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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?

#251

Post by ciphol »

megaman821 wrote: post #232
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…

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.

If one Linux distribution had 90% of Linux users, that might be a good comparison.

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

#252

Post by tannhaeuser »

admax88qqq wrote: post #221
justcodin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript sucks. CSS is misunderstood.

JavaScript is misunderstood, CSS sucks.

You don't know how much CSS sucks until you understand it. Which is kinda the problem. CSS, its lack of formal semantics, self-serving spec process (as W3C's last holdout), and aura of Stockholm's is bordering on the criminal. There's no comparable tech as CSS that is as directly associated with the slip of the web into the hands of "browser vendors", for professionals and laymen alike.

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

#253

Post by fauigerzigerk »

skinnymuch wrote: post #188
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can make some specific features of any forks useless, not all of them as the FlOC situation has demonstrated. But the same is true for features of alternative browser engines that don't gain enough market share.

This stuff isn’t that big of a deal in the overall scope. Not when compared to seeing how Google controls Android which has a longer history of others trying to get away from it. It didn’t work. Android is even more entrenched in most of the world sans China. These sorts of arguments probably help cement Google’s power. By giving the guise that the open source part of the equation can be the key to usurping Google’s…

I think Android is very different, because the open source parts of Android (AOSP) do not constitute a viable OS on their own. The entirety of what we know as Android is simply not open source.

To make matters worse, Google has put in place some legal roadblocks against device vendors using AOSP in markets where others can fill in for some of the proprietary Google parts.

These requirements are subject to regulatory action and I'm almost 100% certain that they will be deemed anticompetitive and therefore illegal.

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

#254

Post by ohgodplsno »

moron4hire wrote: post #229
ohgodplsno wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

No. The standardization process does not call for you to make your public facing, extremely visited website use Polymer/ShadowDOMv0. You can implement your API and make a demo website/offer a beta test on your website so that people can try it out.

Making it the default and making the fallback only reasonably accessible by installing an extension that will rewrite your links (that all send back to the alpha-using version), causing every browser that isn't Chrome to slow down to a crawl while you happily display a "Hey, did you know the web is faster with Chrome?" isn't working through the standardization process, it is weaponizing it to sabotage other browsers.

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

#255

Post by abruzzi »

jmyeet wrote: post #94

Let's break down the browser space: 1. Microsoft: MS was never interested (until it was far too late) in having a standards-compliant, performant browser. It was a spoiler move to keep people Windows dependent. 2. Mozilla: I honestly don't understand what Mozilla is doing other than raising top exec pay while Firefox users go down [1]. As best as I can tell, Mozilla is the Yelp in this situation. Yelp has spent over…

> I don't see us repeating the IE6 era however. The Internet is core to Google's business in a way that it never was to Microsoft.

Depends on what your takeaway from the IE6 era was--if its that MS abandoned development and the web stagnated, then I think you're correct. However if you takeaway was that too much power was concentrated in a single private entity who has the defacto ability to control development and standards and channel them towards their best interests, not the users, then I think it would be the IE6 era all over again.

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

#256

Post by resoluteteeth »

darinf wrote: post #237

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…

> 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.

That's what happened with Internet Explorer but the reason Microsoft was perfectly happy to stall the development of the web once it took over the browser market was because it didn't really have any incentive to use the web in the first place (it was better off if people just used desktop apps), and it only developed IE so that if the internet was going to take over it could be the one in the position to control it.

On the other hand, outside of Android, Google is extremely reliant on the web for its products on desktop and on chromebooks (there used to be chrome os apps and chrome browser apps but they have already been deprecated).

Google actually has an incentive to add new features to try to give PWA's feature parity with desktop apps, so rather than ceasing development, it may be more likely that they start just adding new features that aren't compatible with other browsers.

E.g. they could probably now go back and immediately undeprecate WebSQL and just say, "we don't care what firefox thinks now." If they announced that, they have enough market share that they could probably get people to start using it again and that would immediately break compatibility with firefox.

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

#257

Post by choeger »

I really think that a new browser is possible. The people that worked on Firefox and Chromium over the years learned a lot. Programming languages and tools have improved massively.

That doesn't mean it will be easy, but I have little doubt that with enough pressure, some people will start their own browser from scratch, and some of them will be successful.

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

#258

Post by DangitBobby »

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?

You usually can't tell they are broken until you get to the last part of a multi-part checkout process.

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

#259

Post by corrral »

withinboredom wrote: post #110
remus wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

They have every incentive to NOT implement things to force devs to create apps. If they wanted to create an actual browser vs. bare bones browser, they'd still offer it on other operating systems.

Please. I've been using the Web since '95, and working on the Web nearly as long. Safari's where I do almost all my browsing, work and personal. It's a fine browser. If I could use it on Windows and Linux, I wouldn't hesitate to choose it over Firefox and Chrome and their derivatives.

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

#260

Post by pilif »

pmoriarty wrote: post #193
pilif wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple thinks (and I'm inclined to agree) that no browser engine is safe enough to be on the platform but as there has to be at least one by necessity, they might as well reduce the attack surface by restricting it to a single one that's tightly integrated with the OS security measures and which is updated together with other OS updates.

Following that reasoning there should only be one app of each kind on the platform: an Apple app. Minimize attack surface, minimize choice.

A calendar app provides a much smaller attack surface than a browser. It can also perform good enough without the need for JIT compilation.

As I said in my comment: I believe Safari and the underlying WebKit to be the most complex and most insecure part of iOS by multiple orders of magnitude.

Not adding more of equally complex and demanding pieces does provide a significant reduction of attack surface

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