22 ms·

What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

267 points by dochtman 4y ago

longrod 4y ago
Web browsers have become huge monolithic applications we all nowadays preach against. So much so that other monoliths get built on top of them. (I am taking the dictionary definition of monolith here: a massive structure). Many of the solutions given in this thread are similar to ones we give to someone who wants to escape from the monolith mess. Namely, move towards a very slim core, make everything as modular as possible etc etc. And the problems towards such an approach are the same as well i.e., what do we do about the legacy stuff? The important question here is: what can be done better if we start from scratch? The main issue I see with browsers is that they have become so big that building a new one in a reasonable amount of time is next to impossible. This makes all the open standards pointless because no one can do anything with them except the few already established browsers. Unfortunately there's no clean way out of this.
phendrenad2 4y ago
If Mozilla and the various other non-megacorp browsers (Vivaldi, Brave, Opera) banded together and built a governance structure for Chromium, similar to the Linux Foundation, they could try to stop this fate. But they aren't, and they won't, due to hubris, pride, and jealousy.
cpeterso 4y ago
If a browser engine monoculture is a good or sustainable situation, why did Google fork WebKit to create Blink? Why will a Chromium monoculture be any better than the WebKit monoculture ten years ago?
HWR_14 4y ago
"Hi, you seem to be browsing without being signed into Google with your government verified identity. Please do so to continue seeing the ads, I mean the internet"
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Chromium is open source. You're confusing Chromium with Chrome.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
    It's like confusing "open-source" Android, AOSP and Play Services: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on... >While Android is open, it's more of a "look but don't touch" kind of open. You're allowed to contribute to Android and allowed to use it for little hobbies, but in nearly every area, the deck is stacked against anyone trying to use Android without Google's blessing. The second you try to take Android and do something that Google doesn't approve of, it will bring the world crashing down upon you.
    - jacooper 4y ago
      The difference is, AOSP on its own is unusable, but Chromium Is.
      - anonymousab 4y ago
        Google has added proprietary closed source blobs to chromium in the past and there's little reason they wouldn't do so again when they're the only game in town.
        jacooper 4y ago
        But they arent, chromium forks like brave or edge won't stand and do nothing if something ridiculous happened.
      - ohgodplsno 4y ago
        For now.
      - gspr 4y ago
ecmascript 4y ago
It will not be Chromium only. It will be chromium and safari and it already is. Apple will most likely never open up unless forced, which usually sucks but is a good thing due to the monopoly of the market. Firefox is responsible for such a low percentage it's sad (the stats I have for the sites I work on it's usually on the 1-2% range). I think it's mainly because of the horrible leadership at Mozilla. I want to use Firefox and promote it but every time I think they've changed Mozilla does something new that boils my blood. You can donate to Mozilla, but not directly to Firefox and they seem to spend a lot of money on political projects. It's a 'get woke, go broke' situation and I have watched the fall of Mozilla in real time over the past years. I really wish Mozilla changed focus, I would gladly pay for Firefox+ or something if I knew that the money went to Firefox development and not to some racist white male hate project. So I'll continue using Brave and hope for the best, the future the author is talking about is basically already here.
- rapnie 4y ago
  Still, I do a lot of browsing the web and did not encounter broken pages on Firefox, luckily.
  - ecmascript 4y ago
    On the websites I work on I have stopped testing on Firefox for the most part. I do testing once in a while, but I'd rather spend the time to make the site more accessible since it's a larger group than Firefox users.
    - gostsamo 4y ago
      So, how should I feel as a blind user who uses Firefox? :)
      - ecmascript 4y ago
        Happy that I use my time to try to help your disability and make your life easier rather than make sure that a web browser that hardly anyone uses work 100% correctly. Surely, most of the time Firefox will work just fine or at least good enough and by that standard I am sure that a site that has put some focus for it being easier to read with a screen reader is more important?
paol 4y ago
We don't have to speculate, we've been through this already during the IE4 to IE6 era. Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so will Google. In Microsoft's case what they wanted was nothing. They weren't a web business, saw it as a threat to their platform leverage, and so just left it abandoned and stagnant for years. Google is simultaneously better and worse: they won't leave it stagnant because the web is their platform, but on the other hand they have a lot more to gain by abusing control of it.
- wdb 4y ago
  Personally, I think Google already does whatever it wants similar to what Microsoft did. They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit.
  - remus 4y ago
    > They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit. Safari definitely does not just follow suit (see https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareCats=JS%20API https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareC... for example).
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      They have every incentive to NOT implement things to force devs to create apps. If they wanted to create an actual browser vs. bare bones browser, they'd still offer it on other operating systems.
      - corrral 4y ago
        Please. I've been using the Web since '95, and working on the Web nearly as long. Safari's where I do almost all my browsing, work and personal. It's a fine browser. If I could use it on Windows and Linux, I wouldn't hesitate to choose it over Firefox and Chrome and their derivatives.
Santosh83 4y ago
If there is only one implementation, then whichever body (private, public, for profit, not for profit, doesn't matter) controls this implementation will control the direction of the entire web. It's the definition of consolidation and monopoly control. There is no reasonable argument to make for a Chromium only web from anyone without vested interests.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  It's open source. Anyone can fork it.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    But the websites aren't. If chrome is the only browser websites will target chrome. Do if you fork it and remove features that you find harmful you now have a useless lump of software.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      Chrome already has a large market share and a browser changing their browser engine doesn't necessarily change Chrome's market share.
  - soapdog 4y ago
    Forking is easy. Maintaining and developing a browser engine is really hard. Most forks that make substantial changes to the original source are either maintained by a multimillion company or die without maintenance.
  - bobajeff 4y ago
    Sadly, even if you don't fork Chromium and simply embed It via Electron or Chromium Embedded Framework you still won't be able to login in to some Google sites.
    - i5Aj7PXGjUPy 4y ago
rvz 4y ago
We did this on ourselves. As everyone was laughing at Internet Explorer, another behemoth was overtaking IE and nothing was in their way. Mozilla (Firefox) was our chance for something different. They were ahead of IE once but they watched on and did nothing whilst they had their pockets lined up with Google's money and allowed them (Google) to overtake everyone and now everyone is complaining about it. It even goes back before Chrome was a thing when the Mozilla CEO declared that they could move away from depending on Google's money. [0] Now 14+ years later, they are still unable to do so. Since then it is only Google (Chrome) and Apple (Safari) again, just like for Android and iOS. All other attempts at stopping them was a complete failure like Firefox OS was and now Mozilla and Firefox are the ones fizzling out of existence as they are unable to make money as the majority of users are running to Chrome, Brave, Edge and Vivaldi. It is no wonder websites are beginning to not only break on Firefox, but also tell or block users from their web apps to instead use Chrome. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9044160/Mozilla_can_live_without_Google_s_money_Baker_says_ https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
- joshuaissac 4y ago
  What was Mozilla supposed to do? Google could advertise their browser to everyone who used Google Search, just like how Microsoft could with Windows. Mozilla did not have any products with that kind of reach.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    It's not what Mozilla was supposed to do, it's what we here were supposed to do. Everyone here should have switched to Firefox already. That would make a difference in the long run by both direct and indirect effects. Just hunker down, do your part and eat your spinach already.
  - account42 4y ago
    For one, Mozilla could start empowering the user again instead of trying to ape Chrome in every way. If the only reason anyone would want to use Firefox is to prevent Chrome from being the only browser then that is on Mozilla.
basdp 4y ago
This is not hypothetical, as we’ve lived through this before with Internet Explorer. The web didn’t get better from that. Open source is a big plus now of course, but it’s still backed by corporations that want us for our data to make money. It’s never going to be pretty. We might have to live through another monopoly (or we could call it web-communism?) but I am 100% sure we are going to condemn Chromium some time later and work our way back to a free browser-world. It’s the circle of life.
dr-detroit 4y ago
fritigern 4y ago
Not having alternatives is really bad. Chromium-only web would suck.
mnd999 4y ago
Probably we have to start again with something different in the same way as the web replaced all the other protocols (gopher, usenet etc). I’m not what that looks like but it should be cleaner, simpler, open and blockchain-free.
- PretzelPirate 4y ago
  > I’m not what that looks like but it should be cleaner, simpler, open and blockchain-free. You’re asking for an open network and then putting restrictions on individuals right away by saying they can’t use blockchains on it. Some people want to use blockchains (or any other technology) and an open network shouldn’t put restrictions on how people participate.
  - dkersten 4y ago
    But it shouldn’t itself be based on blockchains. That is, if you want to use them, that’s fine and up to you, but if you don’t want to use them, then that should also be a valid choice. The core technology shouldn’t be based on blockchain and should work just as well without.
  - dingleberry420 4y ago
  - ardacinar 4y ago
    A blockchain-free protocol is not a protocol with "no you can't do anything blockchain related on this" restriction. A blockchain-free protocol is one where the protocol itself does not involve a blockchain. Like HTTP, or FTP, or Gopher, or IRC, SMTP etc.
- bobajeff 4y ago
  Yes, I've been wanting something that's just a rich document but designed around accessibility with no styles or JavaScript.
  - fbanon 4y ago
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
We’ll have “amazing” technologies like ActiveX and JScript except this time from Google!
- milankragujevic 4y ago
  I remember Google Gears :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_(software)
- jeremycarter 4y ago
  They were pretty cool though - genuinely
GeekyBear 4y ago
I think we already know from internal documents revealed during the discovery phase of the various antitrust filings. >Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web into a walled garden https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1452053941504684036 https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205394150468403...
samsquire 4y ago
Edit: to reply to the lovely article. I wouldn't mind if there was a reference implementation for the web. So that people could experiment with things on it. There's nothing stopping me building Chromium which I did on a Windows machine once as an experiment. I couldn't get Firefox to build as Mercurial kept crashing. I would like to see proper SQL APIs in browsers as that's the industry standard for fetching and retrieving data. The browser is a very powerful piece of technology. I see it as a magazine viewer and application distribution platform. I use Repl.it when I am on a low powered windows laptop and IntelliJ and vim otherwise. I would also like to see a lightweight native API for DOM queuing ala React. Layout engines are difficult to write and adapt. Especially adapt as they're so complicated. I read part of the ORC Solver paper and there is algorithms in that paper for writing a layout engine and there's code on GitHub. https://github.com/YueJiang-nj/ORCSolver-CHI2020 https://github.com/YueJiang-nj/ORCSolver-CHI2020 I would like to adapt this approach but write the code myself but it is obviously a challenging area. I am yet to write a branch and bound optimisation algorithm. But from my understanding you greedily try a number of rows or columns and try arrange objects preferred width and preferred height into the space available. ORCSolver uses intervals and eliminates attempts that are not viable. ORCSolver uses Z3 for the final step to actually get coordinates when the system has been constrained. I plan to use ORTools. For simplicity I plan to break up text into letters and try place them all in a flowing horizontal then vertical layout. I can use GetTextExtents of WX widgets to predict size of a rendered letter. It shall be slow but then how else do you begin writing a layout engine? I would need to read TeX or the Art of Computer Programming. Layout is expensive especially for grid based layouts with flowing. I wonder if website authors could prerender at different resolutions and provide start point sizes and coordinates for speed. Generally everybody reaches the same numbers on everyone's machines and we don't need to try a lot of aborted work to relayout. I am the author of additive GUIs which is a declarative rendering approach for bootstrap layouts. https://GitHub.com/samsquire/additive-guis https://GitHub.com/samsquire/additive-guis It's not really a layout engine but it does layout things according to mutually recursive rules.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
The scaremongering about this is insane, I've seen people justify Apple forcing all browser on iOS to be Webkit based for the sake of "diversity" and "competition". IT'S REALLY NOT THAT BAD AS PEOPLE WOULD MAKE YOU THINK! Competition is great, forcing me to use Webkit on iOS is not how you fix this. Please go promote and support Firefox in any way you can.
qubex 4y ago
This is a large fraction of the reason why I stick to using Safari on my Mac.
Joeri 4y ago
The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. We are at an impasse. The standards cannot be deprecated because they are used all over the web, and because they are used all over the web a new browser maker has little choice except forking chromium or firefox. Even microsoft couldn’t afford to keep adding all the standards to their browser engine. Normally the solution for a messy overgrown implementation is a grand reboot. But we can’t do a grand reboot of the web because we cannot get rid of the legacy. The only viable strategy I see to have real browser engine diversity without giving up on compatibility is moving as much of the standards implementation as possible into JS modules, so new browser makers can start with a small engine that loads the publicly hosted standards modules.
- mdavis6890 4y ago
  Basically - the web is what Chromium source code says it is - no more, no less, and no other.
- freediver 4y ago
  Normally having one strong alternative would be enough, but in this case we have two - Gecko and WebKit. The problem is not in the lack of browser rendering engines, but the lacking innovation and product features of the browsers running these rendering engines.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. A body of web standards that they lobbied for and to be in the form that they are...
  - Closi 4y ago
    … and are a member of … holding more seats than Apple and Google combined … and more than four times the vote share of Mozilla … As an example, Google holds 18 of 39 seats on the Web Assembly Working Group. This means that if they whip their seats, they only need 2 additional votes to pass anything.
noduerme 4y ago
I think it's bizarre to conflate Apple's refusal to allow other webkits on iOS with the fact that Safari remains a viable alternative engine. They're far from heroes here. I think it's great they maintain a Chrome alternative kit that mostly works but let's not pretend they're saints or kid ourselves about the reasons for it. The only reason they disallow Chromium and Mozilla is they want their users locked into their environment and they want to leverage that substantial locked-in user base to dictate terms. It's only being one of the richest companies in history that gives them a seat at the table. If they're afraid of having to open the platform, that's because they're not keeping up. It's not that they're one judgment away from that day. They know that. It's just that they want to get as much mileage as they can before they too abandon Safari and first allow, then switch to Chromium. That will happen in the next 5 years. What might come of it all would be a reset where new branches form and new innovators get to introduce new proposals. Standards aren't a bad thing if they're open. If Safari dies then Google will be next in the line of fire for antitrust action anyway... things will fragment again. I'm personally pissed at the number of great technologies left as litter along the road, not least AS3, just to get to this shitty middle ground / cold browser war between two companies I hope die and one that won't help itself. Let the standards win and let's have a standard platform to innovate on top of.
- leononame 4y ago
  > It's not that they're one judgment away from that day. They know that. It's just that they want to get as much mileage as they can before they too abandon Safari and first allow, then switch to Chromium. That will happen in the next 5 years. I'm not a great future-reader myself, but I don't see this happening soon. The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream, and they have a lot to lose with little to win for their platform. They lag behind because they want to, not because they can't.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    > The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream This is as ridiculous today as it has been every year since the iPhone began. Mobile web apps are terrible and despite all the years of promises that "feature X" will fix this nothing has changed. And you can't blame Apple because Google et al could easily have made mobile web apps work on Android. If you want to make a mobile web app then go right ahead. Apple isn't stopping you. But just don't be surprised when no user is interested in it.
pornel 4y ago
Even if Google was an absolute saint without a trillion-dollar ad business, there's still a problem of "bug-compatibility". Without a second browser engine to test pages in, it's really hard to know what is a bug and what is intentional. Devs don't know all the specs by heart. They write whatever happens to work for them, but sometimes they accidentally depend on obscure edge cases in the implementation that were never meant to exist. In the long term it's paralysing for the engine maintainers, because any change in implementation could be changing some subtle behavior that breaks some pages. W3C requires two independent implementations, so that they'll share intentional behaviors, but hopefully their bugs will differ. The single-engine Web will be as fun to maintain as Windows: Windows 11 Explorer has a shiny new context menu with an option to reopen it as an older, uglier context menu, because Microsoft couldn't touch a line of code of the old context menu without breaking apps.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  > Without a second browser engine to test pages in, it's really hard to know what is a bug and what is intentional. Devs don't know all the specs by heart. They write whatever happens to work for them, but sometimes they accidentally depend on obscure edge cases in the implementation that were never meant to exist. I know this isn’t everyone’s experience, but I believe adding IE11 support to my personal website improved the quality of my code. There were a lot of things I hadn’t specified explicitly, and for whatever reason Chrome/Webkit and Firefox just happened to make the right guesses. IE11 did not, so I had to go back and be clear about exactly what I actually wanted.
  - bromuro 4y ago
    The quality of the code could improve, true, yet I wish nobody the endless afternoons trying to debug code or fix the CSS in IE.
- threeseed 4y ago
  > there's still a problem of "bug-compatibility" They aren't even bugs. The spec allows for interpretations.
msoad 4y ago
I’m a little surprised why Chinese firms aren’t coming in and competing? Maybe they think web is not important for their future anymore?
- rfoo 4y ago
  Why bother when you can simply rebrand Chromium?
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  I'd suggest staying tuned. I'd only just posted that the only organisations I see being able to sustain a divergent development effort which could match Google might come from China. And I don't see that as necessarily, or even at all, benign. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834651
- mmis1000 4y ago
  They do have one for their own use. It's called X5 engine; developed by tencent. It is also used in one of the browser that mainly used in China (To be honest, it actually done much better than safari, I seldom need to handle issue specific to it except some missing API. Apple just choose to ignore)
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  China is more app centered. They can't access half the web anyways.
pjmlp 4y ago
The Web is only one Safari away to turn into ChromeOS, as Firefox hardly matters any more.
mnot 4y ago
FWIW, updated with a response from Jake Archibald (Chromium/Google).
madeofpalk 4y ago
> I recently heard from a well-placed contact that “many in the Chromium community are arguing for a Chromium-only Web.” Seems quite an article for something that's founded on just an unsourced and unquotable rumor.
- abraham 4y ago
  "Chromium community" can mean a lot of different things too.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing some firmer categorisation of that. Not naming names, but at least indicating what portions of the community --- browser devs, Web devs, clients / shops, users, ... ?
rhdunn 4y ago
I've already noticed several things not working on Firefox that work on Chrome and Edge, such as the Discord age selection dropdowns -- clicking on them does nothing in Firefox. It's frustrating as I use Firefox exclusively (outside of testing functionality on Chrome and Edge). It's good that Chrome is finally on track to provide MathML support (which Firefox has had since version 4), and as of version 91 supports counter styles (Firefox supports it since version 33), but I wonder how much of that will happen if/when Chrome is the only actively developed browser on non-Mac platforms, resulting in WebKit/Blink being the only engine developed for the web. I'm also concerned about what will happen in regard to the web standards, given that the browsers have abandoned the W3C in favour of continually changing documents, and only seem to be interested in the needs of web browsers. That makes it difficult for other uses like in ePubs to steer the direction of HTML and the associated standards.
i5Aj7PXGjUPy 4y ago
> “many in the Chromium community are arguing for a Chromium-only Web.” This is why I'll use firefox until it's gone. Considering the push for mv3, I'd rather have a functioning ad blocker that actually blocks ads instead of having pages 100% work 100% of the time
snickerbockers 4y ago
I'm not a webdev so I mostly don't care as long as it's FOSS, but I will say that firefox loads a lot faster than chromium on my machine. Looking at top it appears that somehow firefox is actually using more memory than chromium is (i only tested a three tabs open in each browser so maybe they don't scale the same under heavier load) but at the same time I can report anecdotally that in addition to being slower, chromium also causes my HDD to make way more noise than firefox ever does.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Weird cause I have the opposite effect. Firefox is way slower... On Linux, Firefox didn't even implement any video accelerated decoding for the longest time and it is still buggy and has poor support for Wayland with glitchy artifacts during resizing, etc. I'm using an older computer with Linux and wouldn't be able to use the web reliably if it weren't for Chromium.
- i5Aj7PXGjUPy 4y ago
  > but I will say that firefox loads a lot faster than chromium on my machine. which machine??? genuinely curious
  - snickerbockers 4y ago
    intel i9-9900 3.60GHz, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and a 6TB 7200RPM SATA HDD running manjaro
    - thorncorona 4y ago
      No SSD?
      - snickerbockers 4y ago
        No
jmyeet 4y ago
Let's break down the browser space: 1. Microsoft: MS was never interested (until it was far too late) in having a standards-compliant, performant browser. It was a spoiler move to keep people Windows dependent. 2. Mozilla: I honestly don't understand what Mozilla is doing other than raising top exec pay while Firefox users go down [1]. As best as I can tell, Mozilla is the Yelp in this situation. Yelp has spent over a decade extolling the evils of Google while doing absolutely nothing to improve their product. It's a great way to collect a fatter and fatter paycheck but you're ultimately doomed. 3. Apple: Safari has almost always been bound by its own ecosystem. It's dominant on iOS because you have no other choice (for now; you can install other browsers but they're still the Safari engine basically). A lot of people use it on MacOS. For a brief time there was a Windows port but it died. This doesn't seem like an area that Apple wants to compete in. I mean at the end of the day Safari and Chrome share a common Webkit lineage. So I see a lot of failure, lack of prioritization, missed opportunities and finger-pointing in this space so is it any wonder that a massive engineering company has been able to dominate this space? I don't see us repeating the IE6 era however. The Internet is core to Google's business in a way that it never was to Microsoft. That being said, I think this is one area where government intervention may well be needed sooner rather than later. Google has (and continues to) use their properties to advance Chrome (IMHO) eg [2]. There can be a fine line between advancing the browser space and simply crippling your competitors. [1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html [2]: https://mspoweruser.com/engineer-accuses-google-of-sabotaging-microsoft-edge-browser/ https://mspoweruser.com/engineer-accuses-google-of-sabotagin...
- abruzzi 4y ago
  > I don't see us repeating the IE6 era however. The Internet is core to Google's business in a way that it never was to Microsoft. Depends on what your takeaway from the IE6 era was--if its that MS abandoned development and the web stagnated, then I think you're correct. However if you takeaway was that too much power was concentrated in a single private entity who has the defacto ability to control development and standards and channel them towards their best interests, not the users, then I think it would be the IE6 era all over again.
pdkl95 4y ago
A single-browser web, like any monoculture, dramatically increases the potential damage of common mode failure. With everything - even important infrastructure and services - becoming directly or transitively dependent on the the web, we should be diversifying the browser ecosystem to limit the scope of a class break[1]. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/class_breaks.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/class_breaks....
vinay_ys 4y ago
This is a bizarre FUD piece.
jrochkind1 4y ago
OP discusses W3C as preferable, but my understanding was that the W3C is already fairly irrelevant to what browsers actually do, usurped by the browser-vendor-organized WHATWG. > However, they can’t (quite) go cowboy/cowgirl and do it on their own right now – they’ve all agreed to work together on the definition of what ‘the Web’ is in a Standards Developing Organization (SDO), most often the W3C. I didn't think that was what was going on at all. Has this changed again since last time I was paying attention, has the W3C regained some influence on browser implementations? > it’s more fundamentally a question of how do we organize society so that important decisions are made well? And, what will be considered legitimate governance of the Web? Indeed.
Yizahi 4y ago
The correct header should be "a Chrome-only web". I'm already observing a lot of sites not working or breaking in the Firefox, for instance just today I found out that part of Jira functionality is silently broken in it (integrations). But I was using FF since beta and will see it till it's death and birth of Googlenet.
flenserboy 4y ago
Then it will be time for a true replacement for website layout & transmission to be developed. HTML is fine for what it is, but bolting CSS on top, then JavaScript, etc., etc., is simply a mess. Better can be done, and this could be the impetus for it, to keep the world at least somewhat out of Google's clutches.
teddyh 4y ago
I am increasingly of the opinion that Google Chrome is not a web browser. Chrome is a Google browser. What Chrome does browse is the Google Web, not the World Wide Web.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
There's a simple remedy: demand, by antitrust law, that a browser can't be produced by the same party as the one producing content. Forbid bundling of browsers and/or offering browsers for free.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Which part of antitrust law allows that insanity?
spacemanmatt 4y ago
It will look the same, to me. Chrome might be the last Google app I use, if I ever try to quit them all.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
titzer 4y ago
The Web platform is an abject failure of layering. It's truly the biggest ball of mud that software has yet birthed. If it had only reasonable modularity its implementation would be large integer factors less code and it would not be necessary to wait on three browser engines to ship obscure (declarative!) features for CSS, like dropshadows, which could easily be programmed on top of a better designed, simpler core. And don't even get me started on "accessibility". The web's barely-acceptable kludges for accessibility could easily be accommodated in a layered, more programmable system. The web platform is rife with abstraction inversion, employs declarativity where programmability is necessary, and vice versa. It puts magic in pretty much all the wrong spots. And its event-based programming model that puts all JS on the "main" (actually UI) "thread", forcing a painful and awkward asynchronous programming model that we are gaslighting into believing is good for us, is frankly just dumb. But the web has always thought designers and developers are dumb, so it's fair play to just hate it right back.
nathias 4y ago
imagine Google's boot stamping on a human face — for ever
fallat 4y ago
Relevant http://len.falken.directory/philosophy/when-will-web-browsers-be-complete.txt http://len.falken.directory/philosophy/when-will-web-browser...
damnesian 4y ago
The future of the web is not in a browser. A significant part of the internet already thrives outside of the traditional browser sphere. Apps and mobile are the future. Eventually no one will be using web browsers. Or the internet web browsers serve up will be like cable TV or AOL: a zombified booby trap of nothing but ads, scraped content and links eager to serve you ransomware. Maybe I've read too many dystopian novels though.
- allknowingfrog 4y ago
  That's a really interesting observation. It doesn't seem to be enough anymore to offer a mobile-first web experience. Users expect mobile apps, and your perceived legitimacy will suffer if you don't offer one (even if it's just a wrapper around the same basic web technologies). Maybe we worry too much about the future of the browser.
marosgrego 4y ago
http://www.netsurf-browser.org http://www.netsurf-browser.org
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Unfortunately NetSurf (and other scratch written browsers) are just a demonstration of the trend of Chromification of the web. Outside of old or decidedly accessible sites NetSurf isn't usable on a lot of the web. Too many sites require too much JavaScript for a scratch built non-JIT JavaScript engine to run.
torginus 4y ago
I'm kind of torn on this - first, I can clearly see the dangers as well as anyone else, but considering the reality of the situation, the only browser engine with significant market share is Webkit/Safari. Most webdevs I know consider Safari to be the new IE - they often lag years behind implementing features that are key for new capabilities like WebAssembly multithreading - and it's not hard to see why - the web is a primary competitor to their App Store business. On the other hand, I feel like the browser is almost done. With WebAssembly and WebGPU and a bunch of other stuff, I can think of very little in terms of capabilities that need to be added to browsers in the future.
darinf 4y ago
A side-effect of a Chromium-only web is that it gives the Chrome team at Google less incentive to invest in the web platform. It used to be a way to differentiate Chrome from other browsers. Now-a-days that is no longer the case. Competition is a great way to drive innovation. What will motivate innovation on the web platform going forward? Will there be stagnation? Will another company emerge to push the web forward? What will this mean for companies that have enjoyed all of the innovation on the web platform in recent years? How much longer will it take for bugs to get fixed? This will not be a sudden shift. It will happen gradually.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  > A side-effect of a Chromium-only web is that it gives the Chrome team at Google less incentive to invest in the web platform. It used to be a way to differentiate Chrome from other browsers. Now-a-days that is no longer the case. That's what happened with Internet Explorer but the reason Microsoft was perfectly happy to stall the development of the web once it took over the browser market was because it didn't really have any incentive to use the web in the first place (it was better off if people just used desktop apps), and it only developed IE so that if the internet was going to take over it could be the one in the position to control it. On the other hand, outside of Android, Google is extremely reliant on the web for its products on desktop and on chromebooks (there used to be chrome os apps and chrome browser apps but they have already been deprecated). Google actually has an incentive to add new features to try to give PWA's feature parity with desktop apps, so rather than ceasing development, it may be more likely that they start just adding new features that aren't compatible with other browsers. E.g. they could probably now go back and immediately undeprecate WebSQL and just say, "we don't care what firefox thinks now." If they announced that, they have enough market share that they could probably get people to start using it again and that would immediately break compatibility with firefox.
  - darinf 4y ago
    Yes they can act unilaterally and with Chrome OS and many popular web apps they do have incentive to care about the web. But will that translate to the Chrome organization caring? It doesn’t make Chrome a more attractive browser to users than other browsers also built on Chromium.
superkuh 4y ago
Uh, it's in the name. A Chromium only web is a web controlled by Chrome which is a web controlled by google. It's laughable that these dudes maintaining a fork think they're in control and doing open source when they're basically just eating google's table scraps. The only way to stop this is personal choice: don't use Chrome or Chrome derived software. There's no other actions any human person can take with more impact.
AshleysBrain 4y ago
I think it's very unlikely that the web will end up Chromium-only. macOS-specific browser share numbers are hard to come by, but on our own moderately sized website we see about 60% of macOS users choosing Safari. Even if iOS allows other browser engines, presumably a similarly large number of iOS users would also choose Safari, either because it's the default or because they like it. So regardless of what happens with iOS regulation, it seems likely there will always be significant Safari usage on the web. So then the only way we end up with a Chromium-only web is firstly assuming a worst-case scenario for Firefox essentially falling out of use, but its usage on desktop appears to have stabilised around 7-8%. Secondly Apple would then need to decide to ditch WebKit for Chromium. I can't imagine they'll ever do that. Apple have a strong desire to do things their own way and keep full control over how their browser works. So I think we're a long way from a Chromium-only web.
- izacus 4y ago
  If anything, I'd expect Safari share to grow since competition might kick Apple to improve their browser to be a true equivalent or better competitior to Chrome.
  - solardev 4y ago
    The opposite seems true right now, with Apple deciding to improve its proprietary ecosystems (app store, swift, etc.) and letting WebKit stagnate. There's a lot that Gecko and Blink can handle but Safari struggles with, seemingly by design. Apple doesn't want a strong web-based ecosystem because that means their competitors can use it too, vs the iOS/macOS only stuff. If they wanted to, they could switch Safari to Blink just like everyone else did, but still keep adding features on top of it (privacy, iCloud integration, whatever), the same way Microsoft does. No user asks for a different layout engine, that's corporations fighting with different values and priorities. The differentiating features for users are layers above that and arguably held back by renderer differentiation.
    - AshleysBrain 4y ago
      Apple do appear to be trying a bit harder with Safari - since the regulatory heat has turned up, they've started releasing Safari more regularly since v15, and adding more new web platform features. Safari still does have its problems but I don't think it's fair to say Apple are letting WebKit stagnate.
goodpoint 4y ago
It will look like a dystopian wasteland of closed formats.
choeger 4y ago
I really think that a new browser is possible. The people that worked on Firefox and Chromium over the years learned a lot. Programming languages and tools have improved massively. That doesn't mean it will be easy, but I have little doubt that with enough pressure, some people will start their own browser from scratch, and some of them will be successful.
kypro 4y ago
Has Microsoft ever spoken about why they decided to go with Chromium over say Mozilla Quantum? Microsoft must have realised that picking Chromium would dramatically increase the odds of a Chromium-only web? On the surface I'd have thought it would make more sense for Microsoft to support the Mozilla Quantum project. Perhaps they just wanted to take the easy route though. Chromium is certainly more popular and has Google's backing. I understand why so many projects use it.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  It most likely has to do with XULRunner being non-optional with Firefox/Gecko. Blink is more like WebKit in terms of playing nice with other UI toolkits. Mozilla killing off support for embedding Gecko in other UI toolkits was a massive footgun, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.
nix0n 4y ago
When websites start saying "switch to Chromium" I'll just change my User-agent string in Firefox. (Maybe by that time I'll have to spoof feature flags too, but honestly I doubt it)

267 points by dochtman 4y ago

Web browsers have become huge monolithic applications we all nowadays preach against. So much so that other monoliths get built on top of them. (I am taking the dictionary definition of monolith here: a massive structure). Many of the solutions given in this thread are similar to ones we give to someone who wants to escape from the monolith mess. Namely, move towards a very slim core, make everything as modular as possible etc etc. And the problems towards such an approach are the same as well i.e., what do we do about the legacy stuff? The important question here is: what can be done better if we start from scratch? The main issue I see with browsers is that they have become so big that building a new one in a reasonable amount of time is next to impossible. This makes all the open standards pointless because no one can do anything with them except the few already established browsers. Unfortunately there's no clean way out of this.

phendrenad2 4y ago

If Mozilla and the various other non-megacorp browsers (Vivaldi, Brave, Opera) banded together and built a governance structure for Chromium, similar to the Linux Foundation, they could try to stop this fate. But they aren't, and they won't, due to hubris, pride, and jealousy.

cpeterso 4y ago

If a browser engine monoculture is a good or sustainable situation, why did Google fork WebKit to create Blink? Why will a Chromium monoculture be any better than the WebKit monoculture ten years ago?

HWR_14 4y ago

"Hi, you seem to be browsing without being signed into Google with your government verified identity. Please do so to continue seeing the ads, I mean the internet"

encryptluks2 4y ago
Chromium is open source. You're confusing Chromium with Chrome.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  It's like confusing "open-source" Android, AOSP and Play Services: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on... >While Android is open, it's more of a "look but don't touch" kind of open. You're allowed to contribute to Android and allowed to use it for little hobbies, but in nearly every area, the deck is stacked against anyone trying to use Android without Google's blessing. The second you try to take Android and do something that Google doesn't approve of, it will bring the world crashing down upon you.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    The difference is, AOSP on its own is unusable, but Chromium Is.
    - anonymousab 4y ago
      Google has added proprietary closed source blobs to chromium in the past and there's little reason they wouldn't do so again when they're the only game in town.
      - jacooper 4y ago
        But they arent, chromium forks like brave or edge won't stand and do nothing if something ridiculous happened.
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      For now.
    - gspr 4y ago

ecmascript 4y ago

It will not be Chromium only. It will be chromium and safari and it already is. Apple will most likely never open up unless forced, which usually sucks but is a good thing due to the monopoly of the market. Firefox is responsible for such a low percentage it's sad (the stats I have for the sites I work on it's usually on the 1-2% range). I think it's mainly because of the horrible leadership at Mozilla. I want to use Firefox and promote it but every time I think they've changed Mozilla does something new that boils my blood. You can donate to Mozilla, but not directly to Firefox and they seem to spend a lot of money on political projects. It's a 'get woke, go broke' situation and I have watched the fall of Mozilla in real time over the past years. I really wish Mozilla changed focus, I would gladly pay for Firefox+ or something if I knew that the money went to Firefox development and not to some racist white male hate project. So I'll continue using Brave and hope for the best, the future the author is talking about is basically already here.

rapnie 4y ago
Still, I do a lot of browsing the web and did not encounter broken pages on Firefox, luckily.
- ecmascript 4y ago
  On the websites I work on I have stopped testing on Firefox for the most part. I do testing once in a while, but I'd rather spend the time to make the site more accessible since it's a larger group than Firefox users.
  - gostsamo 4y ago
    So, how should I feel as a blind user who uses Firefox? :)
    - ecmascript 4y ago
      Happy that I use my time to try to help your disability and make your life easier rather than make sure that a web browser that hardly anyone uses work 100% correctly. Surely, most of the time Firefox will work just fine or at least good enough and by that standard I am sure that a site that has put some focus for it being easier to read with a screen reader is more important?

paol 4y ago

We don't have to speculate, we've been through this already during the IE4 to IE6 era. Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so will Google. In Microsoft's case what they wanted was nothing. They weren't a web business, saw it as a threat to their platform leverage, and so just left it abandoned and stagnant for years. Google is simultaneously better and worse: they won't leave it stagnant because the web is their platform, but on the other hand they have a lot more to gain by abusing control of it.

wdb 4y ago
Personally, I think Google already does whatever it wants similar to what Microsoft did. They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit.
- remus 4y ago
  > They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit. Safari definitely does not just follow suit (see https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareCats=JS%20API https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareC... for example).
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    They have every incentive to NOT implement things to force devs to create apps. If they wanted to create an actual browser vs. bare bones browser, they'd still offer it on other operating systems.
    - corrral 4y ago
      Please. I've been using the Web since '95, and working on the Web nearly as long. Safari's where I do almost all my browsing, work and personal. It's a fine browser. If I could use it on Windows and Linux, I wouldn't hesitate to choose it over Firefox and Chrome and their derivatives.

Santosh83 4y ago

If there is only one implementation, then whichever body (private, public, for profit, not for profit, doesn't matter) controls this implementation will control the direction of the entire web. It's the definition of consolidation and monopoly control. There is no reasonable argument to make for a Chromium only web from anyone without vested interests.

charcircuit 4y ago
It's open source. Anyone can fork it.
- kevincox 4y ago
  But the websites aren't. If chrome is the only browser websites will target chrome. Do if you fork it and remove features that you find harmful you now have a useless lump of software.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Chrome already has a large market share and a browser changing their browser engine doesn't necessarily change Chrome's market share.
- soapdog 4y ago
  Forking is easy. Maintaining and developing a browser engine is really hard. Most forks that make substantial changes to the original source are either maintained by a multimillion company or die without maintenance.
- bobajeff 4y ago
  Sadly, even if you don't fork Chromium and simply embed It via Electron or Chromium Embedded Framework you still won't be able to login in to some Google sites.
  - i5Aj7PXGjUPy 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

We did this on ourselves. As everyone was laughing at Internet Explorer, another behemoth was overtaking IE and nothing was in their way. Mozilla (Firefox) was our chance for something different. They were ahead of IE once but they watched on and did nothing whilst they had their pockets lined up with Google's money and allowed them (Google) to overtake everyone and now everyone is complaining about it. It even goes back before Chrome was a thing when the Mozilla CEO declared that they could move away from depending on Google's money. [0] Now 14+ years later, they are still unable to do so. Since then it is only Google (Chrome) and Apple (Safari) again, just like for Android and iOS. All other attempts at stopping them was a complete failure like Firefox OS was and now Mozilla and Firefox are the ones fizzling out of existence as they are unable to make money as the majority of users are running to Chrome, Brave, Edge and Vivaldi. It is no wonder websites are beginning to not only break on Firefox, but also tell or block users from their web apps to instead use Chrome. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9044160/Mozilla_can_live_without_Google_s_money_Baker_says_ https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

joshuaissac 4y ago
What was Mozilla supposed to do? Google could advertise their browser to everyone who used Google Search, just like how Microsoft could with Windows. Mozilla did not have any products with that kind of reach.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  It's not what Mozilla was supposed to do, it's what we here were supposed to do. Everyone here should have switched to Firefox already. That would make a difference in the long run by both direct and indirect effects. Just hunker down, do your part and eat your spinach already.
- account42 4y ago
  For one, Mozilla could start empowering the user again instead of trying to ape Chrome in every way. If the only reason anyone would want to use Firefox is to prevent Chrome from being the only browser then that is on Mozilla.

basdp 4y ago

This is not hypothetical, as we’ve lived through this before with Internet Explorer. The web didn’t get better from that. Open source is a big plus now of course, but it’s still backed by corporations that want us for our data to make money. It’s never going to be pretty. We might have to live through another monopoly (or we could call it web-communism?) but I am 100% sure we are going to condemn Chromium some time later and work our way back to a free browser-world. It’s the circle of life.

dr-detroit 4y ago

fritigern 4y ago

Not having alternatives is really bad. Chromium-only web would suck.

mnd999 4y ago

Probably we have to start again with something different in the same way as the web replaced all the other protocols (gopher, usenet etc). I’m not what that looks like but it should be cleaner, simpler, open and blockchain-free.

PretzelPirate 4y ago
> I’m not what that looks like but it should be cleaner, simpler, open and blockchain-free. You’re asking for an open network and then putting restrictions on individuals right away by saying they can’t use blockchains on it. Some people want to use blockchains (or any other technology) and an open network shouldn’t put restrictions on how people participate.
- dkersten 4y ago
  But it shouldn’t itself be based on blockchains. That is, if you want to use them, that’s fine and up to you, but if you don’t want to use them, then that should also be a valid choice. The core technology shouldn’t be based on blockchain and should work just as well without.
- dingleberry420 4y ago
- ardacinar 4y ago
  A blockchain-free protocol is not a protocol with "no you can't do anything blockchain related on this" restriction. A blockchain-free protocol is one where the protocol itself does not involve a blockchain. Like HTTP, or FTP, or Gopher, or IRC, SMTP etc.
bobajeff 4y ago
Yes, I've been wanting something that's just a rich document but designed around accessibility with no styles or JavaScript.
- fbanon 4y ago

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

We’ll have “amazing” technologies like ActiveX and JScript except this time from Google!

milankragujevic 4y ago
I remember Google Gears :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_(software)
jeremycarter 4y ago
They were pretty cool though - genuinely

GeekyBear 4y ago

I think we already know from internal documents revealed during the discovery phase of the various antitrust filings. >Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web into a walled garden https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1452053941504684036 https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205394150468403...

samsquire 4y ago

Edit: to reply to the lovely article. I wouldn't mind if there was a reference implementation for the web. So that people could experiment with things on it. There's nothing stopping me building Chromium which I did on a Windows machine once as an experiment. I couldn't get Firefox to build as Mercurial kept crashing. I would like to see proper SQL APIs in browsers as that's the industry standard for fetching and retrieving data. The browser is a very powerful piece of technology. I see it as a magazine viewer and application distribution platform. I use Repl.it when I am on a low powered windows laptop and IntelliJ and vim otherwise. I would also like to see a lightweight native API for DOM queuing ala React. Layout engines are difficult to write and adapt. Especially adapt as they're so complicated. I read part of the ORC Solver paper and there is algorithms in that paper for writing a layout engine and there's code on GitHub. https://github.com/YueJiang-nj/ORCSolver-CHI2020 https://github.com/YueJiang-nj/ORCSolver-CHI2020 I would like to adapt this approach but write the code myself but it is obviously a challenging area. I am yet to write a branch and bound optimisation algorithm. But from my understanding you greedily try a number of rows or columns and try arrange objects preferred width and preferred height into the space available. ORCSolver uses intervals and eliminates attempts that are not viable. ORCSolver uses Z3 for the final step to actually get coordinates when the system has been constrained. I plan to use ORTools. For simplicity I plan to break up text into letters and try place them all in a flowing horizontal then vertical layout. I can use GetTextExtents of WX widgets to predict size of a rendered letter. It shall be slow but then how else do you begin writing a layout engine? I would need to read TeX or the Art of Computer Programming. Layout is expensive especially for grid based layouts with flowing. I wonder if website authors could prerender at different resolutions and provide start point sizes and coordinates for speed. Generally everybody reaches the same numbers on everyone's machines and we don't need to try a lot of aborted work to relayout. I am the author of additive GUIs which is a declarative rendering approach for bootstrap layouts. https://GitHub.com/samsquire/additive-guis https://GitHub.com/samsquire/additive-guis It's not really a layout engine but it does layout things according to mutually recursive rules.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago

The scaremongering about this is insane, I've seen people justify Apple forcing all browser on iOS to be Webkit based for the sake of "diversity" and "competition". IT'S REALLY NOT THAT BAD AS PEOPLE WOULD MAKE YOU THINK! Competition is great, forcing me to use Webkit on iOS is not how you fix this. Please go promote and support Firefox in any way you can.

qubex 4y ago

This is a large fraction of the reason why I stick to using Safari on my Mac.

Joeri 4y ago

The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. We are at an impasse. The standards cannot be deprecated because they are used all over the web, and because they are used all over the web a new browser maker has little choice except forking chromium or firefox. Even microsoft couldn’t afford to keep adding all the standards to their browser engine. Normally the solution for a messy overgrown implementation is a grand reboot. But we can’t do a grand reboot of the web because we cannot get rid of the legacy. The only viable strategy I see to have real browser engine diversity without giving up on compatibility is moving as much of the standards implementation as possible into JS modules, so new browser makers can start with a small engine that loads the publicly hosted standards modules.

mdavis6890 4y ago
Basically - the web is what Chromium source code says it is - no more, no less, and no other.
freediver 4y ago
Normally having one strong alternative would be enough, but in this case we have two - Gecko and WebKit. The problem is not in the lack of browser rendering engines, but the lacking innovation and product features of the browsers running these rendering engines.
guerrilla 4y ago
> It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. A body of web standards that they lobbied for and to be in the form that they are...
- Closi 4y ago
  … and are a member of … holding more seats than Apple and Google combined … and more than four times the vote share of Mozilla … As an example, Google holds 18 of 39 seats on the Web Assembly Working Group. This means that if they whip their seats, they only need 2 additional votes to pass anything.

noduerme 4y ago

I think it's bizarre to conflate Apple's refusal to allow other webkits on iOS with the fact that Safari remains a viable alternative engine. They're far from heroes here. I think it's great they maintain a Chrome alternative kit that mostly works but let's not pretend they're saints or kid ourselves about the reasons for it. The only reason they disallow Chromium and Mozilla is they want their users locked into their environment and they want to leverage that substantial locked-in user base to dictate terms. It's only being one of the richest companies in history that gives them a seat at the table. If they're afraid of having to open the platform, that's because they're not keeping up. It's not that they're one judgment away from that day. They know that. It's just that they want to get as much mileage as they can before they too abandon Safari and first allow, then switch to Chromium. That will happen in the next 5 years. What might come of it all would be a reset where new branches form and new innovators get to introduce new proposals. Standards aren't a bad thing if they're open. If Safari dies then Google will be next in the line of fire for antitrust action anyway... things will fragment again. I'm personally pissed at the number of great technologies left as litter along the road, not least AS3, just to get to this shitty middle ground / cold browser war between two companies I hope die and one that won't help itself. Let the standards win and let's have a standard platform to innovate on top of.

leononame 4y ago
> It's not that they're one judgment away from that day. They know that. It's just that they want to get as much mileage as they can before they too abandon Safari and first allow, then switch to Chromium. That will happen in the next 5 years. I'm not a great future-reader myself, but I don't see this happening soon. The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream, and they have a lot to lose with little to win for their platform. They lag behind because they want to, not because they can't.
- threeseed 4y ago
  > The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream This is as ridiculous today as it has been every year since the iPhone began. Mobile web apps are terrible and despite all the years of promises that "feature X" will fix this nothing has changed. And you can't blame Apple because Google et al could easily have made mobile web apps work on Android. If you want to make a mobile web app then go right ahead. Apple isn't stopping you. But just don't be surprised when no user is interested in it.

pornel 4y ago

Even if Google was an absolute saint without a trillion-dollar ad business, there's still a problem of "bug-compatibility". Without a second browser engine to test pages in, it's really hard to know what is a bug and what is intentional. Devs don't know all the specs by heart. They write whatever happens to work for them, but sometimes they accidentally depend on obscure edge cases in the implementation that were never meant to exist. In the long term it's paralysing for the engine maintainers, because any change in implementation could be changing some subtle behavior that breaks some pages. W3C requires two independent implementations, so that they'll share intentional behaviors, but hopefully their bugs will differ. The single-engine Web will be as fun to maintain as Windows: Windows 11 Explorer has a shiny new context menu with an option to reopen it as an older, uglier context menu, because Microsoft couldn't touch a line of code of the old context menu without breaking apps.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> Without a second browser engine to test pages in, it's really hard to know what is a bug and what is intentional. Devs don't know all the specs by heart. They write whatever happens to work for them, but sometimes they accidentally depend on obscure edge cases in the implementation that were never meant to exist. I know this isn’t everyone’s experience, but I believe adding IE11 support to my personal website improved the quality of my code. There were a lot of things I hadn’t specified explicitly, and for whatever reason Chrome/Webkit and Firefox just happened to make the right guesses. IE11 did not, so I had to go back and be clear about exactly what I actually wanted.
- bromuro 4y ago
  The quality of the code could improve, true, yet I wish nobody the endless afternoons trying to debug code or fix the CSS in IE.
threeseed 4y ago
> there's still a problem of "bug-compatibility" They aren't even bugs. The spec allows for interpretations.

msoad 4y ago

I’m a little surprised why Chinese firms aren’t coming in and competing? Maybe they think web is not important for their future anymore?

rfoo 4y ago
Why bother when you can simply rebrand Chromium?
dredmorbius 4y ago
I'd suggest staying tuned. I'd only just posted that the only organisations I see being able to sustain a divergent development effort which could match Google might come from China. And I don't see that as necessarily, or even at all, benign. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834651
mmis1000 4y ago
They do have one for their own use. It's called X5 engine; developed by tencent. It is also used in one of the browser that mainly used in China (To be honest, it actually done much better than safari, I seldom need to handle issue specific to it except some missing API. Apple just choose to ignore)
yellow_lead 4y ago
China is more app centered. They can't access half the web anyways.

pjmlp 4y ago

The Web is only one Safari away to turn into ChromeOS, as Firefox hardly matters any more.

mnot 4y ago

FWIW, updated with a response from Jake Archibald (Chromium/Google).

madeofpalk 4y ago

> I recently heard from a well-placed contact that “many in the Chromium community are arguing for a Chromium-only Web.” Seems quite an article for something that's founded on just an unsourced and unquotable rumor.

abraham 4y ago
"Chromium community" can mean a lot of different things too.
dredmorbius 4y ago
I'd be interested in seeing some firmer categorisation of that. Not naming names, but at least indicating what portions of the community --- browser devs, Web devs, clients / shops, users, ... ?

rhdunn 4y ago

I've already noticed several things not working on Firefox that work on Chrome and Edge, such as the Discord age selection dropdowns -- clicking on them does nothing in Firefox. It's frustrating as I use Firefox exclusively (outside of testing functionality on Chrome and Edge). It's good that Chrome is finally on track to provide MathML support (which Firefox has had since version 4), and as of version 91 supports counter styles (Firefox supports it since version 33), but I wonder how much of that will happen if/when Chrome is the only actively developed browser on non-Mac platforms, resulting in WebKit/Blink being the only engine developed for the web. I'm also concerned about what will happen in regard to the web standards, given that the browsers have abandoned the W3C in favour of continually changing documents, and only seem to be interested in the needs of web browsers. That makes it difficult for other uses like in ePubs to steer the direction of HTML and the associated standards.

i5Aj7PXGjUPy 4y ago

> “many in the Chromium community are arguing for a Chromium-only Web.” This is why I'll use firefox until it's gone. Considering the push for mv3, I'd rather have a functioning ad blocker that actually blocks ads instead of having pages 100% work 100% of the time

snickerbockers 4y ago

I'm not a webdev so I mostly don't care as long as it's FOSS, but I will say that firefox loads a lot faster than chromium on my machine. Looking at top it appears that somehow firefox is actually using more memory than chromium is (i only tested a three tabs open in each browser so maybe they don't scale the same under heavier load) but at the same time I can report anecdotally that in addition to being slower, chromium also causes my HDD to make way more noise than firefox ever does.

encryptluks2 4y ago
Weird cause I have the opposite effect. Firefox is way slower... On Linux, Firefox didn't even implement any video accelerated decoding for the longest time and it is still buggy and has poor support for Wayland with glitchy artifacts during resizing, etc. I'm using an older computer with Linux and wouldn't be able to use the web reliably if it weren't for Chromium.
i5Aj7PXGjUPy 4y ago
> but I will say that firefox loads a lot faster than chromium on my machine. which machine??? genuinely curious
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  intel i9-9900 3.60GHz, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and a 6TB 7200RPM SATA HDD running manjaro
  - thorncorona 4y ago
    No SSD?
    - snickerbockers 4y ago
      No

jmyeet 4y ago

Let's break down the browser space: 1. Microsoft: MS was never interested (until it was far too late) in having a standards-compliant, performant browser. It was a spoiler move to keep people Windows dependent. 2. Mozilla: I honestly don't understand what Mozilla is doing other than raising top exec pay while Firefox users go down [1]. As best as I can tell, Mozilla is the Yelp in this situation. Yelp has spent over a decade extolling the evils of Google while doing absolutely nothing to improve their product. It's a great way to collect a fatter and fatter paycheck but you're ultimately doomed. 3. Apple: Safari has almost always been bound by its own ecosystem. It's dominant on iOS because you have no other choice (for now; you can install other browsers but they're still the Safari engine basically). A lot of people use it on MacOS. For a brief time there was a Windows port but it died. This doesn't seem like an area that Apple wants to compete in. I mean at the end of the day Safari and Chrome share a common Webkit lineage. So I see a lot of failure, lack of prioritization, missed opportunities and finger-pointing in this space so is it any wonder that a massive engineering company has been able to dominate this space? I don't see us repeating the IE6 era however. The Internet is core to Google's business in a way that it never was to Microsoft. That being said, I think this is one area where government intervention may well be needed sooner rather than later. Google has (and continues to) use their properties to advance Chrome (IMHO) eg [2]. There can be a fine line between advancing the browser space and simply crippling your competitors. [1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html [2]: https://mspoweruser.com/engineer-accuses-google-of-sabotaging-microsoft-edge-browser/ https://mspoweruser.com/engineer-accuses-google-of-sabotagin...

abruzzi 4y ago
> I don't see us repeating the IE6 era however. The Internet is core to Google's business in a way that it never was to Microsoft. Depends on what your takeaway from the IE6 era was--if its that MS abandoned development and the web stagnated, then I think you're correct. However if you takeaway was that too much power was concentrated in a single private entity who has the defacto ability to control development and standards and channel them towards their best interests, not the users, then I think it would be the IE6 era all over again.

pdkl95 4y ago

A single-browser web, like any monoculture, dramatically increases the potential damage of common mode failure. With everything - even important infrastructure and services - becoming directly or transitively dependent on the the web, we should be diversifying the browser ecosystem to limit the scope of a class break[1]. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/class_breaks.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/class_breaks....

vinay_ys 4y ago

This is a bizarre FUD piece.

jrochkind1 4y ago

OP discusses W3C as preferable, but my understanding was that the W3C is already fairly irrelevant to what browsers actually do, usurped by the browser-vendor-organized WHATWG. > However, they can’t (quite) go cowboy/cowgirl and do it on their own right now – they’ve all agreed to work together on the definition of what ‘the Web’ is in a Standards Developing Organization (SDO), most often the W3C. I didn't think that was what was going on at all. Has this changed again since last time I was paying attention, has the W3C regained some influence on browser implementations? > it’s more fundamentally a question of how do we organize society so that important decisions are made well? And, what will be considered legitimate governance of the Web? Indeed.

Yizahi 4y ago

The correct header should be "a Chrome-only web". I'm already observing a lot of sites not working or breaking in the Firefox, for instance just today I found out that part of Jira functionality is silently broken in it (integrations). But I was using FF since beta and will see it till it's death and birth of Googlenet.

flenserboy 4y ago

Then it will be time for a true replacement for website layout & transmission to be developed. HTML is fine for what it is, but bolting CSS on top, then JavaScript, etc., etc., is simply a mess. Better can be done, and this could be the impetus for it, to keep the world at least somewhat out of Google's clutches.

teddyh 4y ago

I am increasingly of the opinion that Google Chrome is not a web browser. Chrome is a Google browser. What Chrome does browse is the Google Web, not the World Wide Web.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

There's a simple remedy: demand, by antitrust law, that a browser can't be produced by the same party as the one producing content. Forbid bundling of browsers and/or offering browsers for free.

phendrenad2 4y ago
Which part of antitrust law allows that insanity?

spacemanmatt 4y ago

It will look the same, to me. Chrome might be the last Google app I use, if I ever try to quit them all.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

titzer 4y ago

The Web platform is an abject failure of layering. It's truly the biggest ball of mud that software has yet birthed. If it had only reasonable modularity its implementation would be large integer factors less code and it would not be necessary to wait on three browser engines to ship obscure (declarative!) features for CSS, like dropshadows, which could easily be programmed on top of a better designed, simpler core. And don't even get me started on "accessibility". The web's barely-acceptable kludges for accessibility could easily be accommodated in a layered, more programmable system. The web platform is rife with abstraction inversion, employs declarativity where programmability is necessary, and vice versa. It puts magic in pretty much all the wrong spots. And its event-based programming model that puts all JS on the "main" (actually UI) "thread", forcing a painful and awkward asynchronous programming model that we are gaslighting into believing is good for us, is frankly just dumb. But the web has always thought designers and developers are dumb, so it's fair play to just hate it right back.

nathias 4y ago

imagine Google's boot stamping on a human face — for ever

fallat 4y ago

Relevant http://len.falken.directory/philosophy/when-will-web-browsers-be-complete.txt http://len.falken.directory/philosophy/when-will-web-browser...

damnesian 4y ago

The future of the web is not in a browser. A significant part of the internet already thrives outside of the traditional browser sphere. Apps and mobile are the future. Eventually no one will be using web browsers. Or the internet web browsers serve up will be like cable TV or AOL: a zombified booby trap of nothing but ads, scraped content and links eager to serve you ransomware. Maybe I've read too many dystopian novels though.

allknowingfrog 4y ago
That's a really interesting observation. It doesn't seem to be enough anymore to offer a mobile-first web experience. Users expect mobile apps, and your perceived legitimacy will suffer if you don't offer one (even if it's just a wrapper around the same basic web technologies). Maybe we worry too much about the future of the browser.

marosgrego 4y ago

http://www.netsurf-browser.org http://www.netsurf-browser.org

giantrobot 4y ago
Unfortunately NetSurf (and other scratch written browsers) are just a demonstration of the trend of Chromification of the web. Outside of old or decidedly accessible sites NetSurf isn't usable on a lot of the web. Too many sites require too much JavaScript for a scratch built non-JIT JavaScript engine to run.

torginus 4y ago

I'm kind of torn on this - first, I can clearly see the dangers as well as anyone else, but considering the reality of the situation, the only browser engine with significant market share is Webkit/Safari. Most webdevs I know consider Safari to be the new IE - they often lag years behind implementing features that are key for new capabilities like WebAssembly multithreading - and it's not hard to see why - the web is a primary competitor to their App Store business. On the other hand, I feel like the browser is almost done. With WebAssembly and WebGPU and a bunch of other stuff, I can think of very little in terms of capabilities that need to be added to browsers in the future.

darinf 4y ago

A side-effect of a Chromium-only web is that it gives the Chrome team at Google less incentive to invest in the web platform. It used to be a way to differentiate Chrome from other browsers. Now-a-days that is no longer the case. Competition is a great way to drive innovation. What will motivate innovation on the web platform going forward? Will there be stagnation? Will another company emerge to push the web forward? What will this mean for companies that have enjoyed all of the innovation on the web platform in recent years? How much longer will it take for bugs to get fixed? This will not be a sudden shift. It will happen gradually.

resoluteteeth 4y ago
> A side-effect of a Chromium-only web is that it gives the Chrome team at Google less incentive to invest in the web platform. It used to be a way to differentiate Chrome from other browsers. Now-a-days that is no longer the case. That's what happened with Internet Explorer but the reason Microsoft was perfectly happy to stall the development of the web once it took over the browser market was because it didn't really have any incentive to use the web in the first place (it was better off if people just used desktop apps), and it only developed IE so that if the internet was going to take over it could be the one in the position to control it. On the other hand, outside of Android, Google is extremely reliant on the web for its products on desktop and on chromebooks (there used to be chrome os apps and chrome browser apps but they have already been deprecated). Google actually has an incentive to add new features to try to give PWA's feature parity with desktop apps, so rather than ceasing development, it may be more likely that they start just adding new features that aren't compatible with other browsers. E.g. they could probably now go back and immediately undeprecate WebSQL and just say, "we don't care what firefox thinks now." If they announced that, they have enough market share that they could probably get people to start using it again and that would immediately break compatibility with firefox.
- darinf 4y ago
  Yes they can act unilaterally and with Chrome OS and many popular web apps they do have incentive to care about the web. But will that translate to the Chrome organization caring? It doesn’t make Chrome a more attractive browser to users than other browsers also built on Chromium.

superkuh 4y ago

Uh, it's in the name. A Chromium only web is a web controlled by Chrome which is a web controlled by google. It's laughable that these dudes maintaining a fork think they're in control and doing open source when they're basically just eating google's table scraps. The only way to stop this is personal choice: don't use Chrome or Chrome derived software. There's no other actions any human person can take with more impact.

AshleysBrain 4y ago

I think it's very unlikely that the web will end up Chromium-only. macOS-specific browser share numbers are hard to come by, but on our own moderately sized website we see about 60% of macOS users choosing Safari. Even if iOS allows other browser engines, presumably a similarly large number of iOS users would also choose Safari, either because it's the default or because they like it. So regardless of what happens with iOS regulation, it seems likely there will always be significant Safari usage on the web. So then the only way we end up with a Chromium-only web is firstly assuming a worst-case scenario for Firefox essentially falling out of use, but its usage on desktop appears to have stabilised around 7-8%. Secondly Apple would then need to decide to ditch WebKit for Chromium. I can't imagine they'll ever do that. Apple have a strong desire to do things their own way and keep full control over how their browser works. So I think we're a long way from a Chromium-only web.

izacus 4y ago
If anything, I'd expect Safari share to grow since competition might kick Apple to improve their browser to be a true equivalent or better competitior to Chrome.
- solardev 4y ago
  The opposite seems true right now, with Apple deciding to improve its proprietary ecosystems (app store, swift, etc.) and letting WebKit stagnate. There's a lot that Gecko and Blink can handle but Safari struggles with, seemingly by design. Apple doesn't want a strong web-based ecosystem because that means their competitors can use it too, vs the iOS/macOS only stuff. If they wanted to, they could switch Safari to Blink just like everyone else did, but still keep adding features on top of it (privacy, iCloud integration, whatever), the same way Microsoft does. No user asks for a different layout engine, that's corporations fighting with different values and priorities. The differentiating features for users are layers above that and arguably held back by renderer differentiation.
  - AshleysBrain 4y ago
    Apple do appear to be trying a bit harder with Safari - since the regulatory heat has turned up, they've started releasing Safari more regularly since v15, and adding more new web platform features. Safari still does have its problems but I don't think it's fair to say Apple are letting WebKit stagnate.

goodpoint 4y ago

It will look like a dystopian wasteland of closed formats.

choeger 4y ago

I really think that a new browser is possible. The people that worked on Firefox and Chromium over the years learned a lot. Programming languages and tools have improved massively. That doesn't mean it will be easy, but I have little doubt that with enough pressure, some people will start their own browser from scratch, and some of them will be successful.

kypro 4y ago

Has Microsoft ever spoken about why they decided to go with Chromium over say Mozilla Quantum? Microsoft must have realised that picking Chromium would dramatically increase the odds of a Chromium-only web? On the surface I'd have thought it would make more sense for Microsoft to support the Mozilla Quantum project. Perhaps they just wanted to take the easy route though. Chromium is certainly more popular and has Google's backing. I understand why so many projects use it.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
It most likely has to do with XULRunner being non-optional with Firefox/Gecko. Blink is more like WebKit in terms of playing nice with other UI toolkits. Mozilla killing off support for embedding Gecko in other UI toolkits was a massive footgun, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.

nix0n 4y ago

When websites start saying "switch to Chromium" I'll just change my User-agent string in Firefox. (Maybe by that time I'll have to spoof feature flags too, but honestly I doubt it)