81–90 of 356 posts
> I recently heard from a well-placed contact that “many in the Chromium community are arguing for a Chromium-only Web.” Seems quite an article for something that's founded on just an unsourced and unquotable rumor.
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…
Really close to gnome 3 spirit, it continuously removed user features and personnalisation.
Gnome 3 really epitomized that but it's a general trend of linux on desktop catching up to proprietary os in first 2 decades culminating with the bonus coolness of compiz fusion.
And then the 2010-2020 were most of the time was spend changing the technologies (removing XUL,going to system-d,wayland) and the user experience suffered.
I think open software has a special responsibility to empower users not only through programming but also through their interface, it can be extension or extensive settings but it has to.
It ends up making more practical, feature reach software and open source needs that because we don't always all the resources to make the most polished software.
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…
what exactly is the benefit of having a byzantine set of standards in the first place? Like why not just have a standard and not dick around with it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
That's one reason, but not the only reason. Security is another big one in that the WebKit process is running with privileges that Apple does not want to award to any other app process on the platform, much less a third-party one.
They also want to make sure that if they fix the next security flaw what will undoubtedly be reported in WebKit, that all the apps with an embedded browser will get the fix and won't continue to be vulnerable due to them not updating whatever version of Chromium they were embedding.
Of course, between sandboxing and not allowing JIT compilation, those vulnerabilities couldn't do do much harm, but that embedded Chromium also wouldn't be much fun to use.
Which means, if you let me make a prediction of the future, that when Apple is forced into allowing other browser engines, articles will be written about how Apple is complying by the letter of the law but not the spirit by "seriously hampering 3rd party engines" compared to their own by now allowing JIT compilation.
If they had to then also allow those 3rd party engines to do JIT compilation and bypass the sandbox in means that browser engines need to, then we'll be in a much worse position security wise.
We'll see how this is going to play out, but I'm pretty sure exerting control is not the only reason for Apples' stance.
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).
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.
> I’m not what that looks like but it should be cleaner, simpler, open and blockchain-free. You’re asking for an open network and then putting restrictions on individuals right away by saying they can’t use blockchains on it. Some people want to use blockchains (or any other technology) and an open network shouldn’t put restrictions on how people participate.
This is why I'll use firefox until it's gone. Considering the push for mv3, I'd rather have a functioning ad blocker that actually blocks ads instead of having pages 100% work 100% of the time
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…
>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.
I wonder which company grew their browser marketshare through ruthless advertising on their already-a-monopoly search engine, then began to compete with the other browsers by purposefully breaking their websites on other browsers (all by accident of course, hundreds of times), then began to implement their websites with alpha versions of their proposed web standards that only their browser properly implemented, leaving other browsers with a dreadful polyfill that had horrible performance on purpose, only to then basically force their proposals through the web standards body that they had made because they couldn't control the W3C, leaving everyone having to follow such great APIs as WebUSB or other badly-implemented-but-only-by-them flavor of the day API, all the way to forcing dreadful protocols like QUIC and HTTP/3, justified by their need to save up three bytes per request and making the user's experience better while they serve 2MB of tracking javascript and ads through DNS-cloaked servers.
I think the name was like... Gogle ? Golgool ? Can't remember.