251–260 of 272 posts
I wish them well, but browsers are very much pay-to-play. Google had to pay their way to their current dominant position.
Pay? You mean putting the "you are using X, why not try chrome" adtext everywhere for every search result?
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Pay? You mean putting the "you are using X, why not try chrome" adtext everywhere for every search result?
More like having a team of between 1000 and 1500 full time software engineers working on it over a period of more than a decade.
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Don't forget, Firefox didn't succeed because Firefox was good, it succeeded because IE was bad. People don't like having to choose between Google Chrome and Google Firefox.
Ad blockers were another huge draw, in my experience.
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Three years ago I was very skeptical of Ladybird. But two things have changed. First, they have funding for 8 full time engineers, which I definitely wasn’t expecting. Second, it’s been three years. So given that, I am more optimistic. There’s still a very long way before they can compete with Chrome, of course. And I’m not sure I ever understood the value proposition compared to forking an existing engine.
The value proposition is not having vendor lockin and having WebKit/Blink be the defacto behaviour. For example the Ladybird team have found and raised spec issues in the different specs. Another example is around ad blockers -- if Blink is the only option, they can make it hard for ad blockers to function whereas having other engines allows different choices to be made.
there by definition is no vendor lock-in by forking an open-source engine. The worst case is the original maintainers going evil tomorrow and you being on your own, which is no worse than starting from scratch, except you saved yourself some ten million odd lines of mindless spec implementation in the case of a browser.
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The government(s) need to force Google to obey web standards that are set by an industry consortium. One that also has small player participation as a requirement. If Google is strong arming or pushing ahead their own agenda, the standards body should have plenty enough votes to veto. And for teeth, compliance should be a requirement for Google to even be allowed to have its own browser. If they break it, no more bro…
The government and most voters don't even know what a file is. They can't even vote in favor of their own basic needs like health care. Do you really think this band of incompetents should be empowered to strangle innovation?
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Google has already shown that they will slowly and methodically use every lever at their disposal to nerf ad blocking, regardless of what the user base thinks. It's the exact same playbook Microsoft is using to block users from logging onto their own computer without using an online Microsoft account. Given that Google has already started working to limit sideloading on Android, those days seem limited.
Blink is an open source project. If Google updates Chrome and Android to refuse sideloading at all, you can still fork both projects. Your entire argument relies on a hypothetical you can't prove and doesn't scare anyone. To Android users you sound more like Chicken Little than the Boy who Cried Wolf .
> Google’s Requirement For All Android Developers To Register And Be Verified Threatens To Close Down Open Source App Store F-Droid
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/07/googles-requirement-for-...
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The value proposition is not having vendor lockin and having WebKit/Blink be the defacto behaviour. For example the Ladybird team have found and raised spec issues in the different specs. Another example is around ad blockers -- if Blink is the only option, they can make it hard for ad blockers to function whereas having other engines allows different choices to be made.
>The value proposition is not having vendor lockin there by definition is no vendor lock-in by forking an open-source engine. The worst case is the original maintainers going evil tomorrow and you being on your own, which is no worse than starting from scratch, except you saved yourself some ten million odd lines of mindless spec implementation in the case of a browser.
If you fork that monopolist’s engine, you’re not making any immediate difference to the market. You’ll adopt all their existing behavior, whether or whether not it conforms to spec (and I would guess you would continue to pull in many of their changes down the road).
A brand new implementation is much more difficult, but if it works it’s much more meaningful in preventing a monopoly.
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Ad blockers were another huge draw, in my experience.
Not anymore.. https://imgur.com/a/CARfuHZ
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Not anymore.. https://imgur.com/a/CARfuHZ
Ad-blockers are not just for YouTube. Moreover, addons can still be a draw for Firefox. For example, the built-in Multi-Container addon, and the ones that build on it, are very useful privacy and web testing tools.