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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?

#71

Post by IshKebab »

Gigachad wrote: post #65
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…

We should convert browsers in to just a basic wasm window responsible for rendering html and running wasm. Then JavaScript and all it’s apis can become a shared library as a wasm package or something.

I'm not convinced that JavaScript is the difficult part. HTML/CSS rendering seems far more challenging.

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

#72

Post by leononame »

noduerme wrote: post #47

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 thei…

> 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.

I'm not a great future-reader myself, but I don't see this happening soon. The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream, and they have a lot to lose with little to win for their platform. They lag behind because they want to, not because they can't.

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

#73

Post by p_l »

fullstop wrote: post #70
paol wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Microsoft exposed virtually all elements in the DOM. Netscape was extremely limited in this regard.

They also definitely advanced the CSS more than Netscape.

modern DOM, Ajax, modern CSS, bunch of other small details of JS, all iirc came from IE.

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

#74

Post by dredmorbius »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #63
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…

You fail to mention that IE was closed source while Chromium is open source. That's a completely different situation. We already have a number of Chromium based browsers that go against some of Google's most fundamental interests (e.g Brave).

Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little.

Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match.

Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, might pose an alternative.

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

#75

Post by MatthiasPortzel »

smcleod wrote: post #28
rvz wrote: post #8

We did this on ourselves. As everyone was laughing at Internet Explorer, another behemoth was overtaking IE and nothing was in their way. Mozilla (Firefox) was our chance for something different. They were ahead of IE once but they watched on and did nothing whilst they had their pockets lined up with Google's money and allowed them (Google) to overtake everyone and now everyone is complaining about it. It even goes…

I can't remember the last time I saw a website that was broken specifically on Firefox, maybe like 2009 era perhaps?

I have a website that relies on a quirk of Chrome’s rendering, which leads to scrolling not being handled the way I want in Firefox.

Browser compatibility bugs absolutely exist.

See https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues for some more examples.

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

#76

Post by goodpoint »

charcircuit wrote: post #40
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.

It's open source. Anyone can fork it.

That's far, far from enough.

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

#77

Post by dredmorbius »

charcircuit wrote: post #40
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.

It's open source. Anyone can fork it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834651

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

#78

Post by jakelazaroff »

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…

Who do you think has been pushing features into web standards at a breakneck pace? From where I sit, it’s mostly Google.

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

#79

Post by dredmorbius »

msoad wrote: post #52

I’m a little surprised why Chinese firms aren’t coming in and competing? Maybe they think web is not important for their future anymore?

I'd suggest staying tuned.

I'd only just posted that the only organisations I see being able to sustain a divergent development effort which could match Google might come from China.

And I don't see that as necessarily, or even at all, benign.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834651

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

#80

Post by bobajeff »

jgilias wrote: post #45
bobajeff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well I don't want styling just document structure/description (eg. H1-8, Title, EM, P, IMG, Author, Article, Forum-Post, Search-Result) and yes I want images too so Gemini goes way too far my uses.
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