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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?

#231

Post by fauigerzigerk »

dredmorbius wrote: post #210
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My point is that Open Source of itself is not sufficient 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.

You write here "And I didn't claim that it was", but you'd claimed initially "That's a completely different situation". ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834544 ) I'm not seeing your more recent statement as consistent with the first, given my own response: "Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little." Again: Microsoft's loc…

>You write here "And I didn't claim that it was", but you'd claimed initially "That's a completely different situation".

Yes, and I stand by that. Chromium being open source changes the situation completely. It makes no sense to compare the IE era to any Chromium monopoly without even mentioning that Chromium is open source.

>I'm not seeing your more recent statement as consistent with the first, given my own response: "Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little."

I don't see any inconsistency. I simply disagree with you. It matters a great deal that Chromium is open source. It changes the politics in the industry. It changes the economics. It changes the regulatory situation. It changes the facts on the ground in terms of available browsers.

I do get your point though, and it's not that I disagree with everything you're saying. I just disagree with the claim that open source Chromium "means very little".

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

#232

Post by megaman821 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #74
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).

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…

Why don't these criticisms apply to Linux? The relationship between Linux Core and the Flavors of Linux seems to work well. Edge, Brave, Opera and more are all using the Chromium engine. If Google went off the deep-end, they would easily have enough resources to maintain a fork.

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

#233

Post by esclerofilo »

paol wrote: post #96
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…

Exactly. Even further, without market share it means very little. You could fork and fund a parallel browser, but if it has no market share then it has no influence on the web. That's where Firefox is right now, unfortunately.

Maybe if Mozilla had just forked Chromium in ~2015, its market share wouldn't have gotten as low as it is right now.

I've told some people to switch to Firefox. A lot of them switch back to Chrome after a while, simply because it's faster.

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

#234

Post by gspr »

gsnedders wrote: post #225
gspr wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My understanding is that the Chromium folks handle security issues with: "version x.y.z is vulnerable, please update to (x+7).(y+25).(z+2), as it is the only supported version – the fact that the diff from x.y.z is 100 kLOC and touches mostly completely unrelated things is your problem".

This isn't sustainable open source development in any practical sense. Sure, it's technically open source, but nearly useless for anything but consumption straight from Google. I'd say that that makes it practically not open source.

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

#235

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

It's a blessing and a curse, because since Google only builds web and mobile apps, it means their web apps that require specific features will have to be updated in the browser, so indirectly we got amazing tech like Slack and Discord out of it.

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

#236

Post by torginus »

I'm kind of torn on this - first, I can clearly see the dangers as well as anyone else, but considering the reality of the situation, the only browser engine with significant market share is Webkit/Safari.

Most webdevs I know consider Safari to be the new IE - they often lag years behind implementing features that are key for new capabilities like WebAssembly multithreading - and it's not hard to see why - the web is a primary competitor to their App Store business.

On the other hand, I feel like the browser is almost done. With WebAssembly and WebGPU and a bunch of other stuff, I can think of very little in terms of capabilities that need to be added to browsers in the future.

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

#237

Post by darinf »

A side-effect of a Chromium-only web is that it gives the Chrome team at Google less incentive to invest in the web platform. It used to be a way to differentiate Chrome from other browsers. Now-a-days that is no longer the case.

Competition is a great way to drive innovation. What will motivate innovation on the web platform going forward? Will there be stagnation? Will another company emerge to push the web forward?

What will this mean for companies that have enjoyed all of the innovation on the web platform in recent years? How much longer will it take for bugs to get fixed?

This will not be a sudden shift. It will happen gradually.

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

#238

Post by superkuh »

Uh, it's in the name. A Chromium only web is a web controlled by Chrome which is a web controlled by google. It's laughable that these dudes maintaining a fork think they're in control and doing open source when they're basically just eating google's table scraps.

The only way to stop this is personal choice: don't use Chrome or Chrome derived software. There's no other actions any human person can take with more impact.

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

#239

Post by NoGravitas »

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 Firefox also doesn't follow suit (to some extent). But Apple is the only organization with any influence because of their captive market.

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

#240

Post by AshleysBrain »

I think it's very unlikely that the web will end up Chromium-only.

macOS-specific browser share numbers are hard to come by, but on our own moderately sized website we see about 60% of macOS users choosing Safari. Even if iOS allows other browser engines, presumably a similarly large number of iOS users would also choose Safari, either because it's the default or because they like it. So regardless of what happens with iOS regulation, it seems likely there will always be significant Safari usage on the web.

So then the only way we end up with a Chromium-only web is firstly assuming a worst-case scenario for Firefox essentially falling out of use, but its usage on desktop appears to have stabilised around 7-8%. Secondly Apple would then need to decide to ditch WebKit for Chromium. I can't imagine they'll ever do that. Apple have a strong desire to do things their own way and keep full control over how their browser works. So I think we're a long way from a Chromium-only web.

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