401–410 of 510 posts
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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…
Anyone who tries to push changes to Chromium will quickly find Google does control it.
The real difficulty is that you need someone with large pockets to fund any forks if those forks are going to be viable. And that is due to the complexity of the web as a platform.
I 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.…
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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…
That response ignores the fact that Valve isn't in the business of preventing you from playing your games on niche operating systems but Cloudflare is in the business of blocking non-standard browsers. If Cloudflare truly wants to prevent a Google/Apple web duopoly the most effective thing they can do is to stop blocking alternatives or even just browser- configurations that are Google-hostile.
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I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole. As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.
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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.”
This is a problem of Apple's own making.
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They don’t penalize browsers for not being Chrome – Safari users almost never see those, because their devices support a protocol for attesting real hardware with a real user, in what is hopefully a privacy-preserving manner: https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-... That’s the underlying problem here: web sites are constantly getting suspicious traffic and if you do something like using Tor or…
So you are saying they don't penalize browser from not being Chrome and then link to a specific mechanism that they are allow listing Safari. That goes directly counter to what you are claiming. I have seen it myself, from my own system. Firefox, almost impossible to use the web due to non-stop bot checks by CF. For the same session, same site(s), I give up and use Chrome, with all the same browser extensions, and I…
This is very much not my experience. I don't know if you use a VPN or have a ton of extensions but if I was hitting that so hard I'd consider trying a clean profile with no extensions and adding things back in to see if you can find the trigger condition.
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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…
There's a tightly controlled pool of developers who make up the decision-making body about which commits get approved. That pool is dominated by Google employees so they effectively control whether something gets committed.
So it's not open in the sense that would be most people's first impression, which is that anyone can contribute code to the project and see it realized. You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.
>Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
I don't see how that follows. Google disproportionately invests in a browser, controls it and with it much of the destiny of the web. The fact that Google is leveraging their ad monopoly to create and maintain a dominant browser is the issue. At least, it's an issue. The ad monopoly powers their control over the web and vice versa.
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Anyone who tries to push changes to Chromium will quickly find Google does control it.
I think you missed the point here. Forking is and always has been a totally viable hedge against any other parties control in an Open Source product. Google can't force Microsoft to take it as it is with no input because Microsoft can absolutely fork. Just like Apple and Google forked from each other. The real difficulty is that you need someone with large pockets to fund any forks if those forks are going to be viab…
As you noted, I don't think forking and maintaining a Google sized code base is a realistic alternative. But by the same token, I don't think that the possibility of forking said code base is what people typically mean by not having control.