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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?

#311

Post by resoluteteeth »

darinf wrote: post #300
resoluteteeth wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's the point. They don't need to care if it makes it more attractive than other chromium browsers. They have features they want to use so being able to unilaterally add them benefits them either way.

If they decide to add new amp integration or similar features, for example, that can give them more control of the Internet even if you are using those features through Edge rather than Chrome.

Seeing Google's goal as getting everyone on Chrome is missing the point: it's just as good from their perspective to simply have everyone using chromium based browsers.

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

#312

Post by fauigerzigerk »

giantrobot wrote: post #283
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 respons…

> Yes, and I stand by that. Chromium being open source changes the situation completely. This is just a ridiculous assertion. Blink being Open Source does not change what Google does with the engine. If the web was Blink with a handful of irrelevant Blink forks then the web is Blink. That means whatever stupid specs Google puts forward like WebBluetooth or WebFacialTrackingAttentionMonitor become de facto web technol…

>Blink being Open Source does not change what Google does with the engine.

That's absolutely right, but it's not the point.

What matters is how much investment is required to offer an alternative to Google's Chrome. Does it take billions or does it take mere millions?

Building on top of Chromium means that it takes mere millions. And that changes the situation.

For that to be true, it is not necessary to wrest power from Google when it comes to deciding what does or does not go into Chromium as Google doesn't get to decide what goes into any forks.

Does any of this negate the power that Google currently has over web standards by way of Chrome's overwhelming market share? Certainly not.

What it changes is Google's margin of safety when it comes to imposing truly user hostile technology on everybody or stop investing in the technology.

And I don't mean "user hostile" in the sense that it enrages the HN crowd. I mean user hostile in the sense that many normal users will actually look for better alternatives on their own accord, not for political/advocacy reasons.

The fact that open source Chromium exist makes Google's dominance over the web far less assured than it would otherwise be.

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

#313

Post by jacooper »

anonymousab wrote: post #183
jacooper wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google has added proprietary closed source blobs to chromium in the past and there's little reason they wouldn't do so again when they're the only game in town.

But they arent, chromium forks like brave or edge won't stand and do nothing if something ridiculous happened.

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

#314

Post by jacooper »

gspr wrote: post #204
jacooper wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Its a Debian problem, there is a flatpak version and its working fine.

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

#315

Post by jacooper »

NoGravitas wrote: post #246
jacooper wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AOSP on its own was perfectly usable, in the early days. That frog has been thoroughly boiled.

Pure AOSP is always unusable, because it doesn't have the kernel drivers for any device.

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

#316

Post by jacooper »

HWR_14 wrote: post #265
jacooper wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to see what will happens when V2 dies. I'm using brave so this won't change anything for me really.

As for the Topics API, It looks like to be a new copy of FLOC, which flopped immediately on release, as no body adopted it other than chrome.

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

#317

Post by colejohnson66 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #129
threeseed wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sounds like there needs to be a new, unambiguous spec.

In the case of HTML, that was called XHTML, and it never took off because users need their browser to be forgiving, whether they know it or not.

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

#318

Post by jacobolus »

native_samples wrote: post #303
jacobolus wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s nothing “magical”, but Safari uses a lot less battery than Chrome. Safari developers optimize for battery life whereas Chrome developers seem not to care about client-side resource use.

Right, yet, Chrome has an enormous number of Mac users. Apple argue that battery life is a topic so important it's worth banning competitors for but clearly when given the choice users disagree. There are other things more important to them.

My impression is that most computer users have a limited sense of which software applications are churning through battery, and instead just blame the computer vendor.

That is, if Chrome churns through battery on a Mac laptop, the typical user is going to just think “Apple laptops have poor battery life”, never realizing that switching to Safari would make a significant difference.

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

#319

Post by noduerme »

kmeisthax wrote: post #274
native_samples wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

People who don't know conflate Flash as a browser plug-in with all AS3 (e.g. Air apps that run in a native container). You couldn't expect a browser plugin at that time to have GPU access, but Air apps sure did and we used it all the time to make our games run smoothly.

The same people will say Flash was slow by default. I remember running canvas vs flash rendering tests in mobile Safari when the plugin was still available, and Flash blew canvas rendering away. Of course it was all about what you chose to do with it... no one was writing really complicated behaviors in canvas at that point, and wasm didn't exist, so if you wanted special animation or complexity you used Flash. The appropriate thing would have been to have Flash off by default until someone tapped an embed to load it.

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

#320

Post by noduerme »

native_samples wrote: post #287
kmeisthax wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Adobe expecting Flash authors to make versions optimized for mobile wasn't particularly crazy though, was it? That's exactly what browser makers expect mobile site developers to do. A non-mobile optimized site mobile is an awful experience. W.R.T. compositing, browsers took a long time to move to even just GPU based compositing, and full GPU based rendering took longer still. Certainly, if Flash hadn't been killed of…

>> Adobe expecting Flash authors to make versions optimized for mobile wasn't particularly crazy though, was it?

It took a few years for plain old HTML/JS sites to be optimized for mobile, and not many of them were then. Given some time, Flash devs would have too. I'd already optimized my own and was optimizing a Flash-based gaming site for mobile when Apple pulled the plug.

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