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> 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 user

by 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 Yoric 8y ago

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.