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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?

#271

Post by encryptluks2 »

gspr wrote: post #234
gsnedders wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Arch has been handling minor releases on Chromium just fine. If Debian is having issues, it is most likely with them trying to backport fixes into antiquated code bases.

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

#272

Post by coffeecat »

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/…

> The same thing has happened to Linux which was ok as long as it was chasing commercial Unix, spawning POSIX even; but look what happened with systemd, wayland, snaps/flatpacks, Docker, k8s, and all the other erratic developments - all the while not a single end-user app was created in the last decade.

Strongly disagree. Desktop Linux is better than it's ever been before, and not at all comparable to the degenerate hellhole that is the modern web.

systemd isn't perfect, but I think it's an improvement from traditional init. If you prefer the simplicity of traditional init systems, then you're free to use a non-systemd distro. Wayland is a much-needed modernization and simplification of the graphics stack, and again, nobody's forcing you to use it - X11 won't disappear any time soon. Snap, Flatpak, Docker, etc aren't exactly my cup of tea either, but again, nobody's forcing us to use them. Debian, Arch, etc are chugging along just fine. Meanwhile, PipeWire is a significant improvement compared to bare ALSA or Pulse+Jack, and iwd is a significant improvement compared to wpa_supplicant+NetworkManager.

As for new end-user applications, how about Sway?

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

#273

Post by kitsunesoba »

asddubs wrote: post #150
pilif wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason they disallow Chromium and Mozilla is they want their users locked into their environment and they want to leverage that substantial locked-in user base to dictate terms That's one reason, but not the only reason. 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. T…

battery life is another stated reason I believe.

It’s a big one. Google and Mozilla don’t prioritize efficiency, and it shows in the difference in battery life between using Safari and Chrome or Firefox on macOS.

While users can choose their primary browser, they have no control over what embedded browsers third party apps use, and so if embedding Chromium becomes popular in third party apps it will unavoidably cut the battery life of many if not most users.

When/if Apple starts allowing third party engines on iOS, I think they should require engines to meet minimum efficiency levels to prevent this issue. As a bonus, it’ll allow savvy laptop users to use community builds of desktop Chromium/Firefox with iOS efficiency compliance flags switched on if they want to extend the battery lives of their laptops by an hour or two.

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

#274

Post by kmeisthax »

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…

SWF is a compact format, but that doesn't get you an efficient Flash Player. Apple put in a lot of work to make HTML battery efficient and usable on a phone, and Adobe didn't[0] do the same with Flash. In fact, Apple more or less begged Adobe like four times to make Flash work well on phones! Adobe wanted to push that work onto their customers instead of putting work into making every Flash movie ever authored work good on a phone.

The real bullshit about the Jobs Flash memo wasn't that it was justifying not shipping Flash Player on phones, but that it was justifying banning apps that used any third-party developer tool. Adobe had decided to just ship a packaging tool that let you stick a SWF and Flash Player into an iOS app; which Jobs considered to be a way to pollute the App Store with garbage apps. Except this wasn't a ban of one specific developer tool, it applied to everything that wasn't entirely C, C++, Objective-C, or JavaScript[1]. This only lasted about 3 months because...

1. A lot of mobile game developers were already using scripting tools that violated the new rule, and the games they were shipping were not garbage

2. The FTC was threatening to sue Apple

After that, Apple caved completely. In fact, if you've played iPhone games, you've probably already used Flash Player on iPhone. Jobs' fear was mostly unfounded because developers absolutely could make performant mobile games in Flash and ship them as apps. The problem was that they had to work around all of Flash's legacy crap to get there.

[0] Safari has several UI affordances for mobile web usage that Flash never got. Notably, those "cutting edge floating menus" still work because Safari treats finger touches as either a hover or a click, and picks between the two based on how the page changes when it simulates a hover.

Furthermore, browsers around this time were moving to GPU compositing internally, but Flash has always been built around a particularly quirky scanline renderer. Getting that to work on GPUs was apparently too much for Adobe, and even Ruffle has rendering problems caused by it.

[1] The language in the developer agreement was "originally written", so no, transpiling doesn't get you out of this.

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

#275

Post by kypro »

Has Microsoft ever spoken about why they decided to go with Chromium over say Mozilla Quantum?

Microsoft must have realised that picking Chromium would dramatically increase the odds of a Chromium-only web? On the surface I'd have thought it would make more sense for Microsoft to support the Mozilla Quantum project. Perhaps they just wanted to take the easy route though. Chromium is certainly more popular and has Google's backing. I understand why so many projects use it.

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

#276

Post by shadowofneptune »

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?…

You cannot escape the politics of browsers by going to WebAssembly, because that's where WebAssembly was born. To use features outside of the original WASM spec, you have to consult a table and perhaps use a polyfill, like with CSS or JS features. Browser implementers have a large influence on the direction of the VM. For example, around a year into the original spec's development, it switched from being based on an abstract syntax tree to being based on a stack in a decision made by the browser teams [1]. A big change like that, a year in! The s-expressions in the text format are an artifact of that period, since tools already relied on their existence for optimization.

Anyone who writes a compiler or engine for WebAssembly is going to have to deal with the mess of web standards, unfortunately.

1. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/755

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

#277

Post by withinboredom »

corrral wrote: post #259
withinboredom wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't change their incentives. They might make a nice browser, for you. On every other OS, Apple's software is so slow as to be borderline useless. Watching iTunes struggle to download album art is almost as entertaining as listening to the music.

I do use a MBP daily, and the software there is amazing. But seeing that their software barely works outside of their platform, it's a miracle they have any customers at all.

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

#278

Post by kitsunesoba »

kypro wrote: post #275

Has Microsoft ever spoken about why they decided to go with Chromium over say Mozilla Quantum? Microsoft must have realised that picking Chromium would dramatically increase the odds of a Chromium-only web? On the surface I'd have thought it would make more sense for Microsoft to support the Mozilla Quantum project. Perhaps they just wanted to take the easy route though. Chromium is certainly more popular and has Goo…

It most likely has to do with XULRunner being non-optional with Firefox/Gecko. Blink is more like WebKit in terms of playing nice with other UI toolkits.

Mozilla killing off support for embedding Gecko in other UI toolkits was a massive footgun, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.

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

#280

Post by dredmorbius »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #263
megaman821 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd be among that number.
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