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I’m not claiming the situation is just or should be ignored, but the option the author seems to be ignoring is to launch without Widevine. Sure, a lot won’t work, but a lot will. Having a vocal community can add a lot of pressure.
https://security.googleblog.com/2019/04/better-protection-ag...
Why aren’t there more browsers? Is it just a matter of all the IP tied up by the majors?
If we're talking about creating a browser from scratch, it's nearly impossible to implement one without a huge investment of both time and money. Browsers are unbelievably complex, and the new features are being added at such a pace that you need to run twice as fast just to keep up. If we're talking about forking an existing browser, that is doable. But you still need a huge investment to understand, change and exte…
Why aren’t there more browsers? Is it just a matter of all the IP tied up by the majors?
Too many standards to follow, too many APIs, too complicated. Sometimes I wonder if the web standards aren't designed specifically to prevent any meaningful competition.
Why aren’t there more browsers? Is it just a matter of all the IP tied up by the majors?
Why aren’t there more browsers? Is it just a matter of all the IP tied up by the majors?
It's trivial to create a browser that's just a Chromium fork. It's nearly impossible to create one that isn't. Firefox (and Tor) is basically the only one. https://alternativeto.net/software/google-chrome/
The ecosystem is the big issue for a lot of these products. It why Microsoft's Windows phone failed so badly - they didn't have the app store to compete with or allow users to migrate to their platform without losing a lot of apps they already used on Apple or Android.
The ecosystem is a major reason why you don't see more competition.
I’m not claiming the situation is just or should be ignored, but the option the author seems to be ignoring is to launch without Widevine. Sure, a lot won’t work, but a lot will. Having a vocal community can add a lot of pressure.
Basically the dev wanted to take Electron (a wrapper of Chromium/v8, the Google maintained FOSS browser engine) + Google's Widevine, smash them together with some glue code and a special-purpose UI, and call it a "broswer".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too many standards to follow, too many APIs, too complicated. Sometimes I wonder if the web standards aren't designed specifically to prevent any meaningful competition.
Web standards are designed for cooperation not competition.
I’m not claiming the situation is just or should be ignored, but the option the author seems to be ignoring is to launch without Widevine. Sure, a lot won’t work, but a lot will. Having a vocal community can add a lot of pressure.
They could also reverse engineer the Widevine module binary and reimplement it in their own project. You don't really need Google for this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too many standards to follow, too many APIs, too complicated. Sometimes I wonder if the web standards aren't designed specifically to prevent any meaningful competition.
Web standards are designed for cooperation not competition.