Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

mnot.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 356 posts

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

#261

Post by account42 »

joshuaissac wrote: post #23
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…

What was Mozilla supposed to do? Google could advertise their browser to everyone who used Google Search, just like how Microsoft could with Windows. Mozilla did not have any products with that kind of reach.

For one, Mozilla could start empowering the user again instead of trying to ape Chrome in every way. If the only reason anyone would want to use Firefox is to prevent Chrome from being the only browser then that is on Mozilla.

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

#262

Post by tannhaeuser »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #172
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/…

I don't think that's a failure of FOSS, just a scoping problem. Open source is a good thing and a contributor to a strong ecosystem, but it's not sufficient by itself.

The problem is that we're inclined to ignore the nonsense and great destroyer of content that is the web just because it's implemented using F/OSS.

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

#263

Post by kitsunesoba »

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.

For what it’s worth, there are those of us who don’t think it’s great for GNU/Linux to be overwhelmingly dominant in the FOSS operating system sphere. It’s a wonderful project that we’re fortunate to have, but monocultures are rarely healthy.

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

#264

Post by corrral »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #124
threeseed wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream This is as ridiculous today as it has been every year since the iPhone began. Mobile web apps are terrible and despite all the years of promises that "feature X" will fix this nothing has changed. And you can't blame Apple because Google et al could easily have made mobile web apps work on Android. If you want to make a mobile web app the…

You do realize web apps can be packaged up and distributed on the Play Store and work just like regular apps on Android, and so YouTube Music among others are already web apps. Pretending like no one is interested when we're talking about probably close to 100 million users or more for a single web app is disingenuous. Apple is a walled garden and their cultist will make up any excuse to not have to admit so.

I don't think anyone argues that developers and companies don't want to make web apps. Clearly, many of them are interested in that.

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

#265

Post by HWR_14 »

jacooper wrote: post #157
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Oh good, I look forward to the continued ad-blocking Manifest v2 provides after Chrome sunsets it.

And we still have to see if other browsers will block the Topics API spyware or not.

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

#266

Post by corrral »

andrekandre wrote: post #186
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…

> 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, and because they are used all over the web a new browser maker has little choice except forking chromium or firefox. could web assembly be a way out?…

Accessibility and UI inconsistency are going to be serious problems with that. And UI inconsistency's already the curse of the Web—definitely not something that needs to get worse.

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

#267

Post by corrral »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #131
HWR_14 wrote: post #2

"Hi, you seem to be browsing without being signed into Google with your government verified identity. Please do so to continue seeing the ads, I mean the internet"

Chromium is open source. You're confusing Chromium with Chrome.

That works until Chrome (not open-source derivatives) tops 85% or 90% of market share and the entire Web (by which I mean Cloudflare and AWS) start CAPTCHAing browsers that don't present a Chrome-proprietary user session token.

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

#268

Post by kitsunesoba »

native_samples wrote: post #205
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #192

Earlier 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…

Flash didn’t have to be inefficient, but Adobe’s implementation certainly was. I remember the Mac version of Flash pegging the CPUs of PPC G5 and Core 2/Core 2 Duo based machines, turning them into space heaters until the user navigated away from the page containing flash elements. For the vast majority of what Flash got used for, that was in no way justifiable, particularly on devices like laptops and smartphones.

HTML5 by and large didn’t have this problem. Was it possible to write a grossly inefficient HTML5 site? Yes, of course, but it wasn’t the default state, as evidenced by how much happier those same machines mentioned in the last paragraph were when running e.g. the HTML5 YouTube player instead of the flash one.

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

#269

Post by encryptluks2 »

threeseed wrote: post #165
encryptluks2 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can take a mobile web site, wrap it in a browser component and publish it to the App Store. Now I will lose one of the advantages of PWA e.g. remote updates but everything else I can do e.g. push notifications, access device APIs. 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 wi…

I think you're ignoring the fact that App Store didn't allow PWAs until fairly recently, among a bunch of other things. Mobile web apps aren't slow or clunky or feature-poor and you can design your interface however you want now... except on Apple products. It sounds like your issue is the poor support from Apple, which is exactly what I was getting at. I'd encourage you to read through the blog post I linked here:

https://blog.pwabuilder.com/posts/publish-your-pwa-to-the-io...

> PWAs remain a second-class citizen on iOS

> PWABuilder doesn’t guarantee that your app will be accepted into Apple’s App Store.

> In 2019, Apple released new guidelines for HTML5 apps in the App Store

2019 isn't close to a decade.

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

#270

Post by woojoo666 »

andrekandre wrote: post #186
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…

> 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, and because they are used all over the web a new browser maker has little choice except forking chromium or firefox. could web assembly be a way out?…

I feel like the point of standards to to provide more structure on top of an execution layer. Think about the browser's file picker dialog. Now imagine if every browser had their own file picker API, and each website only bothered to support one of those APIs. Now as you browse the web, the file picker only works on some websites but not others
Post reply on HN