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Browser vendors can carry small patches against Chromium but significant changes are very costly to carry long-term as the code changes under you. Furthermore,

by roca 5y ago

Browser vendors can carry small patches against Chromium but significant changes are very costly to carry long-term as the code changes under you. Furthermore, Google controls how heavy that burden is for you. In practice browser vendors who choose Chromium don't challenge Google's Web platform decisions except in very narrow cases like FLoC. In contrast Mozilla and Apple examine every Google-proposed Web platform feature or change to see whether it makes sense. Mozilla's influence over the Web platform is much lower than it was but it is also far from zero. Lots of major sites still test in Firefox. Apple has even more influence. That is why Google doesn't yet has absolute power over the Web platform.

roenxi 5y ago
> Browser vendors can carry small patches against Chromium but significant changes are very costly to carry long-term as the code changes under you. Furthermore, Google controls how heavy that burden is for you. This is fundamentally wrong; at any point anyone can hard fork chromium and then the long term costs of maintenance and rate of code change are completely out of Google's control. > In practice browser vendors... This is because Google generally makes great choices with Chrome that don't need to be second guessed. One of the reasons for Chrome's ubiquity is Google makes a great browser.
- roca 5y ago
  No-one is going to hard-fork Chromium. The reason you adopt Chromium is because you don't want to pay to maintain your own browser engine.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > The reason you adopt Chromium is because you don't want to pay to maintain your own browser engine. Same argument applies to Gecko, but if people want to get in to the web browser game it makes a lot more sense to start with a de-facto open standard - which is Chromium. There are already a lot of browsers based on that engine, which is apparently named Blink according to Wikipedia, with backers who could easily choose to maintain an engine if they wanted to. If the world ends in 12 months then sure, no-one is going to fork Chromium. But in the future, at some point Google will start doing a bad job maintaining it and Chromium could well be forked. If someone decides they need a browser engine to maintain full time they're probably going to fork Chromium as the technically strongest starting point and start maintaining a branch themselves. Forking Gecko would get them ... not much useful. Maybe some PR points. The Blink license says people can fork it. There isn't any legal or technical reason that it is unforkable. At some point, it will be forked.

by roca 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago

> Browser vendors can carry small patches against Chromium but significant changes are very costly to carry long-term as the code changes under you. Furthermore, Google controls how heavy that burden is for you. This is fundamentally wrong; at any point anyone can hard fork chromium and then the long term costs of maintenance and rate of code change are completely out of Google's control. > In practice browser vendors... This is because Google generally makes great choices with Chrome that don't need to be second guessed. One of the reasons for Chrome's ubiquity is Google makes a great browser.

roca 5y ago
No-one is going to hard-fork Chromium. The reason you adopt Chromium is because you don't want to pay to maintain your own browser engine.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > The reason you adopt Chromium is because you don't want to pay to maintain your own browser engine. Same argument applies to Gecko, but if people want to get in to the web browser game it makes a lot more sense to start with a de-facto open standard - which is Chromium. There are already a lot of browsers based on that engine, which is apparently named Blink according to Wikipedia, with backers who could easily choose to maintain an engine if they wanted to. If the world ends in 12 months then sure, no-one is going to fork Chromium. But in the future, at some point Google will start doing a bad job maintaining it and Chromium could well be forked. If someone decides they need a browser engine to maintain full time they're probably going to fork Chromium as the technically strongest starting point and start maintaining a branch themselves. Forking Gecko would get them ... not much useful. Maybe some PR points. The Blink license says people can fork it. There isn't any legal or technical reason that it is unforkable. At some point, it will be forked.