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The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chro
by user17843 7y ago
The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork. (The train has already left the station for anything besides WebKit or Blink, since the lack of accessibility of Gecko means it will never be adopted by anyone else.)
But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground (e.g. Opera, Firefox).
And unfortunately no single player involved can gain much by going against Google. What would Microsoft gain from forking? Nothing.
I think 10 years in the future we might see WebKit and Blink merge together into a single core engine.
Modern Capitalism almost dictates this development, as corporations strive to save money at all costs.
- btown 7y ago> smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork Google can and does use DRM to block even this from happening: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-browser/ https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked... Even Mozilla needed to license Widevine from Google to support modern video: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm Based on the policy evidenced in Maddock's post, it seems impossible to develop an open-source browser in 2019 that supports video streaming.
- Aeolun 7y agoUse an open-source DRM solution?
- frenchy 7y ago> support modern video There's nothing particularly modern about DRM.
- TylerE 7y agoIn some sort of Stallman utopia maybe. In the real world...
- userbinator 7y agoCrack the DRM and do it in a country that does not care about DMCA and has lax copyright laws. You could create an "illegal browser", and judging by how effective all the other antipiracy efforts have been to date (i.e. not at all), I doubt you'll face too much opposition...
- arpa 7y agoOr don't consume DRMed content?
- Sabinus 7y agoSo, all commercial video content on the web?
- josteink 7y agoNot all commercial content is DRMed. Example: Rifftraxx. You can also enjoy lots of high-quality, DRM-free content on YouTube, Vimeo, peertube, fosdem and god knows where. There’s more to internet video than Netflix, Hulu and Prime.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoFrom the perspective of general population - which is where you need adoption to be even a mote of dust next to Chrome - no, there isn't.
- zentiggr 7y agoSure... vote with your wallet, only in video space. When DRM'ed content becomes less popular, companies will have to reconsider. Of course, I'm one of those who doesn't care much about mass media in general. Addictions could make this shift impossible.
- asark 7y agoOr go the "insert DeCSS here" route that some used back when that was a thing. "If you happen to have somehow acquired a WideVine lib, having hash [some string], stick it here if you want to watch Netflix."
- arpa 7y agoWell maybe we don't really need DRM? I mean, there are other sources of entertainment which do not threaten the FOSS
- zwaps 7y agoSure, people gonna use a browser where the only entertainment is a 240p stream of Stallmann chewing his toes. These responses... Dont support amazon or netflix, twitch? Even FOSS needs to be realistic and see what is a solution and what is not. A FOSS product needs to support the things people want to do. Otherwise it will not succeed. We should have learned this in the last twenty years. Without Firefox and its compromises, Google would have 99% market share and FOSS people would browse wuth Lynx or wget
- arpa 7y agoYes, support direct torrent video streaming. Screw the fat cats. Long live Stallman, death to late stage capitalism computing!
- threeseed 7y agoApple is behind WebKit and has a lot to gain by going against Google. They are competitors in the hardware space and Apple needs an 'enemy' to help target its pro-privacy agenda against.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoGenuine question, will Apple leave all the tracking/advertising money on the table in order to best Google on privacy? Or, once they win enough market-share will they just sell out?
- ljm 7y agoIs that true? IE was incumbent and Firefox unseated it. They had the legacy of Netscape, sure, but they didn’t throw the towel and reskin IE the same way other browsers of the time did. Besides that, at which point does the dominant search and advertising company of the internet get an antitrust case for this? People think google is trustworthy yet they do nothing to earn that trust.
- Klonoar 7y agoThis kinda erases history. IE was riddled with security flaws and stagnant beyond belief when Firefox usurped it. There was a compelling reason to use an IE alternative back then - they actually offered something IE couldn't give. Chrome doesn't have that problem.
- bhtru 7y agoWith this course of action it may be compelling enough to give consumer users a reason to ditch Chrome.
- ethbro 7y agoNo significant number of users have ever ditched anything useful over invisible tracking.
- brokenmachine 7y agoWe're talking about very visible ads, not invisible tracking.
- kortilla 7y agoWell it will once it disallows ad blocking
- ljm 7y agoDo these changes make Google less stagnant, as they disempower the discerning user who wants at least some control over their browsing experience? Google's new security flaw is that they are going to moderate ad-blocking, become responsible for it, and then depend on their inhuman machine to ignore all of your complaints. No different to how you can't find a human connect when you get screwed out of Gmail or Google Wallet because of their mathematics. As a total thought experiment on where I'm coming from with this: in Star Trek TNG, Data (the Android) spends seven years with us exploring the human equation. Strip out the narrative imbalance and do you think the current automation of help and support is anywhere near aligned to the ideals of that 30 year old TV show that didn't know better? Or is the algorithm an overfitting to Google's commercial needs? It's tangential to this thread but for some reason it felt worth writing out.
- roca 7y agoWhat do you mean "lack of accessibility of Gecko"? Did you mean "lack of embedability"? Gecko's embedability sucks ... on desktop. But that's not inevitable, it's just a matter of priorities and resources. On Android it's getting a lot better and something like GeckoView on Android could be made to work on desktop too ... if there's demand and perceived benefit. (Mozilla's in the middle of upgrading Gecko's multiprocess support for fine-grained "site isolation" so now might not be the ideal time to stabilize embedding APIs.)
- user17843 7y agoWhat i've read is that Gecko is a bit more difficult to understand when it comes to the entire code base, compared wo WebKit or Blink.
- roca 7y agoThat might be true. They're all incredibly complex beasts. I don't think it matters much for adoption in terms of embedding or forking to create a new browser; the engine internals can and should mostly be hidden behind an API.