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The endless browser wars

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Re: The endless browser wars

#51

Post by kungito »

dzdt wrote: post #50

Not mentioned is the password situation. That is the bigger lock-in than bookmarks. I don't know what is the tech stack underneath or even what chromium does. But as a normal-ish chrome user I know behind the scenes google is managing my passwords and it would be a nightmare to switch. Too many sites I wouldn't know how to access without their password management. That is true lock-in.

This is what I disliked about using password managers with autogenerated complex passwords. It feel like too much lock in. I'm glad I switched to Firefox Lockwise before getting too locked in with Google's password management

Re: The endless browser wars

#52

Post by preommr »

izacus wrote: post #26
cccc4all wrote: post #20

Google has become too big as company and has to be broken up by anti-trust rules, along with many other FAANG companies that ballooned up in recent years. It's laughable that Microsoft was under anti-trust scrutiny when they were much smaller company. The Microsoft anti-trust situation created enough lanes for smaller companies at the time, like Google, Apple, etc. to gain traction. The situation is the same now, ant…

Except that you're talking about a completely different situation - Microsoft was attacked for defaulting their browser in their operating system, which had majority market share. This isn't really the case with Chrome though - on Windows, I keep having my browser reset back to Edge with fullscreen ads, on macOS the default browser is Safari (and it keeps spamming me with notification advertisements to use it), on An…

Because it's not about the operating system, but all the related services that are embedded in the browser.

I use chrome because it ties with my google account which ties in with... pretty much everything. It stores a lot of my passwords, it ties in with my gmail, my google workspace, my shared extensions that gets installed with any other chrome browsers through this google account, other google apps like google docs/calendar, and other google services like their speech-to-text, and it also ties in with my android phone that is linked to my google account.

Re: The endless browser wars

#53

Post by shakna »

Crazyontap wrote: post #7

There is a new trend emerging in computing with the advent of Machine learning and that is, it is no longer sufficient to have talent/knowledge/passion/amazing team to create something. You need very deep pockets too. I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for sp…

> I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for speech-to-text/text-to-speech, etc.

The Web Speech API is still in "Draft" spec, but Mozilla have been working steadily on it and finished the work for SGML parsing back in January. There are actually flags you can change to enable it on most platforms, its just they aren't considered "stable" yet.

Mozilla's DeepSpeech engine is also not that far off from reaching a level of stability. You can help them with it here [0] if you're interested.

[0] https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en

Re: The endless browser wars

#54

Post by eternalny1 »

gggtt wrote: post #24
Crazyontap wrote: post #7

There is a new trend emerging in computing with the advent of Machine learning and that is, it is no longer sufficient to have talent/knowledge/passion/amazing team to create something. You need very deep pockets too. I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for sp…

I am not convinced this is true. The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon so that they can build even more privacy invasive Alexa & friends device. So yeah, in a way this an issue of money, but not because you can't afford GPUs & Data, but because you can't buy the right people

> The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon

That is part of the problem.

With smaller projects you are at risk of the "hit by a bus" problem, where major/complex technology is dependent on a single individual or a very small team.

Re: The endless browser wars

#55

Post by preommr »

fctorial wrote: post #25
Crazyontap wrote: post #7

There is a new trend emerging in computing with the advent of Machine learning and that is, it is no longer sufficient to have talent/knowledge/passion/amazing team to create something. You need very deep pockets too. I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for sp…

They could ask their users to donate cpu/gpu if this is an issue.

I am pretty sure that Google provides a lot of those services at a loss, or at the very least, they can synergize with other projects they have in way that justifies the cost.

Either way, people will choose the free option rather than the option that requires them to pay even a nominal fee, particularly for software that people have gotten used to getting for free.

Re: The endless browser wars

#56

Post by mkl95 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #47
mkl95 wrote: post #29

Every Chromium user needs to understand that Chromium is a Google project, and Google like to sacrifice a random project once in a while (don't be evil huh?). I'm completely unaware of how Google handle these decisions internally, but from the point of view of an outsider they are trying to optimize their resources and output as much as possible. If some service is not extremely successful and profitable, and it's be…

How do you sacrifice an open-source project that people can just fork?

Technically, Chromium is not being sacrificed, it will just lose access to some powerful APIs. In practice it means Chromium as we know it is done. Most people who want or need these features will be unaware of some community fork and will simply switch to Chrome or Firefox.

Re: The endless browser wars

#57

Post by hyper_reality »

lqet wrote: post #22

Key points: > Much of what appears to be Chrome (or Chromium) functionality is, in truth, provided by servers in Google's data centers. These include bookmark synchronization, the safe-browsing feature, search suggestions, spell-checking, and more. > On January 15, the Chromium blog carried this brief notice that, as of March 15, non-Chrome builds of Chromium would lose access to these APIs. > Anticipating this, dist…

I think the article somewhat misconstrues the reasons why maintainers are thinking of dropping support for packaging Chromium. Maintaining the Chromium package is an unusually laborious task, with a lot of releases, and huge compile times. It's simply a gigantic codebase with the order of millions of lines of code, and there are only a couple of people (at best) in each distro dedicating time to keep track of the latest changes. The Chromium in Debian has been developing a growing list of security issues as it falls behind the latest versions https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=972134

Google's forced removal of features from Chromium may just be the straw that broke the camel's back. I see other comments on HN and LWN question the maintainers' judgement, without realising how many resources it takes to package Chromium for distros.

Re: The endless browser wars

#58

Post by Nextgrid »

stiray wrote: post #39
doublerabbit wrote: post #38

Until someone creates a new browser with a new render/scripting engine. Which everyone always jumps on saying "it's impossible", the war is over. Chrome has won. Chrome is currently giving life support to Mozilla and when they decide to axe that, well it's game over for Mozilla. The depressing part is the freedom, the new that the internet once provided is over. It's been turned in to a commercial breeding ground and…

The issue is that Firefox HAS created a new rendering engine, but people don't switch. It has nothing to do with technology, people wont even try to switch. Some for fanboyism, some because they would have to adapt, some don't even know what browser is. What I do consider staggering is how many technically capable people are not prepared to make a switch. Google is slowly closing down the lock-down trap they have nur…

Mozilla has also shot itself in the foot by alienating Firefox's core userbase (power users) with terrible attempts to copy Chrome in a (failed) attempt to cater to idiots.

They ended up trading off powerful extensions for what? A terrible, slower copy of Chrome with Pocket and a share button built into the browser. Seriously.

Re: The endless browser wars

#59

Post by indymike »

lqet wrote: post #22

Key points: > Much of what appears to be Chrome (or Chromium) functionality is, in truth, provided by servers in Google's data centers. These include bookmark synchronization, the safe-browsing feature, search suggestions, spell-checking, and more. > On January 15, the Chromium blog carried this brief notice that, as of March 15, non-Chrome builds of Chromium would lose access to these APIs. > Anticipating this, dist…

Not a single one of these features matter to me, either. Probably the only feature I'll miss is automatically installing my Chrome apps when I log in, but it gets used so infrequently.

Re: The endless browser wars

#60

Post by hyper_reality »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #47
mkl95 wrote: post #29

Every Chromium user needs to understand that Chromium is a Google project, and Google like to sacrifice a random project once in a while (don't be evil huh?). I'm completely unaware of how Google handle these decisions internally, but from the point of view of an outsider they are trying to optimize their resources and output as much as possible. If some service is not extremely successful and profitable, and it's be…

How do you sacrifice an open-source project that people can just fork?

"Just fork" underestimates the huge amount of effort it requires to develop a modern browser that stays up to date with the latest web standards. There's a reason why even Microsoft's browser now is based on Chromium.
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