What will a Chromium-only Web look like? • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by FartyMcFarter » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #235

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.

Some of Google's web apps (for example: Stadia) only work on Chrome, so this doesn't always help anyone else.

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

#292

Post by Closi » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

guerrilla wrote: post #130

Closi wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… 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.

I think you meant Apple and Microsoft combined, right[1]? 1. https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/wasm/participants

Oops, yes!

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

#293

Post by mildred593 » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #247

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).

Is someone maintaining a significantly different version of the chromium engine that I'm not aware of? Google can always change the license on Chromium as well which would require a hard fork and basically you end up with diverging versions. No we need multiple (or at least two browser engines) browsers.

No, Chrome came from WebKit and from KHTML. The code does not belongs to Google at all and they can't re-license it.

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

#294

Post by longrod » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

Web browsers have become huge monolithic applications we all nowadays preach against. So much so that other monoliths get built on top of them. (I am taking the dictionary definition of monolith here: a massive structure).

Many of the solutions given in this thread are similar to ones we give to someone who wants to escape from the monolith mess. Namely, move towards a very slim core, make everything as modular as possible etc etc. And the problems towards such an approach are the same as well i.e., what do we do about the legacy stuff?

The important question here is: what can be done better if we start from scratch? The main issue I see with browsers is that they have become so big that building a new one in a reasonable amount of time is next to impossible. This makes all the open standards pointless because no one can do anything with them except the few already established browsers.

Unfortunately there's no clean way out of this.

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

#295

Post by pornel » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #114

pornel wrote: post #49

Even if Google was an absolute saint without a trillion-dollar ad business, there's still a problem of "bug-compatibility". Without a second browser engine to test pages in, it's really hard to know what is a bug and what is intentional. Devs don't know all the specs by heart. They write whatever happens to work for them, but sometimes they accidentally depend on obscure edge cases in the implementation that were nev…

> there's still a problem of "bug-compatibility" They aren't even bugs. The spec allows for interpretations.

When you have a monoculture, it doesn't matter how good the spec is.

Even if the spec was as precise as a source code of another browser, that's not what devs are writing for, so code in the wild web will inevitably deviate from the spec.

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

#296

Post by phendrenad2 » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

If Mozilla and the various other non-megacorp browsers (Vivaldi, Brave, Opera) banded together and built a governance structure for Chromium, similar to the Linux Foundation, they could try to stop this fate. But they aren't, and they won't, due to hubris, pride, and jealousy.

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

#297

Post by phendrenad2 » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #122

There's a simple remedy: demand, by antitrust law, that a browser can't be produced by the same party as the one producing content. Forbid bundling of browsers and/or offering browsers for free.

Which part of antitrust law allows that insanity?

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

#298

Post by giantrobot » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

marosgrego wrote: post #227

http://www.netsurf-browser.org

Unfortunately NetSurf (and other scratch written browsers) are just a demonstration of the trend of Chromification of the web. Outside of old or decidedly accessible sites NetSurf isn't usable on a lot of the web. Too many sites require too much JavaScript for a scratch built non-JIT JavaScript engine to run.

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

#299

Post by fullstop » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #196

paol wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and the grandparents are thinking of a slightly earlier time. Yes IE jumped over Netscape massively in technical terms. Then Netscape died an MS, having mission accomplished, basically stopped touching the browser.

The problem wasn’t per se that MS stopped (having a stable platform that doesn’t change continuously is in principle a good thing), it was most of all the many quirks, inconsistencies and bugs that IE had.

Even among browsers with the same version numbers! I recall array.push or array.pop missing on some Windows PCs with identical IE6 versions. It had to do with the upgrade path that the PC took.

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

#300

Post by darinf » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

resoluteteeth wrote: post #256

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 real…

Yes they can act unilaterally and with Chrome OS and many popular web apps they do have incentive to care about the web. But will that translate to the Chrome organization caring? It doesn’t make Chrome a more attractive browser to users than other browsers also built on Chromium.