mechanism which is affecting some [Asian] scripts but is working perfectly in Gecko-powered browsers!

One final thought. There are two Asian browsers with three browser engines (Trident, Gecko, and Blink): IE-based Avant Browser by a Chinese developer and IE-based Lunascape by a Japanese developer. Yes, there are multi-engine browsers (and extensions in the case of Firefox).

This Browser Wars III clearly is about the browser engines Blink and Gecko, the browser frontends that is Chromium and Firefox are only secondary, we just see them mentioned more because the average Joe and Jane are only familiar with those “names”.

Last Saturday, 21^st of November 2009, the new Mozilla Philippines Community held their first event entitled “5 Years of Firefox in Manila!” Regnard Raquedan, the leader of Mozilla Philippines, was already halfway through his presentation when we arrived at the venue.

The venue was sponsored by the good people of Asian Institute of Management (AIM), across from Greenbelt 1, Paseo de Roxas, Makati City, Philippines. Allan Caeg of Ubuntu Philippines was also there as one of the organizers. After Regnard presented the history and growth of Firefox, as well as the official launch of Mozilla Philippines Community website, Globe Telecom followed and presented their latest product - Web2Mobile.

What is Web2Mobile? It is a Filipino-developed Firefox browser extension (or add-on) that will allow one to send text messages (SMS) and multi-media messages (MMS) without leaving their browser window. Cool eh? Maybe not because we have uLink and Chikka for our web-to-mobile needs.

This is how Olive Ruth Dag and J. Allen Santos, the UP students who developed the extension for the Globe Labs Summer of Code program made it stand-out:

• Highlight any text on any website, right-click, and then hit ‘Send’. No need to copy and paste or re-typing everything
• You can also send any images, be it a photo or any graphics from any website. Right-click on the image and simply hit ‘Send’

After the Globe presentation (good thing there was no Q&A session, I would have drilled the presenters with questions about their service), what followed was the raffle. For the first time I won - being unlucky with raffles… I got a Firefox ID lace, now two, which I’ll proudly use and keep.

It is good to be part of Free/Libre Open-Source Software (FLOSS/FOSS) communities. We may not be able to give back code or donate but through these events and communities, we are giving back something even though it is as small as showing our support by being simply being present and spreading the word.

Congratulations to the organizers of Five Years of Firefox in Manila and thank you to Mozilla for the freebies. Of course thanks goes to the sponsors as well - AIM for the venue and wi-fi, Globe Telecom for the food.

Photo gallery on Facebook.

Bloggers who attended:

• Joell Lapitan
• Juned Sonido
• Jane Uymatiao
• Rochelle Sy Chua
• Ia Lucero
• Eugene Alvin Villar
• Marvin Beduya
• JP Manahan
• Regnard Raquedan (organizer)

Give Web2Mobile a try: Download the add-on here.

Visit the official community website at www.mozillaphilippines.org.