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Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

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Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#81

Post by roenxi »

bobajeff wrote: post #24
roca wrote: post #11

Some major problems with the "let's all use Chromium" approach: Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting. All the companies that use Chromium are using it because they want Google to do the heavy lifting, so that isn't going to change, even if Google decides to put an open governance face on it, and there's no sign they're going to do even that. Should Google really be ceded complete power over the…

As bad as this all is, it seems like an unavoidable consequence to the nature of our economy. Do we really need separate competing: • Office Suites • Search engines • link sharing sites • internet runtimes that all do roughly the same thing? Maybe we do. Maybe Google should be broken up into a bunch of smaller Google's and be forced to interoperate with smaller search companies like DuckDuckGo, Qwant and TinEye. Like…

Need is one of those surprisingly dangerous words. We need a steady supply of potatoes, some leafy greens and mild warm weather to get through life and not much more.

The standard we should strive for is to not lock any given 3rd party in to facilitate data exchanges. If I want to email someone, I shouldn't need to coordinate with Google. If I want to email a document I shouldn't need to coordinate with Microsoft and if I want to browse the internet I shouldn't have to coordinate with the Mozilla foundation.

We've seen this play out a few times; data lock-in is not properly appreciated even within the tech industry, let alone outside it. The risk of making Google a mandatory part of exchanging data between two parties on the internet is serious - if they ever manage to insert themselves in the same way IE got its claws into South Korea back in the day that will be decades of foolish pain for no gain. Great idea to keep people aware of the threat.

What happens if Google shut down Gmail outside the US with no warning and no big export of data? Maybe because the US government decides foreigners need a bit of prodding because of a trade war? That would be a Nasty Shock.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#82

Post by ken »

yogthos wrote: post #69

At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…

Microsoft was ruthless and technically competent, but in many ways they were also strategically stupid.

- IE was a Windows-only product (after Microsoft dropped Mac support), so as Windows lost its dominance (thanks to the internet, and mobile devices, and Linux, and Apple's rebirth, and...), so did IE. It helped sow the seeds of its own destruction.

- Chrome has an open-source core, so they're going after the embedding market much more than IE ever did. That means that a lot of "Chrome" use is in places where users feel the consequences, but have no control over being able to switch engines (e.g., Electron apps).

Google's web browser group feels like the classic "big, smart" quadrant competitor that nobody will engage. If your only goal were "take over the world usage share of browser engines", it's hard to imagine doing a better job than they're doing now.

The client-side web was not traditionally Microsoft's home. They were a little late to the game, they didn't quite understand it, and they needed a good browser on their platform but it wasn't fatal if it wasn't theirs. (They're doing quite well in services and games and many other areas.) Google was always web-first, and they will never cede that.

Crazy tech prediction: Chrome will be the last dominant web browser engine. What defeats it will be the successor to the web, not another "web browser". Its successor will probably even embed Chrome for backwards compatibility, like Edge embeds IE, or Chrome embeds FTP. We'll look at legacy Chrome-compat internet sites the way we look at Electron apps, or non-TLS websites.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#83

Post by firethief »

Certhas wrote: post #40
bobajeff wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As bad as this all is, it seems like an unavoidable consequence to the nature of our economy. Do we really need separate competing: • Office Suites • Search engines • link sharing sites • internet runtimes that all do roughly the same thing? Maybe we do. Maybe Google should be broken up into a bunch of smaller Google's and be forced to interoperate with smaller search companies like DuckDuckGo, Qwant and TinEye. Like…

Maybe not. Maybe these all are more like infrastructure companies rather than service/product providers. But then we should regulate them as infrastructure companies, too.

If there were an effective browser monopoly (as this article argues for) we'd need a lot of regulation to protect us from the browser's owner's unilateral choices. But... one browser, heavily regulated, with no competition, no alternatives--is that not a nightmare scenario?

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#84

Post by treis »

roca wrote: post #11

Some major problems with the "let's all use Chromium" approach: Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting. All the companies that use Chromium are using it because they want Google to do the heavy lifting, so that isn't going to change, even if Google decides to put an open governance face on it, and there's no sign they're going to do even that. Should Google really be ceded complete power over the…

>A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. Yes, this is already true to some extent, but it could get much worse. So fixing bugs would get harder.

Your last line doesn't follow from the rest of the paragraph. One platform is easier to fix than 4. And it makes it much easier to develop for. Either your site works on Chromium or it doesn't work. You don't get into a situation where it works for 80% of your users.

>Say you want to rewrite the Chromium style system for parallelism with Rust, like Mozilla did with Firefox, and Google says no?

I'd be concerned about that if Chromium hasn't been eating everyone's lunch for nearly a decade now. In terms of rendering/js engine they're clearly ahead of everyone else. For all of Mozillas efforts they still haven't matched chromium let alone surpass it.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#85

Post by treis »

roca wrote: post #44
lazyjones wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. It's not the single browser codebase that hurts the web, any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. The main issue is that today, the web as a platform is garbage. It's full of cruft, mostly useless features th…

> any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. No. When Web devs test in multiple browsers and find that something doesn't work in one of them, they will usually pick an alternative solution that does work in all of them, avoiding the bug in the buggy browser, thus avoiding a situation where their site depends on that bug continuing to exist. It doesn't always work out as well as that,…

>No. When Web devs test in multiple browsers and find that something doesn't work in one of them,

I question how many developers do that. Especially for smaller sites if it works in Chrome it's generally good enough.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#86

Post by iforgotpassword »

SquareWheel wrote: post #35
iforgotpassword wrote: post #25

Most of the post resonates well with me, but at that point > Ideally, this codebase would not be controlled by any single company. I'd love to see a common browser engine controlled by an independent nonprofit foundation I had a bit of a facepalm moment. This is exactly how Google started out: Chrome(ium) was built based on webkit, so basically there was a mini consortium where Google and Apple would work together. B…

There's a lot you're glossing over there. For instance the split from WebKit resulted in 4.5 million of lines of code that could be deleted, reducing bloat. Apple could then do the same on their end. It was a relationship which ended on good terms. Your comment makes it sound like it was antagonistic.

I don't know anything about the relationship back then. But moving faster and more flexibility was even among the reasons Google gave back then iirc. Anyways, what I tried to say was that it didn't work, and you gave a good example why the split was necessary. To me that just confirms that a "chromium consortium" wouldn't work.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#88

Post by collyw »

lazyjones wrote: post #20
saulrh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> controlled by people with no ulterior motives. Everyone used to think that was Google. Anyway, if by some miracle you do find anyone that matches that description but knows where the lever is to kick everything over to a new paradigm, don't tell anyone about them, because as soon as you do they'll have more ulterior motives then you can count.

> Everyone used to think that was Google. When was that? Around the time they decided to liberate the web from the evil clutches of Microsoft/IE and ... Mozilla/FF (20%+ and growing at that time)?

When MS still held the monopoly position and mobile phones weren't mainstream. Google had a mission of "don't be evil" or something similar, they quietly got rid of that and started being evil.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#89

Post by danShumway »

noir_lord wrote: post #67
danShumway wrote: post #6

Ultimately, Google will still decide what goes into Chromium. As it stands, Google decides what patches get merged, and Google decides how core features are implemented. And they can be implemented in ways that are very hard to toggle and very specific to Google's business model. We need to get a version of Chromium that's not owned by Google -- but, I don't see any motivation for Google to give up control of Chromiu…

> Firefox isn't doing great right now, but is it doing any worse than Brave? Maybe in terms of market share as a proxy for success that is true. As a browser though Firefox has come on leaps and bounds (and has momentum to keep improving), I never switched away from it but used Chrome for dev for the last few years so I have a fair amount of time with both (dozens of hours a week) and Firefox is as fast and reliable…

Yep, to be clear, I was talking specifically about browser market share.

Firefox is my daily driver, and it's great.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#90

Post by gridlockd »

yogthos wrote: post #69

At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…

People don't remember how awful IE was. Netscape wasn't significantly better. Both were considered "bloated".

Then, along came Firebird, and it was light and fresh. Unfortunately, a lot of sites didn't work with it. But users demanded that it should work, and eventually it did.

Eventually Firefox itself became bloated and Chrome was the faster alternative. It's the guys at Mozilla that dropped the ball this time.

Fast forward to now: Chrome is bloated, everything is bloated, everything is terrible, but we now rely on a tech stack that has grown exponentially just to get really basic stuff working. The difference is, this time we can't reasonably start fresh anymore without breaking backward compatibility.

Perhaps that's what needs to happen though: Break everything. Delete HTML, CSS, Javascript and all that crap. Admit that most non-trivial web sites are not documents, they're applications. Applications can display documents and do all kinds of other things. Figure out the minimal API that can efficiently output graphics, sound and video. Add in some accessibility hooks. Provide some optional interfaces to geolocation, storage, camera/mic etc. Done.

Fuck the semantic web. Just let us write applications.

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