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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?

#321

Post by noisymemories »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #317
pmoriarty wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly I never understood the logic behind the "HTML spec has to be forgiving towards errors". Like, what's so special compared to any other programming language? Popularity? Excel Macro programming is probably an even more popular and widely used language by non-developers, and I've yet to see anyone arguing for more leniency while trying to put formulas inside a sheet.

And by the way - I'd argue that HTML and CSS are not more "forgiving" towards the user, "silently failing" would be a more appropriate definition. I'd rather have an error message saying there's an unclosed tag so the page couldn't be properly rendered rather than the browser trying to infer meaning from broken HTML and misapplying CSS, generating a dadaist poetry piece instead of a blog page.

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

#322

Post by giantrobot »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #312
giantrobot wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

This simply does not follow. If you're building on the back of Blink you're still chasing whatever Google unilaterally decides to include in Blink. You need to do extra work to merge stuff you want and keep stuff you don't want properly disabled. Google has no impetus to make it easy or even possible for third parties to disable features in Blink. The cost to maintain a defanged Blink can very easily go from "mere" millions to billions if Google makes it difficult to merge upstream changes in defanged forks.

If web developers readily adopt whatever Google throws out, and lets be honest it's adtech companies adopting "features" to better fingerprint users without cookies, then a Blink-based alternative to Chrome will get zero uptake. If the top sites on the Web require Google's version of Blink/Chrome with all of Google's handy dandy anti-privacy features then it does not matter in the slightest that a non-Google Blink browser can exist.

You're pretending that Blink being Open Source is somehow going to affect the decisions of web developers (adtech companies). They are going to chase Google's version of Blink/Chrome because that's how they make the most money. Right this second Apple and Mozilla are just barely keeping Chrome from fully dominating the web.

Google is never going to make Chrome overtly user hostile. They're just going to continue to making Chrome an advertiser's dream browser because they are an advertiser. While WebEyeTracking might have some non-advertising use 99% of the user cases will be to make sure people looked at an advertisement long enough. If Google controls the specifications that define the web and sites adopt those technologies, there's no room for alternatives that aren't Google's Blink. Not only can defanged Blink not be practical but neither are non-Blink browser engines.

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

#323

Post by gspr »

jacooper wrote: post #314
gspr wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're kinda proving my point: it works fine if you wholeheartedly take whatever Google gives you. Sure, that's technically open source, but is it really practically so if you can't practically adapt it?

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

#324

Post by HWR_14 »

jacooper wrote: post #316
HWR_14 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Topics is rebranded FLOC. Everyone pushed back on it when FLOC came out, but that was publicly reviled and there was a simple toggle to turn it off (it was an experimental feature).

This is an excellent test of Google's ability to just push a very unpopular feature into Chromium derivatives.

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

#325

Post by gspr »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #271
gspr wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a year old is considered antiquated, we have some major problems in this world.

And it's kinda my whole point: code that can only be consumed wholesale as shipped might technically be open source, but if backporting fixes to a year old version is nigh on impossible, is it truly open source in practice?

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

#326

Post by jacooper »

gspr wrote: post #323
jacooper wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're kinda proving my point: it works fine if you wholeheartedly take whatever Google gives you. Sure, that's technically open source, but is it really practically so if you can't practically adapt it?

How ? There is brave, Ungoogle chromium, and many other modified browsers that are maintained.

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

#327

Post by jacooper »

HWR_14 wrote: post #324
jacooper wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Topics is rebranded FLOC. Everyone pushed back on it when FLOC came out, but that was publicly reviled and there was a simple toggle to turn it off (it was an experimental feature). This is an excellent test of Google's ability to just push a very unpopular feature into Chromium derivatives.

Non google browsers didn't only disable it, they removed it completely.

Google has a lot of control over chromium, but I don't think its even close to how gimped AOSP is compared to Android google edition.

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

#328

Post by pornel »

noisymemories wrote: post #321
colejohnson66 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly I never understood the logic behind the "HTML spec has to be forgiving towards errors". Like, what's so special compared to any other programming language? Popularity? Excel Macro programming is probably an even more popular and widely used language by non-developers, and I've yet to see anyone arguing for more leniency while trying to put formulas inside a sheet. And by the way - I'd argue that HTML and CSS…

Unlike typical programs, HTML is often assembled dynamically. This means pages can have broken HTML sometimes, depending on data and context that the developer may not have tested. XML should have been generated from a DOM or something that guarantees proper serialization, but markup-ignorant text-gluing tools are the norm, and they're not capable of ensuring the markup is 100% correct 100% of the time.

These bugs were the worst, because they happened to end users. Users couldn't do anything about unclosed tags or unescaped ampersands, not even notify the developer of the page that refused to display.

Back then HTTPS was rare, but young mobile ISPs loved "optimizing" middleboxes that were messing up the markup. Even if you generated a flawless markup, your pages still wouldn't work for some users. Users were told that your page is bad, and it's your fault, and couldn't contact you about it. ISPs didn't care, because hardly anybody actually used the strict XHTML parsing mode (it made pages inaccessible to IE that had 80% market share). Most "XHTML" pages worked fine thanks to being parsed as regular HTML with invalid extra slashes.

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

#329

Post by GekkePrutser »

daveoc64 wrote: post #142
i5Aj7PXGjUPy wrote: post #84

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. what exactly is the benefit of having a byzantine set of standards in the first place? Like why not just have a standard and not dick around with it?

Frustration with the shortcomings of older web standards resulted in the prevalence of browser plugins like Adobe Flash, and non-standard technology like ActiveX. If there are things browsers can't do natively, then someone will build their own way to do it and then you end up with non-standard implementations. It's better to get everyone on the same page and develop an open standard.

Was that all though? I think part of this was just businesses attempting to lock the web into their tech. Microsoft has never wanted the web to be open, first trying to reinvent it with their own MSN. Then trying to lock it in with IE and ActiveX.

Adobe / Macromedia started from the designer perspective but Flash soon became a goal of its own because Adobe wouldn't give up that marketshare.

Only now all parties realise it's too big for one company to own. Well except Google perhaps.

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

#330

Post by giancarlostoro »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #291
giancarlostoro wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it doesn't run on Firefox, you're not getting my visit. That is sad, but its always the case when they introduce bleeding edge features, whats even worse is people've been able to make Google "Chrome Only" Google Apps work with Firefox if you lie about your web browser agent.
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