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What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

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Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#41

Post by _2paq »

Santosh83 wrote: post #7

If there is only one implementation, then whichever body (private, public, for profit, not for profit, doesn't matter) controls this implementation will control the direction of the entire web. It's the definition of consolidation and monopoly control. There is no reasonable argument to make for a Chromium only web from anyone without vested interests.

> There is no reasonable argument to make for a Chromium only web from anyone without vested interests.

It could be just apathy towards choice. I've observed this behavior among GNOME advocates as well. Some of them would rather see GNOME as the only de facto choice for a desktop environment on Linux and considering how it's installed by default on most major distributions, those words and their effect aren't far fetched.

Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#42

Post by paol »

MikusR wrote: post #39
paol wrote: post #4

We don't have to speculate, we've been through this already during the IE4 to IE6 era. Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so will Google. In Microsoft's case what they wanted was nothing . They weren't a web business, saw it as a threat to their platform leverage, and so just left it abandoned and stagnant for years. Google is simultaneously better and worse: they won't leave it stag…

Ajax?

Yep, XMLHttpRequest was literally the only thing to come out of years of Microsoft tenure. Fun fact: it was added so that they could make the Outlook web interface.

Edit: well, that and ActiveX, but that's not a good thing...

Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#43

Post by TremendousJudge »

ecmascript wrote: post #33
Santosh83 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is responsible for such a low percentage it's sad (the stats I have for the sites I work on it's usually on the 1-2% range). I think it's mainly because of the horrible leadership at Mozilla. I want to use Firefox and promote it but every time I think they've changed Mozilla does something new that boils my blood. This is repeated ad nauseum on this site and needs to be called out. The Mozilla management ma…

Yes but before the tech community was all fire for Firefox. IT-guys installed it on work computers, school computers etc. We would recommend it to our families and install it for our less techy family when they would need our assistance. Firefox had the IT-sector with them. I think this does a lot for spreading the usage. Even just one IT-guy can probably give Firefox hundreds of users. Now, this is no longer the cas…

All this talk about Mozilla's political views, what about the political views of the Google leadership? Why do they get a free pass? I think blaming the politics is a just-so story. I saw everyone adopt Chrome over the years since it came out, and it had nothing to do with the leadership of the Mozilla foundation, or Google for that matter.

What happened is much simpler: Chrome worked better than Firefox, most of the tech people switched to recommending Chrome, and it was bundled with a lot of software and advertised on the Google homepage. And nobody ever switched back, and they started justifying why in various ways.

Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#44

Post by Santosh83 »

ecmascript wrote: post #33
Santosh83 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is responsible for such a low percentage it's sad (the stats I have for the sites I work on it's usually on the 1-2% range). I think it's mainly because of the horrible leadership at Mozilla. I want to use Firefox and promote it but every time I think they've changed Mozilla does something new that boils my blood. This is repeated ad nauseum on this site and needs to be called out. The Mozilla management ma…

Yes but before the tech community was all fire for Firefox. IT-guys installed it on work computers, school computers etc. We would recommend it to our families and install it for our less techy family when they would need our assistance. Firefox had the IT-sector with them. I think this does a lot for spreading the usage. Even just one IT-guy can probably give Firefox hundreds of users. Now, this is no longer the cas…

All that you say may be true, but if that stops the vast majority of tech community from using FF and installing it for their user support base, then we must be prepared for a Blink/Webkit only future, and maybe even Blink only in the worst case.

What will the tech community do if Google starts promoting a certain political direction, if they haven't already? Will they stop seeking employment at Google, or stop using/developing for Chromium in protest?

Sometimes the larger goals should outweigh the immediate disappointments.

Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#45

Post by jgilias »

bobajeff wrote: post #22
mnd999 wrote: post #16

Probably we have to start again with something different in the same way as the web replaced all the other protocols (gopher, usenet etc). I’m not what that looks like but it should be cleaner, simpler, open and blockchain-free.

Yes, I've been wanting something that's just a rich document but designed around accessibility with no styles or JavaScript.

For what it's worth, there's Gemini. You can't really call it rich document though, as styling is left to the user consuming the content.

Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#46

Post by guerrilla »

Joeri wrote: post #36

The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. We are at an impasse. The standards cannot be deprecated because they are used all over the web…

> It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable.

A body of web standards that they lobbied for and to be in the form that they are...

Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#47

Post by noduerme »

I think it's bizarre to conflate Apple's refusal to allow other webkits on iOS with the fact that Safari remains a viable alternative engine. They're far from heroes here. I think it's great they maintain a Chrome alternative kit that mostly works but let's not pretend they're saints or kid ourselves about the reasons for it. The only reason they disallow Chromium and Mozilla is they want their users locked into their environment and they want to leverage that substantial locked-in user base to dictate terms. It's only being one of the richest companies in history that gives them a seat at the table. If they're afraid of having to open the platform, that's because they're not keeping up.

It's not that they're one judgment away from that day. They know that. It's just that they want to get as much mileage as they can before they too abandon Safari and first allow, then switch to Chromium. That will happen in the next 5 years.

What might come of it all would be a reset where new branches form and new innovators get to introduce new proposals. Standards aren't a bad thing if they're open. If Safari dies then Google will be next in the line of fire for antitrust action anyway... things will fragment again. I'm personally pissed at the number of great technologies left as litter along the road, not least AS3, just to get to this shitty middle ground / cold browser war between two companies I hope die and one that won't help itself. Let the standards win and let's have a standard platform to innovate on top of.

Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#48

Post by xnickb »

Joeri wrote: post #36

The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. We are at an impasse. The standards cannot be deprecated because they are used all over the web…

> moving as much of the standards implementation as possible into JS modules

Heh. Now you have two problems. One of them is JS, which was a mistake in the first place and now we can't get rid of it for similar reasons.

Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#49

Post by pornel »

Even if Google was an absolute saint without a trillion-dollar ad business, there's still a problem of "bug-compatibility".

Without a second browser engine to test pages in, it's really hard to know what is a bug and what is intentional. Devs don't know all the specs by heart. They write whatever happens to work for them, but sometimes they accidentally depend on obscure edge cases in the implementation that were never meant to exist.

In the long term it's paralysing for the engine maintainers, because any change in implementation could be changing some subtle behavior that breaks some pages. W3C requires two independent implementations, so that they'll share intentional behaviors, but hopefully their bugs will differ.

The single-engine Web will be as fun to maintain as Windows: Windows 11 Explorer has a shiny new context menu with an option to reopen it as an older, uglier context menu, because Microsoft couldn't touch a line of code of the old context menu without breaking apps.

Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

#50

Post by aaa_aaa »

paol wrote: post #4

We don't have to speculate, we've been through this already during the IE4 to IE6 era. Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so will Google. In Microsoft's case what they wanted was nothing . They weren't a web business, saw it as a threat to their platform leverage, and so just left it abandoned and stagnant for years. Google is simultaneously better and worse: they won't leave it stag…

Comparing it with MS-IE is unfair. It was not Mozilla or Firefox, but Chrome and Android broke the hegemony of IE in many countries. Where I lived, bank or government sites were IE-Windows only until Chrome appeared. In countries like Korea it was a total shit show. I understand it is a shame that only 3 engines left and but please it is not even close to what MS did.
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