141–150 of 356 posts
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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.
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. 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. 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?
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.
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Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match. Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, mi…
>Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Open source is that option. The economics of starting from scratch vs starting from Chromium's latest commit are fundamentally different. I'm not saying that it's easy, only that it is not remotely comparable to the IE situation.
I don’t think they are. That fork then immediately finds itself in the same position as other engines, where now the fork is going to need to keep up with whatever Google is adding to Chromium.
You might then think, “Then the fork can just pull from upstream.”
Okay, so then:
a) Your fork probably isn’t differentiated enough to matter; and more importantly
b) Google is still effectively calling all the shots!
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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.
I 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…
webkit is a bit behind in some areas like APIs but ahead in others like CSS
"Hi, you seem to be browsing without being signed into Google with your government verified identity. Please do so to continue seeing the ads, I mean the internet"
Chromium is open source. You're confusing Chromium with Chrome.
>While Android is open, it's more of a "look but don't touch" kind of open. You're allowed to contribute to Android and allowed to use it for little hobbies, but in nearly every area, the deck is stacked against anyone trying to use Android without Google's blessing. The second you try to take Android and do something that Google doesn't approve of, it will bring the world crashing down upon you.
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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 cleve…
That's not a truth that's an opinion. And one I would definitely disagree with.
When it comes to speed, privacy and battery life I am always choosing Safari over Chrome. And many of us care about those three things over new features that often just make the web worse.
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Ajax?
Yep, XMLHttpRequest was literally the only thing to come out of years of Microsoft tenure. Fun fact: it was added so that they could make the Outlook web interface. Edit: well, that and ActiveX, but that's not a good thing...
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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.
Web apps can be packaged up and distributed on App Store as well. People tried it with PhoneGap for years and it failed. I even built some of them. It has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with the experience being objectively terrible. So bad in fact that even Google gave up trying and built Flutter.
> While WebKit is making progress on PWA support, at the time of this writing, PWAs remain a second-class citizen on iOS. The iOS App Store’s support for PWAs is non-existent, requiring a web view-based solution like PWABuilder’s.
> Additionally, because iOS doesn’t allow 3rd party browser engines, your PWA is limited to WebKit’s PWA capabilities, which are currently lagging behind other browser engines.
Google isn't abandoning PWAs, and in fact Chromium continues expanding support to make them as native as possible:
https://web.dev/window-controls-overlay/
Might I also add that the web app manifest is also an open standard, that Safari is lacking on:
I 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…