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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?

#111

Post by wdb »

remus wrote: post #107
wdb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think Google already does whatever it wants similar to what Microsoft did. They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit.

> They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit. Safari definitely does not just follow suit (see https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareC... for example).

Luckily they don't :) In my opinion Chromium/Chrome is the new IE and not Safari

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

#112

Post by Ygg2 »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #43
ecmascript wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having to use and help family with Android phones. Just get Firefox mobile and install ad blocker. PiHole is good and dandy, but won't work on mobile net or public wifi.

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

#113

Post by threeseed »

leononame wrote: post #72
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…

> The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream

This is as ridiculous today as it has been every year since the iPhone began.

Mobile web apps are terrible and despite all the years of promises that "feature X" will fix this nothing has changed. And you can't blame Apple because Google et al could easily have made mobile web apps work on Android.

If you want to make a mobile web app then go right ahead. Apple isn't stopping you. But just don't be surprised when no user is interested in it.

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

#114

Post by threeseed »

pornel wrote: post #49

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 nev…

> there's still a problem of "bug-compatibility"

They aren't even bugs. The spec allows for interpretations.

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

#115

Post by Yizahi »

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?

BNP bank site rarely but regularly breaks on FF (just shows white screen). At least one payment processor had disabled input fields, so not working. At least two railway portlas in two different countries effectively didn't work for some time because station dropdowns were broken and you couldn't proceed next without selecting. Just today I found a bug in Jira, when external integrations don't work on FF. Stadia doesn't work on FF by design. Skype web doesn't work on FF by design. Streaming services block streaming high def stream to FF because it lacks DRM unlike Chrome clones.

All of this I saw in the last few years, some of that is still valid today.

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

#116

Post by alcover »

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 can’t do a grand reboot
But a partial one, yes. Let's make new 'virtuous' sites using only a core subset of HTML/JS and fast and energy-efficient.

(inb4 XKCD) Yes, like a new standard.

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

#117

Post by threeseed »

remus wrote: post #107
wdb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think Google already does whatever it wants similar to what Microsoft did. They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit.

> They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit. Safari definitely does not just follow suit (see https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareC... for example).

And I am eternally grateful to them for it.

Many of those features can be used to comprehensively fingerprint your device allowing advertisers to track you across sites even without cookies. Forget about any laws or privacy efforts it would all be moot. And many of us value privacy far too much.

Apple even implemented the "do not track" API and advertisers completely ignored it.

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

#118

Post by gjadi »

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?

Until recently[1], jitsi was not working properly on Firefox.

Which was very frustrating given they are both free software :(

1: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758#issuecomment...

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

#119

Post by flenserboy »

Then it will be time for a true replacement for website layout & transmission to be developed. HTML is fine for what it is, but bolting CSS on top, then JavaScript, etc., etc., is simply a mess. Better can be done, and this could be the impetus for it, to keep the world at least somewhat out of Google's clutches.

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

#120

Post by dredmorbius »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #99
dredmorbius wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, mi…

>Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Open source is that option. The economics of starting from scratch vs starting from Chromium's latest commit are fundamentally different. I'm not saying that it's easy, only that it is not remotely comparable to the IE situation.

The problem is that Google controls both the overwhelmingly dominant browser and the standard.

MSIE was bypassed not by a code fork of MSIE (itself originally based on the Spyglass browser, which was a fork of the NSCA's Mosaic codebase), but by independent implementations of an HTML-standard parser. Microsoft had some influence over Web development (noteably through ActiveX) but far less than Google has now.

My point is that Open Source of itself is not sufficient, and moreover simply is not viable. Glibly asserting that it is ... is utterly unrealistic.

Though the alternative of forking a Web-like markup and transport, as Gemini is attempting to do, is one option. For other technologies which have become sufficiently baroque, similar worse-is-better alternate paths have been pursued.

Otherwise, this is an antitrust issue, and Google very badly need busting.

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