31 ms·

The endless browser wars

207 points by signa11 6y ago

dzdt 6y ago
Not mentioned is the password situation. That is the bigger lock-in than bookmarks. I don't know what is the tech stack underneath or even what chromium does. But as a normal-ish chrome user I know behind the scenes google is managing my passwords and it would be a nightmare to switch. Too many sites I wouldn't know how to access without their password management. That is true lock-in.
- kungito 6y ago
  This is what I disliked about using password managers with autogenerated complex passwords. It feel like too much lock in. I'm glad I switched to Firefox Lockwise before getting too locked in with Google's password management
  - fullstop 6y ago
    I switched from Enpass to Bitwarden and it was quite simple. Those are out-of-browser, though, and more in my control.
- lorenzhs 6y ago
  You can export your saved passwords from chrome on chrome://settings/passwords, click the three dot icon to the right of "Saved Passwords" then "Export Passwords". You'll get a CSV file with columns name,url,username,password. This file can be imported into Firefox with https://github.com/louisabraham/ffpass/ https://github.com/louisabraham/ffpass/ (Firefox doesn't support importing the passwords from a chrome profile on Linux). It shouldn't be too hard to import it into your password manager of choice, either.
- Terretta 6y ago
  Agree, that lock-in is rough. That said, it’s just now possible to co-exist or even shift gradually among all three of Microsoft, Google, and now Apple, managing web creds without a third party tool. Although it just got pulled, the just-prior iCloud for Windows supported Apple Keychain password sync, allowing a different GAFAM to manage your creds. There is a Chrome extension as well. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22263118/apple-icloud-windows-password-sync-version-removed https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22263118/apple-icloud-wind... After it’s back, then a reasonably frictionless way to migrate from one of these to another would be to run them side by side for a quarter, using the old to supply the cred while accepting the prompt to remember it on the new. As long as you can still access the old cred store some way, you’ll have most useful creds in order, and only have to look up an old one when accessing something you never use.
approxim8ion 6y ago
Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to. What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway. Other than Firefox and Brave, I can't think of any "mainstream" browser choices that can be considered free software or open source.
- nhoughto 6y ago
  most people don't even think that deeply about it, firefox and chrome are both trusted, end of thought. ease of use beats moral advantage most times (almost every time)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kaladin_1 6y ago
  You don't consider chromium open source?
  - approxim8ion 6y ago
    My understanding is that chromium can't be run on Windows or Mac. Chrome Canary or some testing variant can but not Chromium. It's hard to consider it a mainstream option in that case for me. EDIT: this is untrue, chromium builds are available for all platforms from chromium.org. Please ignore
    - jchw 6y ago
      FWIW, I don't think that is true. https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium
      - approxim8ion 6y ago
Crazyontap 6y ago
There is a new trend emerging in computing with the advent of Machine learning and that is, it is no longer sufficient to have talent/knowledge/passion/amazing team to create something. You need very deep pockets too. I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for speech-to-text/text-to-speech, etc. This gap will grow more and more as new machine learning features are introduced (e.g. natural lang page searching, better translation, etc) which would be very easy for Google to add to it's browser but very expensive for open source projects.
- gggtt 6y ago
  I am not convinced this is true. The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon so that they can build even more privacy invasive Alexa & friends device. So yeah, in a way this an issue of money, but not because you can't afford GPUs & Data, but because you can't buy the right people
  - eternalny1 6y ago
    > The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon That is part of the problem. With smaller projects you are at risk of the "hit by a bus" problem, where major/complex technology is dependent on a single individual or a very small team.
- fctorial 6y ago
  They could ask their users to donate cpu/gpu if this is an issue.
  - preommr 6y ago
    I am pretty sure that Google provides a lot of those services at a loss, or at the very least, they can synergize with other projects they have in way that justifies the cost. Either way, people will choose the free option rather than the option that requires them to pay even a nominal fee, particularly for software that people have gotten used to getting for free.
sradman 6y ago
This article details the decisions of whether to include Chromium in several Linux distributions following Google’s announcement that it will be Limiting Private API availability in Chromium: https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-availability-in.html https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-avail...
- loeg 6y ago
  Which is also referenced in the fifth paragraph of the article: https://lwn.net/Articles/843607/#:~:text=this%20brief%20notice https://lwn.net/Articles/843607/#:~:text=this%20brief%20noti...
1337shadow 6y ago
Why exactly is Google doing this ?
0xy 6y ago
Sync to me is an anti-feature that seems like a privacy nightmare, I especially don't want it to going to an advertising company. Similarly, the vast majority of new browser APIs are absolute garbage infested with security flaws. Most of them are abused almost exclusively by ad networks, including WASM, Audio Context, Beacon and more.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  Sync supports E2E of your data.
Yaggo 6y ago
I wish there was a true war, but unfortunately Chrome has too much domination, expect on Apple's ecosystem.
- loeg 6y ago
  This is pretty similar to the 90s/00s situation with Internet Explorer! It's an apt metaphor; IE6 emerged as dominant at the conclusion of the first browser wars. Chrome is today's IE6.
  - Yaggo 6y ago
    I don't like that comparison. Nowadays there's a collaborated effort to agree about standards, although the process may not always be ideal, but it's still very different from the IE era.
  - acomjean 6y ago
    Memories of doing my timcard. The webpage used to work on hpux and Solaris, but the new one was ie only. The solution was not to fix the time card website, but to force all developers to remote into to a windows box to run Internet Explorer.. I don’t miss time cards..
cccc4all 6y ago
Google has become too big as company and has to be broken up by anti-trust rules, along with many other FAANG companies that ballooned up in recent years. It's laughable that Microsoft was under anti-trust scrutiny when they were much smaller company. The Microsoft anti-trust situation created enough lanes for smaller companies at the time, like Google, Apple, etc. to gain traction. The situation is the same now, anti-trust rules are in place to promote healthy competition at all levels. All these big companies has to be broken up under anti-trust rules to further competition in technology space.
- izacus 6y ago
  Except that you're talking about a completely different situation - Microsoft was attacked for defaulting their browser in their operating system, which had majority market share. This isn't really the case with Chrome though - on Windows, I keep having my browser reset back to Edge with fullscreen ads, on macOS the default browser is Safari (and it keeps spamming me with notification advertisements to use it), on Android the default browser on most US devices is Samsung Browser... It's hard to argue that Google is really abusing people to use Chrome when there's an uphill battle on every single popular platform for users to actually install it. If Google is really pushing an inferior product, how will you argue for antitrust when the users need to go out of their way to use Chrome on pretty much every platform except ChromeOS? What's the equivalent antitrust argument here? "Google doesn't want to freely give their server capacity to anyone for server-driven features" doesn't really make for a strong argument. How do we structure the argument here? "This browser is very popular so it needs to be taken away from its developers"?
  - turminal 6y ago
    Google was attacked for bundling chrome in android as well.
  - preommr 6y ago
    Because it's not about the operating system, but all the related services that are embedded in the browser. I use chrome because it ties with my google account which ties in with... pretty much everything. It stores a lot of my passwords, it ties in with my gmail, my google workspace, my shared extensions that gets installed with any other chrome browsers through this google account, other google apps like google docs/calendar, and other google services like their speech-to-text, and it also ties in with my android phone that is linked to my google account.
lqet 6y ago
Key points: > Much of what appears to be Chrome (or Chromium) functionality is, in truth, provided by servers in Google's data centers. These include bookmark synchronization, the safe-browsing feature, search suggestions, spell-checking, and more. > On January 15, the Chromium blog carried this brief notice that, as of March 15, non-Chrome builds of Chromium would lose access to these APIs. > Anticipating this, distributors are already wondering whether packaging Chromium is still worth the effort. From a first read, I guessed it is time to install Firefox. However, I noticed that I: 1) don't sync bookmarks, 2) don't care for the safe-browsing feature (I understand it is the annoying message that a website is "not safe"?), 3) have my own spell-checking service. So what exactly is meant by "search suggestions"? Is Google actually disabling access to their search API? Why wouldn't this affect Firefox? Why would Google even consider doing this? And, I guess that 4) I can still use another search engine. So, does anyone know what's hidden under "and more"? Because even if all the features from above were missing, I fail to see why this should result in Chromium being removed from distros. It's still a functional, reliable and very fast browser. I am additionally confused because Chromium without these features is more attractive to me than the current version.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  I'm guessing that means personalized search autocomplete from the url bar.
- Artlav 6y ago
  I find this seriously confusing too. None of these sound like major, or even all that useful, features, and yet they talk about "considering whether there is any value in a crippled version of Chromium". What makes it crippled?
- hyper_reality 6y ago
  I think the article somewhat misconstrues the reasons why maintainers are thinking of dropping support for packaging Chromium. Maintaining the Chromium package is an unusually laborious task, with a lot of releases, and huge compile times. It's simply a gigantic codebase with the order of millions of lines of code, and there are only a couple of people (at best) in each distro dedicating time to keep track of the latest changes. The Chromium in Debian has been developing a growing list of security issues as it falls behind the latest versions https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=972134 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=972134 Google's forced removal of features from Chromium may just be the straw that broke the camel's back. I see other comments on HN and LWN question the maintainers' judgement, without realising how many resources it takes to package Chromium for distros.
mozey 6y ago
Maybe Linux distribution specific builds of Chromium isn't a good idea, instead there should just be Chromium distributions, e.g. https://brave.com https://brave.com?
- turminal 6y ago
  Distro packaging doesn't work like that. Distros enable or disable certain features of the software at compile time, they also attempt to make sure the software plays well with the rest of the distro and abides to its stated goals and guidelines. Distro packagers also make sure whatever the software developers make up isn't blindly accepted and followed. Chromium in particular is particularly hard to package in a meaningful way (there was a recent controversy concerning that in the Mint distro). But that doesn't mean it is not worth trying.
mkl95 6y ago
Every Chromium user needs to understand that Chromium is a Google project, and Google like to sacrifice a random project once in a while (don't be evil huh?). I'm completely unaware of how Google handle these decisions internally, but from the point of view of an outsider they are trying to optimize their resources and output as much as possible. If some service is not extremely successful and profitable, and it's being actively maintained, someone at Google will eventually suggest to move on to other stuff.
- dgb23 6y ago
  Chrome and Chromium are not some niche products. Same with ads, search and GCP. These things are here to stay for a very long time. There are other problems with Chrome and Chromium. Google is a brilliant company and I want to like them. Out of the biggest tech companies they seem to apply the least bullying tactics, worker exploitation and so on. But the fact that they are an ad company that profiles my behavior leaves a bitter taste. They often gather data in a way that is completely opaque to most people, which I think is problematic.
  - mkl95 6y ago
    Linux makes heavy use of GNU technology, but the GNU OS itself is relatively unknown. Just like Chrome and Edge make heavy use of Chromium, but it is used directly by relatively few users (don't get me wrong, I was a Chromium user for years). Google may be trying to turn the Chromium browser into a "Chromium userland" rather than a browser will full capabilities.
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  How do you sacrifice an open-source project that people can just fork?
  - mkl95 6y ago
    Technically, Chromium is not being sacrificed, it will just lose access to some powerful APIs. In practice it means Chromium as we know it is done. Most people who want or need these features will be unaware of some community fork and will simply switch to Chrome or Firefox.
voiper1 6y ago
I'm actually kinda confused. If chromium had search suggestions, spell checking from google, logging in to google for bookmark sync and safe browsing, etc, then how is chromium particularly de-google'd? It actually seems like this move by google is what people claim to want: an open source browser that doesn't phone home to google.
- turminal 6y ago
  Chromium utilizes no proprietary code, that's what makes it different from chrome. All the listed features were just google apis (accessed by open source code) . It still phoned home unless those features were disabled.
minikites 6y ago
It remains baffling to me that supposedly tech-savvy people seem to love a web browser made by an advertising company.
turminal 6y ago
Sadly the impact of this will be so small google won't even notice. And even if all the angry chromium users that are potentially going to have to switch their browser would take action and be vocal and do something about what is going on with the web, nothing would change. Such is the price of monopolies.
doublerabbit 6y ago
Until someone creates a new browser with a new render/scripting engine. Which everyone always jumps on saying "it's impossible", the war is over. Chrome has won. Chrome is currently giving life support to Mozilla and when they decide to axe that, well it's game over for Mozilla. The depressing part is the freedom, the new that the internet once provided is over. It's been turned in to a commercial breeding ground and we are the cattle to be milked and bred. Until we create a whole new infrastructure, protocol suite away from the broken existing OSI model, the internet isn't going to heal. It's going to be robbed and stabbed repeatedly over and over again. Look at your browsing history today, how many times have you visited that one site in the last year? Now compare that to how many new sites you have visited in the same year; not a lot I expect.
- kungito 6y ago
  There is too much money in milking average non technical people in any way possible. I guess whichever "new internet" pops up will be awesome and used by just a small number of power users. Great and flexible tools will never be used by the average person. I've had 2 close family members in a span of 2 weeks get lost in the whole "log into your chrome account" vs "log into your google account within your chrome account" thing. Any remotely complex feature beyond "2 clicks to all of the 4 things I use the internet for" is just confusing people. And it's OK because that seems to be the reality. Ads for the general public are here to stay
- stiray 6y ago
  The issue is that Firefox HAS created a new rendering engine, but people don't switch. It has nothing to do with technology, people wont even try to switch. Some for fanboyism, some because they would have to adapt, some don't even know what browser is. What I do consider staggering is how many technically capable people are not prepared to make a switch. Google is slowly closing down the lock-down trap they have nurtured for so many years and now it should be obvious to anyone who is looking at "progress" (or decline?) of internet, but this is still not enough to at least stop using the chrome. Ah, people... we will just never learn.
  - 6y ago
wombatmobile 6y ago
The original browser "war" between Microsoft and Netscape was over the definition of HTML. Microsoft wanted to control it, and was prepared to damage Netscape's business to quash the competition illegally to impose an arbitrary monopoly. HTML5 has long been an open standard, maintained by the W3C. Google's role as a W3C member was to end the original browser war by supporting W3C processes with implementations and evangelism that lead to Chrome becoming the most popular browser. The article's news, about Chromium losing access to app features such as syncing, is a different battle. It is not about arbitrary syntax being controlled by a corporation vs a standards body. It is about the cost of making useful software that serves the public and is given away for free to enable the commons. Everybody has the right and the technical opportunity to make a browser and ancillary services such as sync. However, a couple of people in a garage don't live long enough to make a browser. Only well funded and well organised groups have the resources to do so. Even Mozilla relies upon funding from Google to implement Firefox, so really, Google is funding the whole browser ecosystem. That's an entirely different problem to the one Microsoft got busted for in 1996. It's a problem alright, and one that needs air and sunlight. To really give this problem the prominence it deserves and requires, we shouldn't be calling it "the endless browser war". We should be calling it something else. Until we do, the status quo is just going to get stronger and more entrenched, because it isn't anything illegal, proprietary, or closed. The fact that most consumers like Google and don't see the problem makes it all the more urgent to give this problem a name.
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  > Even Mozilla relies upon funding from Google to implement Firefox, so really, Google is funding the whole browser ecosystem Don't forget that Microsoft forked Chromium also, and that Chromium has been forked by several open-source groups.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  "Browser monoculture problem" sounds like a good name.
Zardoz84 6y ago
> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. The creators of web sites have responded by not caring about Firefox; having to retry broken web sites in Chrome is a ritual that many Firefox users have had to get used to. It's not surprising that users give up and just run Chrome from the outset. Pardon ? I don't run on any issue that requires using Chrome instead of Firefox. At least, not usually. Also, as web developer I always work on Firefox and then I try on Chromiun and Edge to see if I run on a Blink bug (Yeah! I hit a few working on this way) or something that it's different between Firefox and Blink engine
- richeyryan 6y ago
  I encounter it occasionally. Either broken or omitted features. Slack calls don't work in Firefox just because. Blurring out your background in Google meet isn't available on Firefox. Some utilities websites here, in Ireland, don't work in Firefox but do in Chrome.
  - tristor 6y ago
    >Slack calls don't work in Firefox just because. Slack calls don't work in Firefox because Slack explicitly made the choice to not support Firefox and to not follow web standards in how they implemented Slack calls. Furthermore, they go a step further by detecting your browser and blocking the feature for Firefox users and telling you to switch to Chrome. [1] This is not a failure of Firefox, it's a failure of Slack. I think the attitude in your comment is very common, and is exactly why it's so hard to build a web browser for the modern web that isn't part of the Google Chrome monoculture. Users cannot differentiate easily between problems they encounter because of their browser vs problems they encounter because of the web app, and for the user it doesn't matter because it's still a problem. Regardless of the cause, it's important that browser makers solve these issues to ensure that users can get things done on the web, but that's easier said than done. [1]: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/958645632620748800?lang=en https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/958645632620748800?lang=e...
karmakaze 6y ago
TL;DR - reminder: Chrome is not/was not opensource - Chromium is losing features like bookmark sync on Mar 15 because Google will no longer issue API keys - if you care about opensource, run Firefox (or Chromium) - if you are a web dev, support Firefox
mumblemumble 6y ago
What really strikes me here is that so many of us, perhaps taken in by the tacit assumption that embrace, extend, extinguish is a peculiarly Microsoft behavior, didn't see this sort of thing coming, and even spent much of the past decade cheering it on.
meibo 6y ago
I wonder if it would be feasible for e.g. Canonical to offer a free, hosted implementation of the Sync servers. The protocol is openly documented afaik, and there might already be efforts to implement an open server. It also has e2ee built-in. Of course then you might as well go off and use Firefox, Brave or Vivaldi, but it'd be an option nonetheless, if not quite an expensive one.
jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y ago
And Firefox is now pro-censorship. i.e. dead to me
CryptoGhost 6y ago
Maybe trying to maintain a free beer web browser is not the best path forward (given all the requirements for a web browser in 2021). Perhaps the best solution is a paid application with an either free or proprietary source model. Free beer programs seem best suited for problem domains where they can age like wine and not worry about maintaining some service level agreement.
CA0DA 6y ago
What's wrong with Firefox? I use it daily and it works great.
LarryDarrell 6y ago
Chrome, or at least it's rendering engine, has won the World Wide Web. It was able to do this because the company that was the best at monetizing every last packet decided it wanted to own that last endpoint as well. HTTP is a lost cause. At this point we need new protocols that are designed to be impossible to monetize. From there new browsers can be built. It'll never get to be as big as the WWW, but I think sub-Internets are the best way to ensure the spirit and creativity of the early WWW lives on.
CivBase 6y ago
> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel? I believe browser diversity is healthy for the world wide web. I don't want Firefox to become dominant either, but right now there is a short supply of browsers which are independent from Chromium. I don't want the W3C to be replaced by the Chromium Project. I believe Firefox is a good enough browser to go toe-to-toe with Chrome. It and it's developer are not without problems. However, at this point I'd use Firefox even if Mozilla was just as bad as Google because I think the diversity is worth it.
- m45t3r 6y ago
  Also, just changing to a Chromium based browser is not sufficient. Google still takes most of the decisions in where Chromium is going, and downstreams either accept them or workaround them (but for every workaround they do it is more things to keep maintaining in the long run). So yeah, using a non Chromium browser is the only way to ensure that the Web is still healthy (i.e.: not controlled by only Google) in the long run.
  - MR4D 6y ago
    I think natural entropy will solve that problem over time. Give Microsoft another year or two, and I think we’ll see a hard fork. Looking back at WebKit, Google forked that into Blink. I don’t know why Firefox couldn’t do the same. I suppose in a couple years we’ll be able to check this post to see if Microsoft has done a hard fork or not. Will be interesting to see.
    - tjoff 6y ago
      I don't know why we'd want Firefox to do that...
015a 6y ago
This is rather written in the perspective of "shame on google for removing these API keys", but it feels to me that this should be a (small, incomplete, but still a) win for open source; if I want to run an open source, free browser, I don't want it phoning home to Google every day. There's a separate problem in that Chromium isn't capable of any other ways of more freely and openly syncing the things it used to sync to Google's servers. But when thinking about any open source software, I feel that its important to separate "things it does which I don't want it to do" and "things I wish it did". In other words, code which was written that doesn't serve the users' interests, and code which could serve the users' interests if it were written. I don't believe its productive to worry or complain about the latter; its more productive to just write it, file feature requests, etc. Of course, in Chromium's case, its unlikely they'd be accepted, but that's a separate, third issue. I also disagree with the article's position that Firefox isn't a valid alternative. Firefox is somewhere within the range of 98% to 102% as good as Chrome, depending on the website you're visiting. By comparison, I would place Safari (the only other real alternate browser on any OS) at 92%-96%. Firefox is a fantastic browser which can absolutely replace Chrome/Chromium, and should be used by more people if for no other reason than to add more balance to the Big Three. Throw out the FOSS ideals for just a second; there are effectively three browsers left, and the most ideal marketshare for those three is 33% each, given that the primary long-term benefit and risk from marketshare is, at the end of the day, power toward influencing the future of the web. Power should be distributed, always. And this is hardly contentious, but the industry need a 4th browser. I would rank this as the single most important project any company, group, or individual could commit productivity to at this time. Of course, important things are rarely easy, but to me, it doesn't even matter if its open or closed source; open source would be better, but what matters far more is distributing power further.
- qu-everything 6y ago
  > if I want to run an open source, free browser, I don't want it phoning home to Google every day. Exactly, it feels more like a win than a loss from where I stand
- latexr 6y ago
  > Firefox is somewhere within the range of 98% to 102% as good as Chrome, depending on the website you're visiting. Perhaps when only taking into account webpage rendering. But how you interact with the browser is also important, and to many of us Firefox falls short in that regard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26036353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26036353
npteljes 6y ago
Discussed 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25913310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25913310
nickelcitymario 6y ago
Anyone else get a real "Ides of March" feel with the timing of this announcement? Two thousand years later and massive betrayals are still happening on March 15th.
mminer237 6y ago
Even if Firefox falls by the wayside and websites stop working with it somehow, making Blink (and Webkit) a monopoly (which I think is a very important thing to prevent and is the reason I use Firefox even if I don't have the warmest feelings toward Mozilla), I don't think that the free sync API being removed means that everyone will have to use Google Chrome. The major Chromium projects—Brave, Vivaldi, and Edge—all already use their own sync engines independent of Google.
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
>Current estimates suggest that 60-70% of web users are running on Chrome. Aren't those mostly Windows users?
djhaskin987 6y ago
My favorite quote from the article: > Chromium has taken a path similar to Android's; there is a core built with free software, but getting its full functionality requires accepting layers of proprietary code on top of it. The fact that said code is running on a remote server somewhere does not really change that situation. Google has used this wolf-in-sheep's-clothing approach for yeas, and it has worked. Fortunately, though, it's also backfired a bit. With things like Microsoft Edge using the open core that google has provided (Chromium) on the market, users have a choice of browser host, including what servers their bookmarks/syncing lives on. Not the best choice, perhaps, but still, a choice. :)
- jamienicol 6y ago
  To follow the analogy, having the choice of Chrome and edge is like having the choice of Google android and Samsung Android. I don't want either, I want a real FOSS browser (and mobile OS)
elwell 6y ago
How will this affect Brave (which uses Chromium)?
sdeframond 6y ago
> having to retry broken web sites in Chrome is a ritual that many Firefox users have had to get used to. I, for one, have been using Firefox both on desktop and mobile for years without ever having to install Chromium, or even any Webkit-based browser. Where does the idea that the web does not work well with Firefox come form exactly ?
- danaliv 6y ago
  For some n=1 anecdata, I very (and I do mean very) occasionally have to bail out of Firefox and use Chrome, most recently on Logitech's ecommerce site. I confess though that I'm never quite sure whether it's a browser issue or the fact that I've got Firefox configured to extreme "adtech is psychological warfare" mode.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I actually switched to Chromium as my main browser a few days ago. I'm using this branch[1], which follows upstream except for a handful of patches to retain support for older versions of OS X, which I prefer. I was somewhat surprised to see that all the syncing features seem to still exist in this close-to-stock Chromium. It encourages you to sign into a Google account to sync data, use and to use Google for search suggestions, and to install extensions from the Chrome Web Store. Does anyone know how that's possible? I'd actually be quite pleased if all of this stuff just got stripped out of Chromium. As it is, I spent quite a bit of time going through and turning off as much of it as I could, in some places via semi-confusing defaults write commands. 1: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy
PascLeRasc 6y ago
I’d like to start contributing money to Firefox. Can anyone weigh in on whether that’s best done through a donation to Mozilla or by paying for the premium Firefox features like Pocket or their VPN? I don’t necessarily need or want these, but they seem more Firefox-focused than a donation to Mozilla.
- jamienicol 6y ago
  Mozilla employee here. A donation to Mozilla Foundation can't be spent on Firefox development. So if you want to specifically help Firefox then yes, pocket or VPN are the best ways to do that. It still won't go 100% towards Firefox development, but rather just in to the corporation's "pot", the majority of which is spent on Firefox development. (Donations to the foundation are kept separate, but are also spent on very worthwhile causes in my opinion.)
w0mbat 6y ago
There is a major factor that kicks in when a browser gets the most market share, particularly >50% of the total, as Win IE did in the 90s and Chrome did a few years ago. Because web site developers test their site in the "top" browser, and then maybe other browsers too, becoming the top browser gives you a huge boost in compatibility through no virtue of your own. Every website works in that browser now because website developers make sure they work. This creates a shift among users, who notice that every site works in the top browser, but only 90% work in browser x, and they start shifting to the top browser and often won't even report problems they have with other browsers. The effect is obviously self-reinforcing, and the top browser continues to gain share. The counter-measure to this is standards. With rigorous web standards followed by websites and browsers, if the top browser works, so do all the rest. There isn't much to enforce this though, and there are temptations on all sides not to do the right thing.
m-ce 6y ago
All the arguments about Chrome being insecure due to its proprietary software built upon it, are true, but why not use Ungoogled Chromium? (or another chromium fork that implements those features themselves). Mozilla is in a very bad position, their main source of income as I understand it is Google, because they're the ones that pay the most to have Google as a default search engine in Firefox. That and Googles anti-competitive practices, like when they implemented the Polymer redesign on YouTube, which had Firefox and Edge loading the site way slower than Chrome. I don't know what Mozilla can do even if they do all the right things, because Google will just keep throwing money punches.
collsni 6y ago
Firefox is the way to go, you can disable anything you don't like. I'd also be okay with a degoogle chromium.
hackerman_fi 6y ago
Don’t know if I’m in minority but I couldn’t care less about these Google provided services. I have no reason to bookmark pages between devices - different devices for different purposes. I don’t need my work bookmarks on my gaming computer. For posting random comments to social media I don’t need spell checking either. If grammar needs to be spot on, I use Word etc.
Asmod4n 6y ago
I just wish Firefox would support HDR, more than 60hz refresh rate and more than two channel audio.
- effie 6y ago
  It could easily support launching dedicated media player such as mpv or mplayer. I wonder why this trivial functionality isn't part of any browser.
korethr 6y ago
Mixed feelings on this. Personally, I'd switched back to Firefox from Chrome years ago, because I'd lost some trust in Google, and didn't want a browser that required me to sign in to make use of its features. My own personal use case for Chromium wasn't for any Google-specific features, it was the same reason I would occasionally use Internet Explorer back in the day -- a site I needed/wanted was broken in anything else. AFAICT, the removal of these API keys doesn't break any of the things I used Chromium for. But on the other hand, I recognize that I am an outlier amongst outliers. The everyday user of Chrome probably does make use of and depends on the Google-specific services embedded in the browser. And so by revoking the API keys for those features, Chromium is crippled and no longer at feature parity with Chrome. While I don't care, a lot of other people will, and so those who might be inclined to install Chromium are going to be less inclined if Chromium is now less featureful and useful to them. Only the especially hardcore about software freedom and personal privacy are going to to see installing the feature-stripped and less-useful Chromium as worth the tradeoff. Those persons are like me, outliers amongst outliers. The net effect? Distros stop providing packages for a browser with an install base that shrinks to something too small to be worth supporting. And now, the only option becomes the proprietary Chrome. Honestly, this strikes me as a tactic similar to, if not the same as "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" for which Microsoft was so roundly lambasted in the late 90s and early 00s. The question remains then, what to do about it? Anti-trust or other regulations? Something else?
gtsop 6y ago
The discussion around firefox being inferior to chrome I think is totally irrelevant and missleading. Yes, chrome has supperior functionality, if you don't care about privacy and freedom then there is no discussion to be had here. If you do care, please don't throw arguments like your fans going loud and your ram filling up. Instead, support open source projects financialy or put volunteer some of your time to help fix these problems. I am not saying that privacy and freedom should be hard, but as of right now, they are. You either accept it, suck the downsides and help to fix any issues, or you give up and surrender the fate of the field to a single company, Google. We are all free to do what we think best for ourselves. But please, no fooling ourselves. No excuses.
arpyzo 6y ago
I wish more people with give Firefox a honest try. I've been using it for years and I love it. It's very rare that I need to pull up Chrome to use a site, and frankly I blame the website developer. How hard is it to write a web application that works in Firefox? IMO, one has to be pretty sloppy or lazy to wind up creating a Chrome-only site. Firefox allows me to customize it exactly that way I want, and it's reached the point where I haven't been forced to change that look and feel in a long time. It has a ton of cool features I haven't even had a chance to take advantage yet, such as setting up my own sync server. That said, it has its warts, and the developer's decisions have frustrated me at times, but this goes for pretty much any software that gets "upgraded" on a regular basis. Give is a shot. You might find you like it more than you expected.
- PascLeRasc 6y ago
  Firefox seems to grow on me more and more every day. I really like all the integrations like reader mode, picture-in-picture, the new email alias stuff. There’s a lot that I don’t care about like containers or whatever the special tab system is, but I like that they’re trying new ideas.
- toyg 6y ago
  Yeah, I use Firefox and every time I see these pessimist statements like “omg i have to open a site in Chrome _constantly_” I shake my head. I’ve not touched Chrome in years, on Windows and MacOs, and I surf my fair amount of the wavy web. I even uninstalled it on my personal laptop. If one in a billion sites doesn’t work in FF (which, again, has not happened to me in years, except for intranet sites meant to work only with IE6...), just have a dedicated launcher for it, or even better tell their support you’re dropping them because of that. And if that broken site is a Google property: it’s well-known that they do it on purpose, you’re literally giving in to the school bully shaking you down for lunch money. Grow a spine.
ornxka 6y ago
Nobody is addressing the elephant in the room, which is the reason why there are only two viable browsers in the first place - because the endless and ever-growing list of specifications and standards web browsers must comply with has grown to the point where it is apparently impossible to build a browser without the budget of a nation state. For example, https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.... has done some calculations, and has found that "the total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing." Good luck implementing that, if you're not Google! A lot of things could be done to simplify the amount of labor it takes to build a web browser. If you look at the architecture of the web, there is no reason for things to be this complicated - the web doesn't need a complicated high-level language runtime when it could have bytecode a la WASM, for example. But that's exactly the problem, because the reason why things have become so complicated is not because that's just how complicated the problem space is that a web browser attempts to solve, but because the people in charge of the web actually have a vested interest in things being as complicated as possible. When you already have the budget of a nation state, there is not only no benefit to your job requiring less labor to perform, it actually harms you because now competitors need that many fewer resources to compete with you. That's the real problem - they don't want it to be simple and easy, they want it to be complicated and hard, and the present problem of lack of browser diversity is just a consequence of that. This is the real reason why things have gotten this bad in the browser space, and it's never going to get any better without first addressing this fact and then by breaking basically the entire web by decimating the volume of standards documents web browsers have to follow. There is no other option. Nobody is going to sift through 114 million words of specification documents to build another web browser for the web that exists today. The web can't be saved. Its replacement will have to start from scratch.
- freediver 6y ago
  There are two components of a modern browser: browser rendering engine and a browser framework (everything around the rendering engine that creates the browser itself). There are three main browser rendering engines, all of which are open-source: Gecko, Blink and Webkit. Problem of standards is mainly "offsourced" to these rendering engines and these open source communities have been doing their job more or less successfully. Browser frameworks are built around these rendering engines. Two most popular open source ones are Firefox (built around Gecko) and Chromium (brother of closed-source Chrome, built around Blink). I think the problem that you are articulating comes from the fact that 99% of browsers on the market use one of these two frameworks, in reality mostly Chromium. For example Edge and Brave are based on Chromium. This leads to inheriting most of the features but also most of the flaws of the browser framework. Notably there are no major open source frameworks built around Webkit, which is a shame, considering that at least for macOS, Webkit is by far the most superior rendering engine (both in battery life and sheer performance).
type0 6y ago
I always considered Chromium to be a sort of castrated Chrome, now it's even more apparent than ever.
rurban 6y ago
Wonder why he didn't mention, Ungoogled Chromium, the most likely successor of all linux Chromium packages. In between I am slowly moving to Firefox on Fedora, but mostly because I can watch HD videos there, not on Chromium. Firefox is also much faster than Chromium.

207 points by signa11 6y ago

dzdt 6y ago

Not mentioned is the password situation. That is the bigger lock-in than bookmarks. I don't know what is the tech stack underneath or even what chromium does. But as a normal-ish chrome user I know behind the scenes google is managing my passwords and it would be a nightmare to switch. Too many sites I wouldn't know how to access without their password management. That is true lock-in.

kungito 6y ago
This is what I disliked about using password managers with autogenerated complex passwords. It feel like too much lock in. I'm glad I switched to Firefox Lockwise before getting too locked in with Google's password management
- fullstop 6y ago
  I switched from Enpass to Bitwarden and it was quite simple. Those are out-of-browser, though, and more in my control.
lorenzhs 6y ago
You can export your saved passwords from chrome on chrome://settings/passwords, click the three dot icon to the right of "Saved Passwords" then "Export Passwords". You'll get a CSV file with columns name,url,username,password. This file can be imported into Firefox with https://github.com/louisabraham/ffpass/ https://github.com/louisabraham/ffpass/ (Firefox doesn't support importing the passwords from a chrome profile on Linux). It shouldn't be too hard to import it into your password manager of choice, either.
Terretta 6y ago
Agree, that lock-in is rough. That said, it’s just now possible to co-exist or even shift gradually among all three of Microsoft, Google, and now Apple, managing web creds without a third party tool. Although it just got pulled, the just-prior iCloud for Windows supported Apple Keychain password sync, allowing a different GAFAM to manage your creds. There is a Chrome extension as well. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22263118/apple-icloud-windows-password-sync-version-removed https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22263118/apple-icloud-wind... After it’s back, then a reasonably frictionless way to migrate from one of these to another would be to run them side by side for a quarter, using the old to supply the cred while accepting the prompt to remember it on the new. As long as you can still access the old cred store some way, you’ll have most useful creds in order, and only have to look up an old one when accessing something you never use.

approxim8ion 6y ago

Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to. What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway. Other than Firefox and Brave, I can't think of any "mainstream" browser choices that can be considered free software or open source.

nhoughto 6y ago
most people don't even think that deeply about it, firefox and chrome are both trusted, end of thought. ease of use beats moral advantage most times (almost every time)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kaladin_1 6y ago
You don't consider chromium open source?
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  My understanding is that chromium can't be run on Windows or Mac. Chrome Canary or some testing variant can but not Chromium. It's hard to consider it a mainstream option in that case for me. EDIT: this is untrue, chromium builds are available for all platforms from chromium.org. Please ignore
  - jchw 6y ago
    FWIW, I don't think that is true. https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium
    - approxim8ion 6y ago

Crazyontap 6y ago

There is a new trend emerging in computing with the advent of Machine learning and that is, it is no longer sufficient to have talent/knowledge/passion/amazing team to create something. You need very deep pockets too. I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for speech-to-text/text-to-speech, etc. This gap will grow more and more as new machine learning features are introduced (e.g. natural lang page searching, better translation, etc) which would be very easy for Google to add to it's browser but very expensive for open source projects.

gggtt 6y ago
I am not convinced this is true. The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon so that they can build even more privacy invasive Alexa & friends device. So yeah, in a way this an issue of money, but not because you can't afford GPUs & Data, but because you can't buy the right people
- eternalny1 6y ago
  > The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon That is part of the problem. With smaller projects you are at risk of the "hit by a bus" problem, where major/complex technology is dependent on a single individual or a very small team.
fctorial 6y ago
They could ask their users to donate cpu/gpu if this is an issue.
- preommr 6y ago
  I am pretty sure that Google provides a lot of those services at a loss, or at the very least, they can synergize with other projects they have in way that justifies the cost. Either way, people will choose the free option rather than the option that requires them to pay even a nominal fee, particularly for software that people have gotten used to getting for free.

sradman 6y ago

This article details the decisions of whether to include Chromium in several Linux distributions following Google’s announcement that it will be Limiting Private API availability in Chromium: https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-availability-in.html https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-avail...

loeg 6y ago
Which is also referenced in the fifth paragraph of the article: https://lwn.net/Articles/843607/#:~:text=this%20brief%20notice https://lwn.net/Articles/843607/#:~:text=this%20brief%20noti...

1337shadow 6y ago

Why exactly is Google doing this ?

0xy 6y ago

Sync to me is an anti-feature that seems like a privacy nightmare, I especially don't want it to going to an advertising company. Similarly, the vast majority of new browser APIs are absolute garbage infested with security flaws. Most of them are abused almost exclusively by ad networks, including WASM, Audio Context, Beacon and more.

dkdk8283 6y ago
Sync supports E2E of your data.

Yaggo 6y ago

I wish there was a true war, but unfortunately Chrome has too much domination, expect on Apple's ecosystem.

loeg 6y ago
This is pretty similar to the 90s/00s situation with Internet Explorer! It's an apt metaphor; IE6 emerged as dominant at the conclusion of the first browser wars. Chrome is today's IE6.
- Yaggo 6y ago
  I don't like that comparison. Nowadays there's a collaborated effort to agree about standards, although the process may not always be ideal, but it's still very different from the IE era.
- acomjean 6y ago
  Memories of doing my timcard. The webpage used to work on hpux and Solaris, but the new one was ie only. The solution was not to fix the time card website, but to force all developers to remote into to a windows box to run Internet Explorer.. I don’t miss time cards..

cccc4all 6y ago

Google has become too big as company and has to be broken up by anti-trust rules, along with many other FAANG companies that ballooned up in recent years. It's laughable that Microsoft was under anti-trust scrutiny when they were much smaller company. The Microsoft anti-trust situation created enough lanes for smaller companies at the time, like Google, Apple, etc. to gain traction. The situation is the same now, anti-trust rules are in place to promote healthy competition at all levels. All these big companies has to be broken up under anti-trust rules to further competition in technology space.

izacus 6y ago
Except that you're talking about a completely different situation - Microsoft was attacked for defaulting their browser in their operating system, which had majority market share. This isn't really the case with Chrome though - on Windows, I keep having my browser reset back to Edge with fullscreen ads, on macOS the default browser is Safari (and it keeps spamming me with notification advertisements to use it), on Android the default browser on most US devices is Samsung Browser... It's hard to argue that Google is really abusing people to use Chrome when there's an uphill battle on every single popular platform for users to actually install it. If Google is really pushing an inferior product, how will you argue for antitrust when the users need to go out of their way to use Chrome on pretty much every platform except ChromeOS? What's the equivalent antitrust argument here? "Google doesn't want to freely give their server capacity to anyone for server-driven features" doesn't really make for a strong argument. How do we structure the argument here? "This browser is very popular so it needs to be taken away from its developers"?
- turminal 6y ago
  Google was attacked for bundling chrome in android as well.
- preommr 6y ago
  Because it's not about the operating system, but all the related services that are embedded in the browser. I use chrome because it ties with my google account which ties in with... pretty much everything. It stores a lot of my passwords, it ties in with my gmail, my google workspace, my shared extensions that gets installed with any other chrome browsers through this google account, other google apps like google docs/calendar, and other google services like their speech-to-text, and it also ties in with my android phone that is linked to my google account.

lqet 6y ago

Key points: > Much of what appears to be Chrome (or Chromium) functionality is, in truth, provided by servers in Google's data centers. These include bookmark synchronization, the safe-browsing feature, search suggestions, spell-checking, and more. > On January 15, the Chromium blog carried this brief notice that, as of March 15, non-Chrome builds of Chromium would lose access to these APIs. > Anticipating this, distributors are already wondering whether packaging Chromium is still worth the effort. From a first read, I guessed it is time to install Firefox. However, I noticed that I: 1) don't sync bookmarks, 2) don't care for the safe-browsing feature (I understand it is the annoying message that a website is "not safe"?), 3) have my own spell-checking service. So what exactly is meant by "search suggestions"? Is Google actually disabling access to their search API? Why wouldn't this affect Firefox? Why would Google even consider doing this? And, I guess that 4) I can still use another search engine. So, does anyone know what's hidden under "and more"? Because even if all the features from above were missing, I fail to see why this should result in Chromium being removed from distros. It's still a functional, reliable and very fast browser. I am additionally confused because Chromium without these features is more attractive to me than the current version.

jedimastert 6y ago
I'm guessing that means personalized search autocomplete from the url bar.
Artlav 6y ago
I find this seriously confusing too. None of these sound like major, or even all that useful, features, and yet they talk about "considering whether there is any value in a crippled version of Chromium". What makes it crippled?
hyper_reality 6y ago
I think the article somewhat misconstrues the reasons why maintainers are thinking of dropping support for packaging Chromium. Maintaining the Chromium package is an unusually laborious task, with a lot of releases, and huge compile times. It's simply a gigantic codebase with the order of millions of lines of code, and there are only a couple of people (at best) in each distro dedicating time to keep track of the latest changes. The Chromium in Debian has been developing a growing list of security issues as it falls behind the latest versions https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=972134 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=972134 Google's forced removal of features from Chromium may just be the straw that broke the camel's back. I see other comments on HN and LWN question the maintainers' judgement, without realising how many resources it takes to package Chromium for distros.

mozey 6y ago

Maybe Linux distribution specific builds of Chromium isn't a good idea, instead there should just be Chromium distributions, e.g. https://brave.com https://brave.com?

turminal 6y ago
Distro packaging doesn't work like that. Distros enable or disable certain features of the software at compile time, they also attempt to make sure the software plays well with the rest of the distro and abides to its stated goals and guidelines. Distro packagers also make sure whatever the software developers make up isn't blindly accepted and followed. Chromium in particular is particularly hard to package in a meaningful way (there was a recent controversy concerning that in the Mint distro). But that doesn't mean it is not worth trying.

mkl95 6y ago

Every Chromium user needs to understand that Chromium is a Google project, and Google like to sacrifice a random project once in a while (don't be evil huh?). I'm completely unaware of how Google handle these decisions internally, but from the point of view of an outsider they are trying to optimize their resources and output as much as possible. If some service is not extremely successful and profitable, and it's being actively maintained, someone at Google will eventually suggest to move on to other stuff.

dgb23 6y ago
Chrome and Chromium are not some niche products. Same with ads, search and GCP. These things are here to stay for a very long time. There are other problems with Chrome and Chromium. Google is a brilliant company and I want to like them. Out of the biggest tech companies they seem to apply the least bullying tactics, worker exploitation and so on. But the fact that they are an ad company that profiles my behavior leaves a bitter taste. They often gather data in a way that is completely opaque to most people, which I think is problematic.
- mkl95 6y ago
  Linux makes heavy use of GNU technology, but the GNU OS itself is relatively unknown. Just like Chrome and Edge make heavy use of Chromium, but it is used directly by relatively few users (don't get me wrong, I was a Chromium user for years). Google may be trying to turn the Chromium browser into a "Chromium userland" rather than a browser will full capabilities.
phendrenad2 6y ago
How do you sacrifice an open-source project that people can just fork?
- mkl95 6y ago
  Technically, Chromium is not being sacrificed, it will just lose access to some powerful APIs. In practice it means Chromium as we know it is done. Most people who want or need these features will be unaware of some community fork and will simply switch to Chrome or Firefox.

voiper1 6y ago

I'm actually kinda confused. If chromium had search suggestions, spell checking from google, logging in to google for bookmark sync and safe browsing, etc, then how is chromium particularly de-google'd? It actually seems like this move by google is what people claim to want: an open source browser that doesn't phone home to google.

turminal 6y ago
Chromium utilizes no proprietary code, that's what makes it different from chrome. All the listed features were just google apis (accessed by open source code) . It still phoned home unless those features were disabled.

minikites 6y ago

It remains baffling to me that supposedly tech-savvy people seem to love a web browser made by an advertising company.

turminal 6y ago

Sadly the impact of this will be so small google won't even notice. And even if all the angry chromium users that are potentially going to have to switch their browser would take action and be vocal and do something about what is going on with the web, nothing would change. Such is the price of monopolies.

doublerabbit 6y ago

Until someone creates a new browser with a new render/scripting engine. Which everyone always jumps on saying "it's impossible", the war is over. Chrome has won. Chrome is currently giving life support to Mozilla and when they decide to axe that, well it's game over for Mozilla. The depressing part is the freedom, the new that the internet once provided is over. It's been turned in to a commercial breeding ground and we are the cattle to be milked and bred. Until we create a whole new infrastructure, protocol suite away from the broken existing OSI model, the internet isn't going to heal. It's going to be robbed and stabbed repeatedly over and over again. Look at your browsing history today, how many times have you visited that one site in the last year? Now compare that to how many new sites you have visited in the same year; not a lot I expect.

kungito 6y ago
There is too much money in milking average non technical people in any way possible. I guess whichever "new internet" pops up will be awesome and used by just a small number of power users. Great and flexible tools will never be used by the average person. I've had 2 close family members in a span of 2 weeks get lost in the whole "log into your chrome account" vs "log into your google account within your chrome account" thing. Any remotely complex feature beyond "2 clicks to all of the 4 things I use the internet for" is just confusing people. And it's OK because that seems to be the reality. Ads for the general public are here to stay
stiray 6y ago
The issue is that Firefox HAS created a new rendering engine, but people don't switch. It has nothing to do with technology, people wont even try to switch. Some for fanboyism, some because they would have to adapt, some don't even know what browser is. What I do consider staggering is how many technically capable people are not prepared to make a switch. Google is slowly closing down the lock-down trap they have nurtured for so many years and now it should be obvious to anyone who is looking at "progress" (or decline?) of internet, but this is still not enough to at least stop using the chrome. Ah, people... we will just never learn.
- 6y ago

wombatmobile 6y ago

The original browser "war" between Microsoft and Netscape was over the definition of HTML. Microsoft wanted to control it, and was prepared to damage Netscape's business to quash the competition illegally to impose an arbitrary monopoly. HTML5 has long been an open standard, maintained by the W3C. Google's role as a W3C member was to end the original browser war by supporting W3C processes with implementations and evangelism that lead to Chrome becoming the most popular browser. The article's news, about Chromium losing access to app features such as syncing, is a different battle. It is not about arbitrary syntax being controlled by a corporation vs a standards body. It is about the cost of making useful software that serves the public and is given away for free to enable the commons. Everybody has the right and the technical opportunity to make a browser and ancillary services such as sync. However, a couple of people in a garage don't live long enough to make a browser. Only well funded and well organised groups have the resources to do so. Even Mozilla relies upon funding from Google to implement Firefox, so really, Google is funding the whole browser ecosystem. That's an entirely different problem to the one Microsoft got busted for in 1996. It's a problem alright, and one that needs air and sunlight. To really give this problem the prominence it deserves and requires, we shouldn't be calling it "the endless browser war". We should be calling it something else. Until we do, the status quo is just going to get stronger and more entrenched, because it isn't anything illegal, proprietary, or closed. The fact that most consumers like Google and don't see the problem makes it all the more urgent to give this problem a name.

phendrenad2 6y ago
> Even Mozilla relies upon funding from Google to implement Firefox, so really, Google is funding the whole browser ecosystem Don't forget that Microsoft forked Chromium also, and that Chromium has been forked by several open-source groups.
kmeisthax 6y ago
"Browser monoculture problem" sounds like a good name.

Zardoz84 6y ago

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. The creators of web sites have responded by not caring about Firefox; having to retry broken web sites in Chrome is a ritual that many Firefox users have had to get used to. It's not surprising that users give up and just run Chrome from the outset. Pardon ? I don't run on any issue that requires using Chrome instead of Firefox. At least, not usually. Also, as web developer I always work on Firefox and then I try on Chromiun and Edge to see if I run on a Blink bug (Yeah! I hit a few working on this way) or something that it's different between Firefox and Blink engine

richeyryan 6y ago
I encounter it occasionally. Either broken or omitted features. Slack calls don't work in Firefox just because. Blurring out your background in Google meet isn't available on Firefox. Some utilities websites here, in Ireland, don't work in Firefox but do in Chrome.
- tristor 6y ago
  >Slack calls don't work in Firefox just because. Slack calls don't work in Firefox because Slack explicitly made the choice to not support Firefox and to not follow web standards in how they implemented Slack calls. Furthermore, they go a step further by detecting your browser and blocking the feature for Firefox users and telling you to switch to Chrome. [1] This is not a failure of Firefox, it's a failure of Slack. I think the attitude in your comment is very common, and is exactly why it's so hard to build a web browser for the modern web that isn't part of the Google Chrome monoculture. Users cannot differentiate easily between problems they encounter because of their browser vs problems they encounter because of the web app, and for the user it doesn't matter because it's still a problem. Regardless of the cause, it's important that browser makers solve these issues to ensure that users can get things done on the web, but that's easier said than done. [1]: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/958645632620748800?lang=en https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/958645632620748800?lang=e...

karmakaze 6y ago

TL;DR - reminder: Chrome is not/was not opensource - Chromium is losing features like bookmark sync on Mar 15 because Google will no longer issue API keys - if you care about opensource, run Firefox (or Chromium) - if you are a web dev, support Firefox

mumblemumble 6y ago

What really strikes me here is that so many of us, perhaps taken in by the tacit assumption that embrace, extend, extinguish is a peculiarly Microsoft behavior, didn't see this sort of thing coming, and even spent much of the past decade cheering it on.

meibo 6y ago

I wonder if it would be feasible for e.g. Canonical to offer a free, hosted implementation of the Sync servers. The protocol is openly documented afaik, and there might already be efforts to implement an open server. It also has e2ee built-in. Of course then you might as well go off and use Firefox, Brave or Vivaldi, but it'd be an option nonetheless, if not quite an expensive one.

jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y ago

And Firefox is now pro-censorship. i.e. dead to me

CryptoGhost 6y ago

Maybe trying to maintain a free beer web browser is not the best path forward (given all the requirements for a web browser in 2021). Perhaps the best solution is a paid application with an either free or proprietary source model. Free beer programs seem best suited for problem domains where they can age like wine and not worry about maintaining some service level agreement.

CA0DA 6y ago

What's wrong with Firefox? I use it daily and it works great.

LarryDarrell 6y ago

Chrome, or at least it's rendering engine, has won the World Wide Web. It was able to do this because the company that was the best at monetizing every last packet decided it wanted to own that last endpoint as well. HTTP is a lost cause. At this point we need new protocols that are designed to be impossible to monetize. From there new browsers can be built. It'll never get to be as big as the WWW, but I think sub-Internets are the best way to ensure the spirit and creativity of the early WWW lives on.

CivBase 6y ago

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel? I believe browser diversity is healthy for the world wide web. I don't want Firefox to become dominant either, but right now there is a short supply of browsers which are independent from Chromium. I don't want the W3C to be replaced by the Chromium Project. I believe Firefox is a good enough browser to go toe-to-toe with Chrome. It and it's developer are not without problems. However, at this point I'd use Firefox even if Mozilla was just as bad as Google because I think the diversity is worth it.

m45t3r 6y ago
Also, just changing to a Chromium based browser is not sufficient. Google still takes most of the decisions in where Chromium is going, and downstreams either accept them or workaround them (but for every workaround they do it is more things to keep maintaining in the long run). So yeah, using a non Chromium browser is the only way to ensure that the Web is still healthy (i.e.: not controlled by only Google) in the long run.
- MR4D 6y ago
  I think natural entropy will solve that problem over time. Give Microsoft another year or two, and I think we’ll see a hard fork. Looking back at WebKit, Google forked that into Blink. I don’t know why Firefox couldn’t do the same. I suppose in a couple years we’ll be able to check this post to see if Microsoft has done a hard fork or not. Will be interesting to see.
  - tjoff 6y ago
    I don't know why we'd want Firefox to do that...

015a 6y ago

This is rather written in the perspective of "shame on google for removing these API keys", but it feels to me that this should be a (small, incomplete, but still a) win for open source; if I want to run an open source, free browser, I don't want it phoning home to Google every day. There's a separate problem in that Chromium isn't capable of any other ways of more freely and openly syncing the things it used to sync to Google's servers. But when thinking about any open source software, I feel that its important to separate "things it does which I don't want it to do" and "things I wish it did". In other words, code which was written that doesn't serve the users' interests, and code which could serve the users' interests if it were written. I don't believe its productive to worry or complain about the latter; its more productive to just write it, file feature requests, etc. Of course, in Chromium's case, its unlikely they'd be accepted, but that's a separate, third issue. I also disagree with the article's position that Firefox isn't a valid alternative. Firefox is somewhere within the range of 98% to 102% as good as Chrome, depending on the website you're visiting. By comparison, I would place Safari (the only other real alternate browser on any OS) at 92%-96%. Firefox is a fantastic browser which can absolutely replace Chrome/Chromium, and should be used by more people if for no other reason than to add more balance to the Big Three. Throw out the FOSS ideals for just a second; there are effectively three browsers left, and the most ideal marketshare for those three is 33% each, given that the primary long-term benefit and risk from marketshare is, at the end of the day, power toward influencing the future of the web. Power should be distributed, always. And this is hardly contentious, but the industry need a 4th browser. I would rank this as the single most important project any company, group, or individual could commit productivity to at this time. Of course, important things are rarely easy, but to me, it doesn't even matter if its open or closed source; open source would be better, but what matters far more is distributing power further.

qu-everything 6y ago
> if I want to run an open source, free browser, I don't want it phoning home to Google every day. Exactly, it feels more like a win than a loss from where I stand
latexr 6y ago
> Firefox is somewhere within the range of 98% to 102% as good as Chrome, depending on the website you're visiting. Perhaps when only taking into account webpage rendering. But how you interact with the browser is also important, and to many of us Firefox falls short in that regard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26036353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26036353

npteljes 6y ago

Discussed 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25913310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25913310

nickelcitymario 6y ago

Anyone else get a real "Ides of March" feel with the timing of this announcement? Two thousand years later and massive betrayals are still happening on March 15th.

mminer237 6y ago

Even if Firefox falls by the wayside and websites stop working with it somehow, making Blink (and Webkit) a monopoly (which I think is a very important thing to prevent and is the reason I use Firefox even if I don't have the warmest feelings toward Mozilla), I don't think that the free sync API being removed means that everyone will have to use Google Chrome. The major Chromium projects—Brave, Vivaldi, and Edge—all already use their own sync engines independent of Google.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago

>Current estimates suggest that 60-70% of web users are running on Chrome. Aren't those mostly Windows users?

djhaskin987 6y ago

My favorite quote from the article: > Chromium has taken a path similar to Android's; there is a core built with free software, but getting its full functionality requires accepting layers of proprietary code on top of it. The fact that said code is running on a remote server somewhere does not really change that situation. Google has used this wolf-in-sheep's-clothing approach for yeas, and it has worked. Fortunately, though, it's also backfired a bit. With things like Microsoft Edge using the open core that google has provided (Chromium) on the market, users have a choice of browser host, including what servers their bookmarks/syncing lives on. Not the best choice, perhaps, but still, a choice. :)

jamienicol 6y ago
To follow the analogy, having the choice of Chrome and edge is like having the choice of Google android and Samsung Android. I don't want either, I want a real FOSS browser (and mobile OS)

elwell 6y ago

How will this affect Brave (which uses Chromium)?

sdeframond 6y ago

> having to retry broken web sites in Chrome is a ritual that many Firefox users have had to get used to. I, for one, have been using Firefox both on desktop and mobile for years without ever having to install Chromium, or even any Webkit-based browser. Where does the idea that the web does not work well with Firefox come form exactly ?

danaliv 6y ago
For some n=1 anecdata, I very (and I do mean very) occasionally have to bail out of Firefox and use Chrome, most recently on Logitech's ecommerce site. I confess though that I'm never quite sure whether it's a browser issue or the fact that I've got Firefox configured to extreme "adtech is psychological warfare" mode.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

I actually switched to Chromium as my main browser a few days ago. I'm using this branch[1], which follows upstream except for a handful of patches to retain support for older versions of OS X, which I prefer. I was somewhat surprised to see that all the syncing features seem to still exist in this close-to-stock Chromium. It encourages you to sign into a Google account to sync data, use and to use Google for search suggestions, and to install extensions from the Chrome Web Store. Does anyone know how that's possible? I'd actually be quite pleased if all of this stuff just got stripped out of Chromium. As it is, I spent quite a bit of time going through and turning off as much of it as I could, in some places via semi-confusing defaults write commands. 1: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy

PascLeRasc 6y ago

I’d like to start contributing money to Firefox. Can anyone weigh in on whether that’s best done through a donation to Mozilla or by paying for the premium Firefox features like Pocket or their VPN? I don’t necessarily need or want these, but they seem more Firefox-focused than a donation to Mozilla.

jamienicol 6y ago
Mozilla employee here. A donation to Mozilla Foundation can't be spent on Firefox development. So if you want to specifically help Firefox then yes, pocket or VPN are the best ways to do that. It still won't go 100% towards Firefox development, but rather just in to the corporation's "pot", the majority of which is spent on Firefox development. (Donations to the foundation are kept separate, but are also spent on very worthwhile causes in my opinion.)

w0mbat 6y ago

There is a major factor that kicks in when a browser gets the most market share, particularly >50% of the total, as Win IE did in the 90s and Chrome did a few years ago. Because web site developers test their site in the "top" browser, and then maybe other browsers too, becoming the top browser gives you a huge boost in compatibility through no virtue of your own. Every website works in that browser now because website developers make sure they work. This creates a shift among users, who notice that every site works in the top browser, but only 90% work in browser x, and they start shifting to the top browser and often won't even report problems they have with other browsers. The effect is obviously self-reinforcing, and the top browser continues to gain share. The counter-measure to this is standards. With rigorous web standards followed by websites and browsers, if the top browser works, so do all the rest. There isn't much to enforce this though, and there are temptations on all sides not to do the right thing.

m-ce 6y ago

All the arguments about Chrome being insecure due to its proprietary software built upon it, are true, but why not use Ungoogled Chromium? (or another chromium fork that implements those features themselves). Mozilla is in a very bad position, their main source of income as I understand it is Google, because they're the ones that pay the most to have Google as a default search engine in Firefox. That and Googles anti-competitive practices, like when they implemented the Polymer redesign on YouTube, which had Firefox and Edge loading the site way slower than Chrome. I don't know what Mozilla can do even if they do all the right things, because Google will just keep throwing money punches.

collsni 6y ago

Firefox is the way to go, you can disable anything you don't like. I'd also be okay with a degoogle chromium.

hackerman_fi 6y ago

Don’t know if I’m in minority but I couldn’t care less about these Google provided services. I have no reason to bookmark pages between devices - different devices for different purposes. I don’t need my work bookmarks on my gaming computer. For posting random comments to social media I don’t need spell checking either. If grammar needs to be spot on, I use Word etc.

Asmod4n 6y ago

I just wish Firefox would support HDR, more than 60hz refresh rate and more than two channel audio.

effie 6y ago
It could easily support launching dedicated media player such as mpv or mplayer. I wonder why this trivial functionality isn't part of any browser.

korethr 6y ago

Mixed feelings on this. Personally, I'd switched back to Firefox from Chrome years ago, because I'd lost some trust in Google, and didn't want a browser that required me to sign in to make use of its features. My own personal use case for Chromium wasn't for any Google-specific features, it was the same reason I would occasionally use Internet Explorer back in the day -- a site I needed/wanted was broken in anything else. AFAICT, the removal of these API keys doesn't break any of the things I used Chromium for. But on the other hand, I recognize that I am an outlier amongst outliers. The everyday user of Chrome probably does make use of and depends on the Google-specific services embedded in the browser. And so by revoking the API keys for those features, Chromium is crippled and no longer at feature parity with Chrome. While I don't care, a lot of other people will, and so those who might be inclined to install Chromium are going to be less inclined if Chromium is now less featureful and useful to them. Only the especially hardcore about software freedom and personal privacy are going to to see installing the feature-stripped and less-useful Chromium as worth the tradeoff. Those persons are like me, outliers amongst outliers. The net effect? Distros stop providing packages for a browser with an install base that shrinks to something too small to be worth supporting. And now, the only option becomes the proprietary Chrome. Honestly, this strikes me as a tactic similar to, if not the same as "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" for which Microsoft was so roundly lambasted in the late 90s and early 00s. The question remains then, what to do about it? Anti-trust or other regulations? Something else?

gtsop 6y ago

The discussion around firefox being inferior to chrome I think is totally irrelevant and missleading. Yes, chrome has supperior functionality, if you don't care about privacy and freedom then there is no discussion to be had here. If you do care, please don't throw arguments like your fans going loud and your ram filling up. Instead, support open source projects financialy or put volunteer some of your time to help fix these problems. I am not saying that privacy and freedom should be hard, but as of right now, they are. You either accept it, suck the downsides and help to fix any issues, or you give up and surrender the fate of the field to a single company, Google. We are all free to do what we think best for ourselves. But please, no fooling ourselves. No excuses.

arpyzo 6y ago

I wish more people with give Firefox a honest try. I've been using it for years and I love it. It's very rare that I need to pull up Chrome to use a site, and frankly I blame the website developer. How hard is it to write a web application that works in Firefox? IMO, one has to be pretty sloppy or lazy to wind up creating a Chrome-only site. Firefox allows me to customize it exactly that way I want, and it's reached the point where I haven't been forced to change that look and feel in a long time. It has a ton of cool features I haven't even had a chance to take advantage yet, such as setting up my own sync server. That said, it has its warts, and the developer's decisions have frustrated me at times, but this goes for pretty much any software that gets "upgraded" on a regular basis. Give is a shot. You might find you like it more than you expected.

PascLeRasc 6y ago
Firefox seems to grow on me more and more every day. I really like all the integrations like reader mode, picture-in-picture, the new email alias stuff. There’s a lot that I don’t care about like containers or whatever the special tab system is, but I like that they’re trying new ideas.
toyg 6y ago
Yeah, I use Firefox and every time I see these pessimist statements like “omg i have to open a site in Chrome _constantly_” I shake my head. I’ve not touched Chrome in years, on Windows and MacOs, and I surf my fair amount of the wavy web. I even uninstalled it on my personal laptop. If one in a billion sites doesn’t work in FF (which, again, has not happened to me in years, except for intranet sites meant to work only with IE6...), just have a dedicated launcher for it, or even better tell their support you’re dropping them because of that. And if that broken site is a Google property: it’s well-known that they do it on purpose, you’re literally giving in to the school bully shaking you down for lunch money. Grow a spine.

ornxka 6y ago

Nobody is addressing the elephant in the room, which is the reason why there are only two viable browsers in the first place - because the endless and ever-growing list of specifications and standards web browsers must comply with has grown to the point where it is apparently impossible to build a browser without the budget of a nation state. For example, https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.... has done some calculations, and has found that "the total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing." Good luck implementing that, if you're not Google! A lot of things could be done to simplify the amount of labor it takes to build a web browser. If you look at the architecture of the web, there is no reason for things to be this complicated - the web doesn't need a complicated high-level language runtime when it could have bytecode a la WASM, for example. But that's exactly the problem, because the reason why things have become so complicated is not because that's just how complicated the problem space is that a web browser attempts to solve, but because the people in charge of the web actually have a vested interest in things being as complicated as possible. When you already have the budget of a nation state, there is not only no benefit to your job requiring less labor to perform, it actually harms you because now competitors need that many fewer resources to compete with you. That's the real problem - they don't want it to be simple and easy, they want it to be complicated and hard, and the present problem of lack of browser diversity is just a consequence of that. This is the real reason why things have gotten this bad in the browser space, and it's never going to get any better without first addressing this fact and then by breaking basically the entire web by decimating the volume of standards documents web browsers have to follow. There is no other option. Nobody is going to sift through 114 million words of specification documents to build another web browser for the web that exists today. The web can't be saved. Its replacement will have to start from scratch.

freediver 6y ago
There are two components of a modern browser: browser rendering engine and a browser framework (everything around the rendering engine that creates the browser itself). There are three main browser rendering engines, all of which are open-source: Gecko, Blink and Webkit. Problem of standards is mainly "offsourced" to these rendering engines and these open source communities have been doing their job more or less successfully. Browser frameworks are built around these rendering engines. Two most popular open source ones are Firefox (built around Gecko) and Chromium (brother of closed-source Chrome, built around Blink). I think the problem that you are articulating comes from the fact that 99% of browsers on the market use one of these two frameworks, in reality mostly Chromium. For example Edge and Brave are based on Chromium. This leads to inheriting most of the features but also most of the flaws of the browser framework. Notably there are no major open source frameworks built around Webkit, which is a shame, considering that at least for macOS, Webkit is by far the most superior rendering engine (both in battery life and sheer performance).

type0 6y ago

I always considered Chromium to be a sort of castrated Chrome, now it's even more apparent than ever.

rurban 6y ago

Wonder why he didn't mention, Ungoogled Chromium, the most likely successor of all linux Chromium packages. In between I am slowly moving to Firefox on Fedora, but mostly because I can watch HD videos there, not on Chromium. Firefox is also much faster than Chromium.