The problem with Chromium is that it's controlled by Google. Given they control the engine in the majority of browsers, they get to call the shots on the direction of the web as a whole.
They're not in any position to control the web as a whole; Safari is too strong a competitor.
But even if Chromium was at 100% market share they couldn't control the web. If they start throwing their weight around then the other web companies will start organising around a Chromium fork. The important thing here is OSS/not-OSS rather than market share. Market share can change quickly enough in response to problems. It is like GCC - there was that spat back in the day, someone forks the code and there is a little war until people figure out which is better. Then the better version became "GCC".
It is fine to have one custodian as long as the actual power is retained by the users. Efficient, even.
Isn’t the push to deprecate and remove Manifest V2 in favor of V3 and therefore removing or at least significantly cutting down possibilities for users to block ads a major push from the Google side? A field in which they, conveniently, make their major cut of their profit?
Brave is a big company already, still they’ve already announced that they won’t be able to support V2 for too long as the codebase will break over time.
Only because something is OSS doesn’t mean it’s not controlled by a single entity or consortium. We need competition, especially in something so damn critical like web browsers (which are like OSes for the web).
Mozilla is and has been a savior. They’re doing weird shit, but compared to Google and Apple they’re still as transparent as possible, even with their shit. And their shit is not even THAT bad, while I still dislike it and also thought about replacing FF for a short time. I just hope they come back to the right path, at least in their communications.
Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking. Whether or not Webkit can be thought of as disjoint from Chromium is really the question here.
WebKit is substantially disjointed from Blink at this point, a natural result of differing priorities from their developers.
WebKit remains highly embeddable for example, so if you drop a WebKit webview into your Cocoa/GTK/whatever toolkit app you’ve got a mostly-complete multiprocess browser and just need to build your UI around it. Blink on the other hand is hard-coupled with Chromium for things like multiprocess support, which leaves no practical alternative to forking the whole browser (which as an aside, is why Electron drags around the full heft of Chromium instead of just Blink).
That’s moot though because Google has no qualms with pushing through Chromium-only “standards” that make non-Chromium browsers less viable since sites that use these “standards” simply don’t work in anything but Chromium. It’s like the situation with Internet Explorer and its collection of IE-isms all over again.
One could argue that Mozilla and Apple should just follow Google and implement these “standards” themselves, but that lands us right back where we started in that this effectively gives Google full unbridled power to steer the direction of the web as it pleases, which is a massive conflict of interest.
which outright forked in 2013, though at that point it sounds like they were already carrying enough patches to constitute a soft fork (which then became a hard fork).
roenxi|1 year ago
But even if Chromium was at 100% market share they couldn't control the web. If they start throwing their weight around then the other web companies will start organising around a Chromium fork. The important thing here is OSS/not-OSS rather than market share. Market share can change quickly enough in response to problems. It is like GCC - there was that spat back in the day, someone forks the code and there is a little war until people figure out which is better. Then the better version became "GCC".
It is fine to have one custodian as long as the actual power is retained by the users. Efficient, even.
nileshtrivedi|1 year ago
wobfan|1 year ago
Only because something is OSS doesn’t mean it’s not controlled by a single entity or consortium. We need competition, especially in something so damn critical like web browsers (which are like OSes for the web).
Mozilla is and has been a savior. They’re doing weird shit, but compared to Google and Apple they’re still as transparent as possible, even with their shit. And their shit is not even THAT bad, while I still dislike it and also thought about replacing FF for a short time. I just hope they come back to the right path, at least in their communications.
everdrive|1 year ago
cosmic_cheese|1 year ago
WebKit remains highly embeddable for example, so if you drop a WebKit webview into your Cocoa/GTK/whatever toolkit app you’ve got a mostly-complete multiprocess browser and just need to build your UI around it. Blink on the other hand is hard-coupled with Chromium for things like multiprocess support, which leaves no practical alternative to forking the whole browser (which as an aside, is why Electron drags around the full heft of Chromium instead of just Blink).
That’s moot though because Google has no qualms with pushing through Chromium-only “standards” that make non-Chromium browsers less viable since sites that use these “standards” simply don’t work in anything but Chromium. It’s like the situation with Internet Explorer and its collection of IE-isms all over again.
One could argue that Mozilla and Apple should just follow Google and implement these “standards” themselves, but that lands us right back where we started in that this effectively gives Google full unbridled power to steer the direction of the web as it pleases, which is a massive conflict of interest.
yjftsjthsd-h|1 year ago
No, Google owns Blink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)
which outright forked in 2013, though at that point it sounds like they were already carrying enough patches to constitute a soft fork (which then became a hard fork).