“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

Isn't Chromium just a repackaging of KHTML from the KDE project?

> So you have only a few choices: hold up your release until everyone catches up, ship everyone the same lowest common denominator triaging out the advanced stuff, shipping an app with all kinds of workarounds and fallbacks, or shipping a native mobile one instead.

It seems like the article is complaining more about suspension of its adwords campaign than Chromium. Do you have any insight to that?

Weird combo being Firefox with its default user agent..

> I don't trust people who are more code-savvy than I am (that's most people) not to insert or exploit weaknesses in open-source software or other open code

That applies to closed-source software as well. With (popular) open-source software, on the other hand, you can be confident that "people who are more code-savvy than you are" can examine the code for inserted weaknesses. Existing vulnerabilities can and with be exploited if there's an incentive to so so, regardless of whether or not the source is available.

> With closed-source software, I know the origin point of the software I install, I know the names of the individuals or teams who developed it

That seems like the exception, rather than the rule. Consider browsers, for example. I can see exactly which people have commit access on the open-source Firefox or Chromium projects. When it comes to a closed-source browser such as Microsoft Edge, on the other hand, I only know that "the Edge team" develops it. I have absolutely no idea who is currently on this team, or the quality of any individual member's work.

> and therefore I know who stands behind it, because their reputation is based on that released software working

This doesn't mean that closed-source software is intrinsically less vulnerable than open-source software. Microsoft's reputation may be based on Windows working, but that didn't stop WannaCry - nor will it stop future exploits.

> If something goes wrong, I can take clear action because I know who is to blame, e.g. Vivaldi, Microsoft, etc.

Realistically speaking, what action can you take, besides switching to other software?

> With open-source software, that liability for the software developer is thus offloaded to "the community"

You're conflating open-source software with software developed solely by the community. Many open-source projects, such as Chromium, Firefox, and Linux, do have specific organizations that are either involved or responsible for their development. Closed-source software only gives you an opaque team or organization to blame, while open-source software can give you a specific commit - diff, date, and author.

> Too many people can see it

Direct access to the code may make finding vulnerabilities easier, but as shown by the number of security vulnerabilities in well-known and well-funded closed-source projects (Windows, iOS, etc), it will not stop determined attackers from finding and exploiting them.

> too many people can make changes How many is "too many"? If you're referring to the number of people with commit access, then you're almost never be able to know that number for closed-source software. If you're referring to the number of contributors, then it's not much different from trusting the core development team in the first place. Regardless of where the code originally comes from, you're trusting the maintainers to be able to recognize bad and/or vulnerable code, whether done accidentally or maliciously.

> and it's happening way too fast

Do you have a specific project or projects in mind here? This seems very similar to the issue of "too many people can make changes" - you can only make an informed guess, at best, as to the development rate of closed-source software. Unlike open-source software, you can never know exactly how many changes went into a particular release.

I think it's clear that each individual team makes what is a rational decision for their product; the problem is that when Google are also a browser vendor (and it's almost always only Google's browser that the initial launch supports) then it's very easy to walk away from this viewing Google as malicious.

One launch that was Chrome only would look kinda shitty, several dozen just looks like malice: the probability of such consistent behaviour is incredibly small (if we say the probability of cross-browser support is 0.99, given most sites on the web are, then the probability of a dozen sites all being cross-browser is 0.89, and the probability of none of them is 1×10^-24). It's incredibly unlikely that multiple unrelated web development teams would all decide to go for Chrome-only, and that's reflected by how few non-Google sites are Chrome-only (i.e., the optics would be very different if there were large number of major web launches that were Chrome-only from companies that aren't Google).

As such, if Google did actually care about the web and interoperability (given the Chrome team spend a lot of time talking about and working on it!), one would reasonably expect Google engineers would spend more time trying to report bugs in other browsers (because plenty of them aren't that hard to track down) rather than other browser vendors spending a few days fixing all the bugs after launch and then often spending several months trying to get it officially supported (and often being told "it still fails tests" with no further information (see previous point about caring about interop) while nobody else can find anything broken).

In reality knowing many people at Google, yes, I think I can say it's Google having no cohesive whole and acting like a million discrete teams with no over-arching goals, each wanting to launch their MVP ASAP by caring about a single platform, but it sure as hell doesn't look good.