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Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

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Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#101

Post by sp332 »

yogthos wrote: post #69

At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…

IE development was totally stagnant. IE 5.0/5.01 came out in 1999 and IE 5.5 came out in 2005! Chrome rolls out new versions every six weeks. That's why Chrome will not be displaced as easily. They can put serious pressure on the standards bodies to follow whatever changes they want to make to their browser.

Anyway the adblocking thing isn't really related. Extension APIs are not industry standards, Chrome already doesn't allow adblocking on mobile, and maybe at some point they'll just write off the users who care and focus on monetizing the users who will put up with ads.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#102

Post by heavenlyblue »

ken wrote: post #82
yogthos wrote: post #69

At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…

Microsoft was ruthless and technically competent, but in many ways they were also strategically stupid. - IE was a Windows-only product (after Microsoft dropped Mac support), so as Windows lost its dominance (thanks to the internet, and mobile devices, and Linux, and Apple's rebirth, and...), so did IE. It helped sow the seeds of its own destruction. - Chrome has an open-source core, so they're going after the embedd…

Second point is not exactly strong: loads of apps used IE integration internally. It was one of the stronger points by MS during antitrust investigation.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#103

Post by szczepano »

Narishma wrote: post #76
szczepano wrote: post #71

If we take into consideration that both firefox and chromium use skia graphics library then there are only two companies apple and google.

Does Firefox still use Skia with Webrender?

https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/28fa74680f4a3d2c...

I think they're using skia all the time since 2016.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#104

Post by rightbyte »

luckylion wrote: post #55
la_fayette wrote: post #49

Monopolies are just a different term for stalinism. The question is for how long such a big moloch can control the internet in all domains. Ok they just buy startups in competing subdomains, but i doubt that really anything can be contolled by a single entity. Google is a company and thus a hierarchical system. The distributed innovation on the internet is still possible, see e.g. bitcoin mostl likely started by one…

Question is: how well would (the paranoid, control-seeking parts of) Stalinism have worked with today's technology?

Probably so good that it would be unsustainable. The police, military, government and public officers needs some privacy so they can be corrupt without their superiors noticing and taking a cut. There would be too much control.

We will see how North Korea turns out in the future?

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#105

Post by melenaboija »

yogthos wrote: post #69

At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…

I agree with what you are saying but I would also add that it will become harder to change as times goes by as more private interests are involved with it.

Chrome is business for google and obviously will not want to change the situation, but also people with business on the Internet what want is a friendly and easy environtment which is what google is offering.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#106

Post by rebelwebmaster »

szczepano wrote: post #71

If we take into consideration that both firefox and chromium use skia graphics library then there are only two companies apple and google.

Skia is just one backend used for drawing pixels on the screen. It has nothing to do with deciding which pixels to draw in the first place (i.e. the vast majority of what web browsers do).

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#107

Post by feanaro »

elagost wrote: post #100
yogthos wrote: post #69

At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…

At that point, IE was so technically far behind that you could easily point to reasons why Firefox was better: Add-ons, usable tabbed browsing, incredible speed increases, more customization, and websites actually working. Nowadays, we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser that's not as technically advanced in some ways, with no clear merits and a lot of changes to workflow. The choice tod…

The are definitely merits: fingerprinting protection, containers, less memory usage, soon a state-of-the-art parallel rendering engine (Webrender), soon-to-be better adblockers, etc. More novel things will trickle down from Servo in the future.

It's unclear to me Chromium is still significantly faster in any meaningful way. They certainly feel roughly the same.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#108

Post by NiLSPACE »

lallysingh wrote: post #10
genmon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is WebKit sufficiently separate from Chromium now that we can regard it as competitive? Safari seems to be doing well at keeping Chrome's "embrace and extend" in check.

Chromium stopped using webkit. They forked Blink.

They forked Webkit which they named Blink

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#109

Post by luckylion »

rightbyte wrote: post #104
luckylion wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question is: how well would (the paranoid, control-seeking parts of) Stalinism have worked with today's technology?

Probably so good that it would be unsustainable. The police, military, government and public officers needs some privacy so they can be corrupt without their superiors noticing and taking a cut. There would be too much control. We will see how North Korea turns out in the future?

True, but on the other hand you'd probably need a lot less boots on the ground if you can amplify their power by technology, I suppose. You can pay them more than well to guarantee their support, feed the dogs well so nobody gets any ideas about questioning pig supremacy.
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