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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?

#221

Post by admax88qqq »

justcodin wrote: post #168
tannhaeuser wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

Javascript sucks. CSS is misunderstood.

JavaScript is misunderstood, CSS sucks.

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

#222

Post by gsnedders »

Closi wrote: post #93
guerrilla wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

… and are a member of … holding more seats than Apple and Google combined … and more than four times the vote share of Mozilla … As an example, Google holds 18 of 39 seats on the Web Assembly Working Group. This means that if they whip their seats, they only need 2 additional votes to pass anything.

> As an example, Google holds 18 of 39 seats on the Web Assembly Working Group. This means that if they whip their seats, they only need 2 additional votes to pass anything.

That's making big assumption: that decisions are made by votes, and those votes are done purely based on participation.

And they're not. For decisions within the WG, they're normally done by some notion of rough-consensus (frequently, lack of significant dissent); actual votes within most WGs are relatively rare.

For decisions at the W3C level, it is admittedly done by votes, but it's one-Member, one-vote, so in that case all W3C Member are equivalent in power: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla all have their votes count as one.

This is pretty normal within industrial standards development organisations: voting happens at an organisational level, representing the industrial members, not based on individuals participating from those members. (There certainly are negatives associated with a disproportionate number being from a single organisation, but that's mostly related to disputes in meetings ending up with one individual arguing against ten.)

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

#223

Post by hiccuphippo »

bobajeff wrote: post #80
jgilias wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I'd really like an HTML subset without CSS or Javascript.

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

#224

Post by _ea1k »

dblohm7 wrote: post #187
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #161

Earlier 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?

Because market share can change. Its a statement of the past when we are talking about the future.

Put another way, would Google have had an easier time building Chrome and Chromium if IE had been 100% open source when Chrome was started?

Remember, it wasn't that long ago that IE dominated, and MS still has many of the same advantages now that they had back then.

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

#225

Post by gsnedders »

gspr wrote: post #204
jacooper wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is, AOSP on its own is unusable, but Chromium Is.

It's pretty close to being unusable as an open source code base. Look at Debian's struggles with maintaining security fixes for Chromium. Sure, the license is open, and Chromium is therefore technically open. But it's dangerously close to not being usable in any real practical meaning of "open source". The way things are, we do indeed stand on the precipice of a Chromium-only web with—for all practical intents and pu…

> Look at Debian's struggles with maintaining security fixes for Chromium.

I can't see anything about this anywhere giving any reasons; is it simply that they're released frequently and there aren't really any long-lived branches?

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

#226

Post by nemothekid »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #156
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #63

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/…

>all the while not a single end-user app was created in the last decade.

This is the tragedy of the Linux Desktop. The problem with F/OSS is the "Free" part (as in "Beer"); as long as users resist paying for software, you will never have a rich enough ecosystem to develop that very software. The problems you list with "systemd, wayland, snaps/flatpacks, Docker, k8s, and all the other erratic developments" is that they are largely meant to solve corporate problems.

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

#228

Post by allknowingfrog »

damnesian wrote: post #215

The 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 no…

That's a really interesting observation. It doesn't seem to be enough anymore to offer a mobile-first web experience. Users expect mobile apps, and your perceived legitimacy will suffer if you don't offer one (even if it's just a wrapper around the same basic web technologies). Maybe we worry too much about the future of the browser.

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

#229

Post by moron4hire »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #90
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…

>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. I wonder which company grew their browser marketshare through ruthless advertising on their a…

> then began to implement their websites with alpha versions of their proposed web standards that only their browser properly implemented

That is the standardization process. The W3C won't ratify a standard that does not have draft implementations in the wild.

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

#230

Post by NoGravitas »

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).

It's not that different a situation. Chromium is open-source, but it's not community-based. If Google wants to do a rug-pull on Brave, they can do so at any time. Not as trivially as if it were closed-source, but not that difficult, either. I doubt Brave have the resources to maintain security updates, much less keep up with standards, on an abandoned browser engine codebase.
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