Browser war is probably going to be won by one of Google or Openai, and $net is late to the party
Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
241–250 of 510 posts
Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s one of the very, very few independent browsers built from the ground up and not on top of one the few existing engines (Gecko, Chromium, WebKit), which is extremely important to the health of the open web. Imagine a world where Chromium is the only browser engine. Standards wouldn’t matter and Google could just do whatever they wanted — we’re pretty close to that as it is.
To combat a Chrome hegemony you need strong opposition, not a long-tail of weak opposition. Or in other words: Firefox needs to become more competitive. I (unfortunately) don't think having another 0.1% market cap browser is the solution, at least not for now. Just to clarify: I'm in favor of Cloudflare donating to Ladybird, and I'm in favor of them building it! I just don't think that's the solution to combating Chr…
I don't believe that Firefox can become stronger so long as Mozilla continues to be structured as it is.
Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
#243I’m skeptical. Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web. People have been fiercely debating whether that’s a terrible thing, or whether that’s the least bad practical solution on offer for website owners. I don’t want to make a judgement on that, but I don’t think the observation that CF is pushing us in that direction is very controversial. But an ind…
Cloudflare supporting Ladybird makes sense for the same reasons that Valve invests in Proton. Cloudflare's job is easier if everyone standardizes on a few approved browsers, but right now the three major browser engines are controlled by Google (IIRC most of Mozilla's funding comes from Google) and Apple, just as Valve's Steam is heavily dependent on Microsoft's Windows. Both companies are basically hedging against f…
> Cloudflare supporting Ladybird makes sense for the same reasons that Valve invests in Proton.
Which Proton are you referring to?
Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add to this, Apple’s share of the control is minimal and precarious. A timeline where Google is the sole web engine authority could easily become reality and is even likely. Hedging on a promising upstart makes a lot of sense.
Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. The source is available and it is permissively licensed. If they did something truly onerous, Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium. The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because…
Nobody worth mentioning to big corporations uses Chromium.
Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. They do. If they merge DRM into it tomorrow or something alike, it trickles down to all users of Chromium and Google Chrome. You can build _a fork_ of it. But the enormous majority of the masses don’t use your fork — they use upstream.
Chromium is upstream of Chrome, not the other way around. However, Google Chrome is so ubiquitous that any changes Google makes to it are expected to be available in all other browsers and its a kind of defacto control even if it isn't technically control of the upstream Chromium project.
In practical reality, Chromium is a downstream less-googled fork of Chrome. First they decide what they want to put into Chrome, and then they put the less-googled parts of that into Chromium.
Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
If/when Apple is forced to start allowing Blink on iOS globally, all it takes is a hearty marketing push from Google and devs putting “best viewed in Chrome” badges on their sites for Safari’s marketshare (and with it, Apple’s influence) to plummet.
Given how AMP eventually died, it seems unlikely that web developers would go along with it. What’s in it for them? Also, I don’t see any sign that Google even wants to do it? This is not really evidence-based reasoning, it’s just “I can imagine something evil that Google might do.”
> What’s in it for them?
Never having to use polyfills or CanIUse tables, plus testing on the same environment they develop on.
Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
#247I cannot for the life of me understand the Omarchy hype. The Linux community has been theming their distribution installs for decades. What distinguishes this from that?
Arch linux is a great linux distro that's kinda difficult to set up (more so historically but it's got that reputation). Hyprland is a great WM that has garbage default settings and requires wading through tons of documentation, as well as a lot of effort to set up. Omarchy is a distribution that ships Arch + Hyprland with sane defaults. The whole thing installs in minutes, and is overall very easy to get going with.…
Does Omarchy offer anything other than opinionated dotfiles? These have always existed.
Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloudflare is trying to establish itself as the toll station for AI. And anyone who doesn't play by their rules gets excommunicated.
And what are the rules? Don’t use AI to steal training content across the internet, spread nuclear grade spam and propaganda at scale, hack servers with automated agents? Seems fine.
the end game will be ai training bots will have to be:
1) like 1 cent or fraction of cent to get access to page
2) scrawlers will just cache this data on their server or just train on it so will pay just once
3) small content creators will get just make like few dollars our of it
4) CF will get some 10-30% cut from their content semaphore.
5) in the end you small content creator trading their whole content for few dollars but because CF has mass of scale they will make multi millions or more.