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?
China is more app centered. They can't access half the web anyways.
What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
211–220 of 356 posts
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced that JavaScript is the difficult part. HTML/CSS rendering seems far more challenging.
Servo seemed to have pretty much got rendering working. I'm no expert but I feel like the hundreds of JS apis contribute a lot to the complexity. Just looking at the list here looks like it would take decades for a single person to complete https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
Decades of work for a single person shouldn't take longer than 3 months for one of these mythical "100x" developers.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your argument is based purely on market share then it's basically a tautology.
How can market share not be part of the discussion concerning who controls the web? You wrote: > The fact that both Brave and Vivaldi were able to disable Google's FlOC within a very short period of time Okay, they disabled some stuff. That isn’t a fundamental divergence from the upstream project. The original argument was that Google wouldn’t control the web in a Chromium monoculture because anybody can just fork it…
>How can market share not be part of the discussion concerning who controls the web?
Of course market share has to be part of the discussion. But the way in which you used it seems tautological. Also, market share affects alternative browser engines just as much as Chromium based browsers.
>The original argument was that Google wouldn’t control the web in a Chromium monoculture because anybody can just fork it.
That wasn't my argument though. I don't know if Google wouldn't control the web in a Chromium monoculture. It very well might. My argument was that the IE era does not serve as a valid historical precedent because the fact that Chromium is open source changes the situation in very significant ways.
>A Chromium fork can only sever itself from Google’s control if it is not taking patches from upstream (ie, Google)
I don't think Chromium based browsers can completely extricate themselves from Google's control. But this is not a black and white question. Alternative browser engines cannot do that either.
You make a good point that web APIs are a better test for Google's control than ad tech. But this kind of control affects independent browser engines just as much as Chromium based ones. If Chrome doesn't implement a particular web API then the API is dead in the water. That's where market share matters.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#214Earlier 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?
I don't think an audit will be able to even coming close to validate the security of a piece of software with the complexity of a browser. As it stands now, WebKit and the processes hosting it (Safari, WKWebView) are probably the most complex piece of software running on our iOS devices and as we can see, they are full of security flaws. But so are the engines of all other browser makers. Audits is not what uncovers…
Having an engine monoculture doesn't actually reduce attack surface. People don't visit each web page with every browser they have installed on their device.
What it does is hold part of the system constant, so that attackers know ahead of time that iOS users will be running WebKit. Reducing variability makes attacks easier and increases the value of WebKit vulnerabilities.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#215The future of the web is not in a browser.
A significant part of the internet already thrives outside of the traditional browser sphere. Apps and mobile are the future. Eventually no one will be using web browsers. Or the internet web browsers serve up will be like cable TV or AOL: a zombified booby trap of nothing but ads, scraped content and links eager to serve you ransomware.
Maybe I've read too many dystopian novels though.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think an audit will be able to even coming close to validate the security of a piece of software with the complexity of a browser. As it stands now, WebKit and the processes hosting it (Safari, WKWebView) are probably the most complex piece of software running on our iOS devices and as we can see, they are full of security flaws. But so are the engines of all other browser makers. Audits is not what uncovers…
"Audits is not what uncovers security flaws. Detailed research, fuzzing and effectively unlimited time to do both on the side of white-hat hackers and unlimited budget and criminal energy on the side of black-hats is what does." Audits aren't supposed to be an ultimate guarantee of security, but provide a minimum, independently judged hurdle that has to be passed to get on the platform. If there's a better, independe…
What do you think an audit is, and why do you think you can even approach a useful one on a codebase the size of WebKit? It's not realistic.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, it's still worth doing though. That's one of the reasons for alt, longdesc, and aria-describedby attributes.
What image formats will be support? Plain old 256 color uncompressed bitmaps? Why leave an existing protocol and easy accessibility just for a few images.
I'm not sure I know how to explain it. Images just seem a basic part of content. I just don't think it's acceptable to have to open up an external application to view images in a document.
Any way I'm not against image galleries and video sites either. I just want control over how I consume those. If I want the page read to me it should be possible. If I want to consume it on a tiny 2x2" e-ink display that should be doable.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a smartphone battery that lasts more than an hour is also a pretty good reason. It’s like the skepticism over the Steve Jobs “Flash” memo… why do nerds have such a hard time accepting that Apple might actually be sincere about wanting to make a decent product?
It's because there's nothing magical about HTML that makes it more battery efficient than Flash was. Quite the opposite really - Flash is a compact binary format designed specifically for high graphics performance in an era when HTML4 thought floating menus was cutting edge. The Jobs Flash memo was crystal clear about why Flash was being booted off his platform. It was to avoid "a third party layer of software coming…
There’s nothing “magical”, but Safari uses a lot less battery than Chrome.
Safari developers optimize for battery life whereas Chrome developers seem not to care about client-side resource use.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#219The 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.
You mean like AMP?
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#220The 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...
A body of web standards they are still trying to expand right now.
The first step in saving the web needs to be to stop adding so many new standards that are only needed for "apps".