161–170 of 356 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that both Brave and Vivaldi were able to disable Google's FlOC within a very short period of time is evidence against both (a) and (b) in my view. Even more so the fact that Brave was able to build an alternative ad network on top of Chromium.
Brave and Vivaldi fall into the “don’t matter” category. Call me when a Chromium fork displaces Chromium.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chromium is open source. You're confusing Chromium with Chrome.
It's like confusing "open-source" Android, AOSP and Play Services: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on... >While Android is open, it's more of a "look but don't touch" kind of open. You're allowed to contribute to Android and allowed to use it for little hobbies, but in nearly every area, the deck is stacked against anyone trying to use Android without Google's blessing. The second you try to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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." If they really cared about security then they could subject their browser to an independent security audit, and require the same audit be passed for any other browser that's allowed on their platform. Why don't they do this?
> Why don't they do this? Because the idea that all you need to do to ensure software is secure is hire an expensive consultant is ridiculous. Especially with a web browser which are highly complex pieces of software.
Taking Apple's word for their browser being secure and other browsers not is just as if not even more ridiculous.
What fair, independent way of determining browser security would you suggest be used instead of an audit?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Web apps can be packaged up and distributed on App Store as well. People tried it with PhoneGap for years and it failed. I even built some of them. It has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with the experience being objectively terrible. So bad in fact that even Google gave up trying and built Flutter.
https://blog.pwabuilder.com/posts/publish-your-pwa-to-the-io... > While WebKit is making progress on PWA support, at the time of this writing, PWAs remain a second-class citizen on iOS. The iOS App Store’s support for PWAs is non-existent, requiring a web view-based solution like PWABuilder’s. > Additionally, because iOS doesn’t allow 3rd party browser engines, your PWA is limited to WebKit’s PWA capabilities, which…
This has been available for close to a decade.
Guess what. Users hate it. They hate mobile web apps and their slow, clunky, feature-poor, non-native interfaces and for that reason they will also hate PWAs.
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.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
That's exactly where F/OSS has failed us big time. Just because it's "open source" doesn't mean browsers have to aggregate to whole operating systems. There was once this idea, you know, of exchanging documents and links via TCP/IP, and it was good. Then came platforms and browser wars, and the piece of crap that is JS and CSS along with them. In the end our only way out of this is to start over with a decentralized/…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 poi…
And I didn't claim that it was. My point was merely that Chromium being open source changes the equation pretty fundamentally compared to the IE situation.
Whether it's enough to make a Chromium monopoly consistent with an open web, I really don't know. There are very good reasons to be sceptical.