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I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free software

I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free software. I'm very slightly worried that most people choose the Chrome branded version (which is not free-as-in-freedom), but there is so little between the two that I'm not sure it matters. V8 is forked into Node now so it would be pretty difficult to do horrible things even though Google controls the parent project. The only thing that I can think of that seems like a risk is the amount of influence that Google has on things like whatever the replacement of CAs will be. But the situation is already so bad, it's hardly going to get worse.

llukas 10y ago
You must have missed recent HN news about google stripped build of Chromium - one that doesnt use binary blobs from Google.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  I certainly did. Searching for it doesn't seem to bring anything up. Care to post a link? I even did a duckduckgo search for binary blobs in Chromium and only found the 18 month old discussion of Chromium installing hotwords (which has been resolved now). You're not, by any chance, thinking of the Chromium OS are you?
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    You can't miss it - it's riding #1 on HN right, and has been for a few hours now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      Odd... That's not on my front page at all... Interesting. It must be different for each person.
rtpg 10y ago
one thing is that the influence on standards will be pretty strong if you have the "main" implementation. So it requires trusting Google to go the right direction. You can contrast Google's "the web as apps" with, say, Apple + Safari's more "web as documents + prettiness" approaches. With at least 2 major implementations, even if Google doesn't want to do something, if Apple + Moz + MSFT does something, it's still possible to get it into the standard. You can try getting into the standard without a single implementation but that's probably difficult without a vote of confidence from stakeholders

llukas 10y ago

You must have missed recent HN news about google stripped build of Chromium - one that doesnt use binary blobs from Google.

mikekchar 10y ago
I certainly did. Searching for it doesn't seem to bring anything up. Care to post a link? I even did a duckduckgo search for binary blobs in Chromium and only found the 18 month old discussion of Chromium installing hotwords (which has been resolved now). You're not, by any chance, thinking of the Chromium OS are you?
- Jaruzel 10y ago
  You can't miss it - it's riding #1 on HN right, and has been for a few hours now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    Odd... That's not on my front page at all... Interesting. It must be different for each person.

rtpg 10y ago

one thing is that the influence on standards will be pretty strong if you have the "main" implementation. So it requires trusting Google to go the right direction. You can contrast Google's "the web as apps" with, say, Apple + Safari's more "web as documents + prettiness" approaches. With at least 2 major implementations, even if Google doesn't want to do something, if Apple + Moz + MSFT does something, it's still possible to get it into the standard. You can try getting into the standard without a single implementation but that's probably difficult without a vote of confidence from stakeholders