Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

dev.to

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 128 posts

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#51

Post by tannhaeuser »

roca wrote: post #44
lazyjones wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. It's not the single browser codebase that hurts the web, any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. The main issue is that today, the web as a platform is garbage. It's full of cruft, mostly useless features th…

> any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. No. When Web devs test in multiple browsers and find that something doesn't work in one of them, they will usually pick an alternative solution that does work in all of them, avoiding the bug in the buggy browser, thus avoiding a situation where their site depends on that bug continuing to exist. It doesn't always work out as well as that,…

> extremely complex applications like office suites and 3D games

Who really needs that in the browser? Native apps are consistently better in every single aspect - more powerful, more privacy-respecting, more eco-friendly, etc. Except native apps are vanishing - a month ago I wanted to fire-up SketchUp on my old Mac, only to find out that the casual 3D scene is now using 100% webapps. The reason we have these abominations is that they're one of the only avenues left for financing app development (either ad-driven, or in a fremium model) because nobody buys software anymore. And that is indeed a contradictory effect of making software a commodity through F/OSS when the original motive was to empower users. Now I know folks chase browsers and wasm and whatnot as the ultimate cross-platform app delivery platform (coming from a 1990s MS and 2010s iOS app dominance experience) and make browsers even more complex. However I whish they could stop and think about if their work is actually helping the situation.

What I think would be helpful is to define a base web profile for content delivery, and then additional profiles for webapps. The "march of progress" argument against versioning and profiling HTML, CSS, devices, and JavaScript we've heard from web standardization efforts isn't convincing at all, and only helps the big guys (basically, only Chrome at this point).

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#52

Post by icebraining »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #34
icebraining wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. And then Google will start extending that standard, then sites will start depending on those extensions, and any browser that refuses or is unable to implement them will be extinguished/irrelevant.

How many websites rely on google-specific features not defined by W3C, WHATWG, ECMA etc. today?

Those examples are the demonstration of my point! You had a mostly fixed standard that a small team could hope to reach - the W3C stuff - and the few top browser vendors decided to extend that with a continuous stream of new features chosen only by them - the WHATWG -, with the result that browsers who couldn't keep up got extinguished from the market.

That the features aren't proprietary is besides the point: Google realizes that they don't need them to be proprietary, what matters is that others can't easily implement them all.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#53

Post by sureaboutthis »

I've been saying this about dev.io since it's beginning. It's the place for frustrated redditors trying to make a name for themselves but only making fools instead. Do not bother reading anything there. It's as worthless and pointless as reading anything on reddit.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#54

Post by sureaboutthis »

ximm wrote: post #15
roca wrote: post #11

Some major problems with the "let's all use Chromium" approach: Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting. All the companies that use Chromium are using it because they want Google to do the heavy lifting, so that isn't going to change, even if Google decides to put an open governance face on it, and there's no sign they're going to do even that. Should Google really be ceded complete power over the…

> Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting Google already controls the web standardization process with its manpower. So standardizing on chromium would not change that issue, it would just move it to another level. I am not saying that this is great. I just think the argument is invalid.

Nothing makes it into the standard until there are at least two implementations in browsers. The standard is based on implementation, not invention by anyone.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#55

Post by luckylion »

la_fayette wrote: post #49

Monopolies are just a different term for stalinism. The question is for how long such a big moloch can control the internet in all domains. Ok they just buy startups in competing subdomains, but i doubt that really anything can be contolled by a single entity. Google is a company and thus a hierarchical system. The distributed innovation on the internet is still possible, see e.g. bitcoin mostl likely started by one…

Question is: how well would (the paranoid, control-seeking parts of) Stalinism have worked with today's technology?

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#56

Post by jefftk »

The premise of Mozilla's Servo is that there are major performance and security issues in all the current browsers that are very hard to fix without a full rewrite. Because we have multiple competing browsers and solid standards, instead of a single widely used reference implementation, it's possible that Servo may succeed at this.

If we switch to an open source browser engine monoculture we lose competition among rendering engines, and may never get something much better than what we have now.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#57

Post by Lendal »

OrgNet wrote: post #41

If only there could be no traces of Google inside Chromium... I'll stick with Firefox.

I am one of those who doesn't like to be forced to do anything. I believe in freedom, choice, and competition. Whenever a Fortune 500 company IT department literally pushes a particular piece of software to all their machines, (e.g. Chrome) you can be sure that it's the worst possible option. So I use Firefox instead.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#60

Post by mda »

lazyjones wrote: post #20
saulrh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> controlled by people with no ulterior motives. Everyone used to think that was Google. Anyway, if by some miracle you do find anyone that matches that description but knows where the lever is to kick everything over to a new paradigm, don't tell anyone about them, because as soon as you do they'll have more ulterior motives then you can count.

> Everyone used to think that was Google. When was that? Around the time they decided to liberate the web from the evil clutches of Microsoft/IE and ... Mozilla/FF (20%+ and growing at that time)?

Compared to both of them Chrome was technically miles better as well. And no, Firefox was stagnant. It actually saved web from IE.
Post reply on HN