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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

by roca 7y ago

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 Web? 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. A single codebase makes radical implementation experiments more difficult. Companies can patch Chromium but architectural divergence gets expensive fast. Say you want to rewrite the Chromium style system for parallelism with Rust, like Mozilla did with Firefox, and Google says no? Good luck maintaining that long-term. (A good example was how JSC vs V8 caused endless friction between Google and Apple in Webkit, leading up to the Blink fork.) Another problem is that it would be very hard to block Web features that Google implements in Chromium. (P)NaCl/Pepper is a good example. "It's a ton of work to implement (especially if there's no spec)" is a helpful argument for not implementing a feature that's bad for the Web, both in public and to one's own product management. Hard to hold the line on something like PNaCl/Pepper or WebSQL if it's just a matter of flipping a configuration flag to increase Web compatibility. If the world was all-Chromium a few years ago there's no doubt we'd have PNaCl/Pepper instead of WebAssembly --- and we'd be stuck with the insane duplication of Pepper vs standard Web APIs, the bloat of LLVM everywhere, etc.

ximm 7y ago
> Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting Google already controls the web standardization process with its manpower. So standardizing on chromium would not change that issue, it would just move it to another level. I am not saying that this is great. I just think the argument is invalid.
- roca 7y ago
  Google has a lot of power in the Web platform but it's definitely not complete. If it was just a matter of manpower then they would have forced (P)NaCl/Pepper and Dart down everyone's throats and we would have been stuck with Web Components v0. Sentiments such as "Google controls everything, there is nothing we can do" are inaccurate and also counterproductive.
  - mda 7y ago
    They also introduced countless other things that are now standards. Do you call every attempt to experiment or make things better as"force down throats"? I find this attitude disigenuous and hypocritical.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Mozilla was more relevant back then, and mobile Web wasn't as strong. Nowadays for most consumers it is whatever Safari or Chrome support.
- sureaboutthis 7y ago
  Nothing makes it into the standard until there are at least two implementations in browsers. The standard is based on implementation, not invention by anyone.
lazyjones 7y ago
> 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 that cause browsers to be bloated, unmaintainable codebases nobody except 9-figure-budget entities can hope to reimplement. It's an unstable, far too complex platform that wastes billions in unnecessary maintenance work for web developers. Much of this could have been avoided by knocking some sense into the entities that constantly propose new features and those who implement them as native browser elements instead of JS libraries where possible. Then there's the insanity of preserving unsafe behaviour as default and adding response headers and extra HTML tag attributes to avoid it, so broken sites could stay broken and everyone else had to do maintenance work. I'm not saying Google is the driving force behind this, but it reeks of the same stuff that Microsoft was doing to prevent Word, Excel file formats from becoming readable and writable for the competition. It's too late to freeze the web platform, it needs to be replaced with something sane and stable, controlled by people with no ulterior motives.
- saulrh 7y ago
  > 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.
  - lazyjones 7y ago
    > 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)?
    - mcny 7y ago
      I may be remembering things incorrectly but I think Mozilla almost got in trouble with the IRS because too much of funding came from a single source: Google. What I'm trying to say is Mozilla might have died a long time ago if not for Google.
bobajeff 7y ago
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 MVNOs but for search engine infrastructure.
- z3t4 7y ago
  If you are fed up with a service/app you can switch to another or make your own.
- Certhas 7y ago
  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.
  - firethief 7y ago
    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?
- roenxi 7y ago
  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.
hlkps 7y ago
>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. If instead of Blink we had Blink AND Gecko, instead of Chromium bugs being the standard, Chromium AND Firefox bugs would be the standard. How is having to implement workarounds for TWO engines worse than having to implement workarounds for ONE engine?
- dual_basis 7y ago
  It seems like you are missing the original point. People aren't working around bugs in Chromium, they are (either inadvertently or intentionally) developing apps which rely on the buggy functionality.
treis 7y ago
>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.

by roca 7y ago

ximm 7y ago

> Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting Google already controls the web standardization process with its manpower. So standardizing on chromium would not change that issue, it would just move it to another level. I am not saying that this is great. I just think the argument is invalid.

roca 7y ago
Google has a lot of power in the Web platform but it's definitely not complete. If it was just a matter of manpower then they would have forced (P)NaCl/Pepper and Dart down everyone's throats and we would have been stuck with Web Components v0. Sentiments such as "Google controls everything, there is nothing we can do" are inaccurate and also counterproductive.
- mda 7y ago
  They also introduced countless other things that are now standards. Do you call every attempt to experiment or make things better as"force down throats"? I find this attitude disigenuous and hypocritical.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Mozilla was more relevant back then, and mobile Web wasn't as strong. Nowadays for most consumers it is whatever Safari or Chrome support.
sureaboutthis 7y ago
Nothing makes it into the standard until there are at least two implementations in browsers. The standard is based on implementation, not invention by anyone.

lazyjones 7y ago

> 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 that cause browsers to be bloated, unmaintainable codebases nobody except 9-figure-budget entities can hope to reimplement. It's an unstable, far too complex platform that wastes billions in unnecessary maintenance work for web developers. Much of this could have been avoided by knocking some sense into the entities that constantly propose new features and those who implement them as native browser elements instead of JS libraries where possible. Then there's the insanity of preserving unsafe behaviour as default and adding response headers and extra HTML tag attributes to avoid it, so broken sites could stay broken and everyone else had to do maintenance work. I'm not saying Google is the driving force behind this, but it reeks of the same stuff that Microsoft was doing to prevent Word, Excel file formats from becoming readable and writable for the competition. It's too late to freeze the web platform, it needs to be replaced with something sane and stable, controlled by people with no ulterior motives.

saulrh 7y ago
> 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.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > 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)?
  - mcny 7y ago
    I may be remembering things incorrectly but I think Mozilla almost got in trouble with the IRS because too much of funding came from a single source: Google. What I'm trying to say is Mozilla might have died a long time ago if not for Google.

bobajeff 7y ago

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 MVNOs but for search engine infrastructure.

z3t4 7y ago
If you are fed up with a service/app you can switch to another or make your own.
Certhas 7y ago
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.
- firethief 7y ago
  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?
roenxi 7y ago
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.

hlkps 7y ago

>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. If instead of Blink we had Blink AND Gecko, instead of Chromium bugs being the standard, Chromium AND Firefox bugs would be the standard. How is having to implement workarounds for TWO engines worse than having to implement workarounds for ONE engine?

dual_basis 7y ago
It seems like you are missing the original point. People aren't working around bugs in Chromium, they are (either inadvertently or intentionally) developing apps which rely on the buggy functionality.

treis 7y ago

>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.