6 ms·

Everyone saying this is a repeat of history with Chromium as the new IE6 aren't remembering their history very well. When IE6 initially came out it was the bes

by avar 8y ago

Everyone saying this is a repeat of history with Chromium as the new IE6 aren't remembering their history very well. When IE6 initially came out it was the best browser around, with excellent standards support for its time. It only became the horror it's remembered as today because then Microsoft just didn't update it, so a once first-in-class browser became a backwards compatibility nightmare everyone had to support. I don't see how the same situation could repeat itself. If Google or Microsoft ever decides to just drop Chromium for whatever reason the code this time around is open, so someone else can just pick it up, and users can migrate to that. The main problem with IE6 was that users couldn't do that, there was a decade of legacy apps that had grown to require IE6-specific features.

geolgau 8y ago
Not really. The problem with IE6 was that it didn't implement web standards as they should have, so developers had to to a lot of hacks and tricks to have their websites compatible with all browsers. And IE6 was non-compliant with the HTML standards from the start if I remember well: I had a small website that looked good in IE/Netscape/Opera, but when IE6 was out a lot of people started complaining that my backgrounds would not be positioned as they were in Opera/Netscape and all sorts of things like that.
- avar 8y ago
  Sure. It wasn't perfect, all browsers sucked in different ways back then. Mozilla was slow as hell, IE6's CSS support was amazing etc. This was in 2001 and XP had just been released. My point is that whatever the state was back then what followed couldn't have happened if IE6 was open source. Mozilla could have simply built it as part of Firefox, shipped it as a legacy rendering mode, and nobody would have had Windows or IE6 lock-in to use some legacy website.
detritus 8y ago
If I remember correctly, IE5.5 was the stepping stone toward browser greatness and Netscape became an albatross around all our necks. I find it slightly ironic that my beloved Firefox was borne of that bloody mess!
Yoric 8y ago
> If Google or Microsoft ever decides to just drop Chromium for whatever reason the code this time around is open, so someone else can just pick it up, and users can migrate to that. Not really. Let's imagine for one second that Google switches to Mozilla's Servo or a secret in-house next-gen engine. Who could afford to suddenly hire the 200+ engineers it takes to maintain Chromium? But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that Google will have de facto control on all web technologies. Chromium is open-source but has a closed governance, so nobody can say "no" to a Google patch, while Google can say "no" to any outside patch. This means that Google can, if they so decide, leverage this monopoly against the competition. In theory, Google would have the technological means to kill the web presence of Facebook, Netflix or pretty much anyone with a single commit, which would automatically be propagated to Edge, Opera, Brave, Dolphin, ... Similarly, Google would have the technological means to decide which credit card you could use to pay on the web (at least through WebPay). I don't think that Google would do such a thing, but that's a lot of power in the hands of a single entity, exactly the problem that we witnessed at the time of IE6. Also, Google has, at times, be known to muscle in other browser's territory by using Google Search/Google Docs/Google Hangouts/..., so the temptation will certainly be there.
- avar 8y ago
  > Who could afford to suddenly hire the 200+ engineers it takes to maintain Chromium? In that scenario one of two things will happen. Either Chromium will only be needed in some shape for compatibility with older sites. At that point you don't need 200 people to maintain it, just a small team to fix portability issues and security problems in the sandbox, while the "real" browser is whatever the next Firefox or Safari is. Or, Chromium is critical to the web somehow and needs to be actively devloped. I find it hard to imagine a scenario where that'll be the case but you can't come up with the salary for 200 engineers to work on it. What Google pays Firefox for the search bar alone is way more than enough to cover that, whatever the dominant browser "distribution" is could do something similar, or move to a hybrid "open core" model with a license fee. > The real problem is that Google will have de facto control on all web technologies[...] Yeah that's a problem. But this is why I'm saying the comparison to IE6 doesn't make any sense beyond the trivial statement that in the 00s this one browser was really popular, and now we have this other browser that's going to be dominating in the late 10s and early 20s. The problem with IE6 wasn't that Microsoft was aggressively pushing their own alternate standards (although there was some of that, e.g ActiveX), rather it was that what dominated the web was effectively abandonware. This is not at all what's happening with Chromium, quite the opposite. The fear is that Google will start moving too fast in some direction that's in their interest but not in the interest of the rest of the web.

by avar 8y ago

geolgau 8y ago

Not really. The problem with IE6 was that it didn't implement web standards as they should have, so developers had to to a lot of hacks and tricks to have their websites compatible with all browsers. And IE6 was non-compliant with the HTML standards from the start if I remember well: I had a small website that looked good in IE/Netscape/Opera, but when IE6 was out a lot of people started complaining that my backgrounds would not be positioned as they were in Opera/Netscape and all sorts of things like that.

avar 8y ago
Sure. It wasn't perfect, all browsers sucked in different ways back then. Mozilla was slow as hell, IE6's CSS support was amazing etc. This was in 2001 and XP had just been released. My point is that whatever the state was back then what followed couldn't have happened if IE6 was open source. Mozilla could have simply built it as part of Firefox, shipped it as a legacy rendering mode, and nobody would have had Windows or IE6 lock-in to use some legacy website.

detritus 8y ago

If I remember correctly, IE5.5 was the stepping stone toward browser greatness and Netscape became an albatross around all our necks. I find it slightly ironic that my beloved Firefox was borne of that bloody mess!

Yoric 8y ago

> If Google or Microsoft ever decides to just drop Chromium for whatever reason the code this time around is open, so someone else can just pick it up, and users can migrate to that. Not really. Let's imagine for one second that Google switches to Mozilla's Servo or a secret in-house next-gen engine. Who could afford to suddenly hire the 200+ engineers it takes to maintain Chromium? But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that Google will have de facto control on all web technologies. Chromium is open-source but has a closed governance, so nobody can say "no" to a Google patch, while Google can say "no" to any outside patch. This means that Google can, if they so decide, leverage this monopoly against the competition. In theory, Google would have the technological means to kill the web presence of Facebook, Netflix or pretty much anyone with a single commit, which would automatically be propagated to Edge, Opera, Brave, Dolphin, ... Similarly, Google would have the technological means to decide which credit card you could use to pay on the web (at least through WebPay). I don't think that Google would do such a thing, but that's a lot of power in the hands of a single entity, exactly the problem that we witnessed at the time of IE6. Also, Google has, at times, be known to muscle in other browser's territory by using Google Search/Google Docs/Google Hangouts/..., so the temptation will certainly be there.

avar 8y ago
> Who could afford to suddenly hire the 200+ engineers it takes to maintain Chromium? In that scenario one of two things will happen. Either Chromium will only be needed in some shape for compatibility with older sites. At that point you don't need 200 people to maintain it, just a small team to fix portability issues and security problems in the sandbox, while the "real" browser is whatever the next Firefox or Safari is. Or, Chromium is critical to the web somehow and needs to be actively devloped. I find it hard to imagine a scenario where that'll be the case but you can't come up with the salary for 200 engineers to work on it. What Google pays Firefox for the search bar alone is way more than enough to cover that, whatever the dominant browser "distribution" is could do something similar, or move to a hybrid "open core" model with a license fee. > The real problem is that Google will have de facto control on all web technologies[...] Yeah that's a problem. But this is why I'm saying the comparison to IE6 doesn't make any sense beyond the trivial statement that in the 00s this one browser was really popular, and now we have this other browser that's going to be dominating in the late 10s and early 20s. The problem with IE6 wasn't that Microsoft was aggressively pushing their own alternate standards (although there was some of that, e.g ActiveX), rather it was that what dominated the web was effectively abandonware. This is not at all what's happening with Chromium, quite the opposite. The fear is that Google will start moving too fast in some direction that's in their interest but not in the interest of the rest of the web.