I am increasingly of the opinion that Google Chrome is not a web browser. Chrome is a Google browser. What Chrome does browse is the Google Web, not the World Wide Web.
What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
121–130 of 356 posts
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#122There'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.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#123Earlier 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).
I'm not sure Brave can go against Google's most fundamental interests, without not using Chromium.
Why not? Brave, or any small team really, can disable privacy infringing and google oriented features, and other user hostile behavior.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not that they're one judgment away from that day. They know that. It's just that they want to get as much mileage as they can before they too abandon Safari and first allow, then switch to Chromium. That will happen in the next 5 years. I'm not a great future-reader myself, but I don't see this happening soon. The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream, and they have a lot to…
> The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream This is as ridiculous today as it has been every year since the iPhone began. Mobile web apps are terrible and despite all the years of promises that "feature X" will fix this nothing has changed. And you can't blame Apple because Google et al could easily have made mobile web apps work on Android. If you want to make a mobile web app the…
You do realize web apps can be packaged up and distributed on the Play Store and work just like regular apps on Android, and so YouTube Music among others are already web apps. Pretending like no one is interested when we're talking about probably close to 100 million users or more for a single web app is disingenuous. Apple is a walled garden and their cultist will make up any excuse to not have to admit so.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit. Safari definitely does not just follow suit (see https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareC... for example).
Luckily they don't :) In my opinion Chromium/Chrome is the new IE and not Safari
I'm sorry - but this is just not a realistic take.
Call me when I can install Safari on linux (or any platform other than macOS/iOS).
Until then - the ugly truth is that Apple intentionally underfunds and underdevelops the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their control and revenue from the App store.
It's there because "they have to have a browser" not because they're doing anything novel or clever. And many of the things they refuse to implement aren't related to ads or Google's control at all - they're things that would have narrowed the gap between what a website can do on iOS, and what the App store apps could do.
Again - Apple is acting EXACTLY like microsoft here. Underinvesting in the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their best revenue stream - much like how MS ignored IE when the focus was all on local apps (the king of which was still MS office).
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#126The 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…
> The chromium-only web is not google’s fault
They got exactly what they wanted, but its not their fault?
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#127I think it's bizarre to conflate Apple's refusal to allow other webkits on iOS with the fact that Safari remains a viable alternative engine. They're far from heroes here. I think it's great they maintain a Chrome alternative kit that mostly works but let's not pretend they're saints or kid ourselves about the reasons for it. The only reason they disallow Chromium and Mozilla is they want their users locked into thei…
> 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…
"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."
If they really cared about security then they could subject their browser to an independent security audit, and require the same audit be passed for any other browser that's allowed on their platform.
Why don't they do this?
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#128Earlier 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).
Those are not fundamentals, more like bells and whistles. Fundamentals are strictly dictated by what Google want in the Chrome and its clones and will never change, at least with current trends when even MS switched to Chrome.
The point is that Google can't dictate what browser behavior the forks ('clones') choose to enable.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#129Even 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.
Sounds like there needs to be a new, unambiguous spec.
Re: What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. A body of web standards that they lobbied for and to be in the form that they are...
… 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]?