6 ms·

You fail to mention that IE was closed source while Chromium is open source. That's a completely different situation. We already have a number of Chromium base

You fail to mention that IE was closed source while Chromium is open source. That's a completely different situation. We already have a number of Chromium based browsers that go against some of Google's most fundamental interests (e.g Brave).

dredmorbius 4y ago
Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match. Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, might pose an alternative.
- paol 4y ago
  Exactly. Even further, without market share it means very little. You could fork and fund a parallel browser, but if it has no market share then it has no influence on the web. That's where Firefox is right now, unfortunately.
  - esclerofilo 4y ago
    Maybe if Mozilla had just forked Chromium in ~2015, its market share wouldn't have gotten as low as it is right now. I've told some people to switch to Firefox. A lot of them switch back to Chrome after a while, simply because it's faster.
- fauigerzigerk 4y ago
  >Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Open source is that option. The economics of starting from scratch vs starting from Chromium's latest commit are fundamentally different. I'm not saying that it's easy, only that it is not remotely comparable to the IE situation.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    The problem is that Google controls both the overwhelmingly dominant browser and the standard. MSIE was bypassed not by a code fork of MSIE (itself originally based on the Spyglass browser, which was a fork of the NSCA's Mosaic codebase), but by independent implementations of an HTML-standard parser. Microsoft had some influence over Web development (noteably through ActiveX) but far less than Google has now. My point is that Open Source of itself is not sufficient, and moreover simply is not viable. Glibly asserting that it is ... is utterly unrealistic. Though the alternative of forking a Web-like markup and transport, as Gemini is attempting to do, is one option. For other technologies which have become sufficiently baroque, similar worse-is-better alternate paths have been pursued. Otherwise, this is an antitrust issue, and Google very badly need busting.
    - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
      >My point is that Open Source of itself is not sufficient And I didn't claim that it was. My point was merely that Chromium being open source changes the equation pretty fundamentally compared to the IE situation. Whether it's enough to make a Chromium monopoly consistent with an open web, I really don't know. There are very good reasons to be sceptical.
      - skinnymuch 4y ago
        Your comments appear to be saying that Chromium being open source makes the equation better. Like the comments defending this point about Brave and other wrapper browsers. So you’re not claiming open source is sufficient but you are seemingly defending it is a better situation. While I and some other commenters are signaling we don’t think the situation is better. To me the fundamental part of the equation is outsized power and influence. Being open source or not is part of the equation, but not as close to as fundamental as the core issues with this. This is made much much worse now than 20 years ago with the costs to get your own browser going so much higher. Which leads back to the outsized power being the fundamental issue. Open source can even be argued to be a benefit to Google retaining power. Having enough attention diverted to the possibilities of open source when Google has only monumentally gained from open source with paltry benefits that are usually brought up as defenses against its power. Like AOSP mattering because China doesn’t use Google’s Android and some other irrelevant projects. Any fundamental differences so far are giving Google and any other major central powers more power.
- megaman821 4y ago
  Why don't these criticisms apply to Linux? The relationship between Linux Core and the Flavors of Linux seems to work well. Edge, Brave, Opera and more are all using the Chromium engine. If Google went off the deep-end, they would easily have enough resources to maintain a fork.
  - ciphol 4y ago
    If one Linux distribution had 90% of Linux users, that might be a good comparison.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    For what it’s worth, there are those of us who don’t think it’s great for GNU/Linux to be overwhelmingly dominant in the FOSS operating system sphere. It’s a wonderful project that we’re fortunate to have, but monocultures are rarely healthy.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      I'd be among that number.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    They do. Linux itself is at least not a proprietary and commercial entity, though quite arguably its development has largely been captured by a set of proprietary and commercial entities. There's enough multilaterality in that group that fixed loci of control don't seem overwhelmingly apparent, but I'd definitely watch for those. I've been concerned over numerous elements of Linux development (including viewpoints expressed by senior developers) for a decade or so. I think you'll find some level of concern expressed by others, including some very senior former Linux devs. (I'm not positive A.C. has said as much, though that's a vibe I get.)
contravariant 4y ago
I'm not sure Brave can go against Google's most fundamental interests, without not using Chromium.
- vanviegen 4y ago
  Why not? Brave, or any small team really, can disable privacy infringing and google oriented features, and other user hostile behavior.
  - turminal 4y ago
    Until those features become core web functionality and websites stop working without them.
    - vanviegen 4y ago
      Of course. But the question at hand is: does it matter that the competition is using chromium to power their browsers? At least with chromium, competition is somewhat viable, in case Google goes over more lines than even the general public can stomach.
Yizahi 4y ago
Those are not fundamentals, more like bells and whistles. Fundamentals are strictly dictated by what Google want in the Chrome and its clones and will never change, at least with current trends when even MS switched to Chrome.
- vanviegen 4y ago
  The point is that Google can't dictate what browser behavior the forks ('clones') choose to enable.
  - Kye 4y ago
    There's a reason people fork Chrome instead of Firefox. All Google has to do is slow walk making it hard to fork the way they did with Android.
  - turminal 4y ago
    The point is they can make the forks useless, unless sufficiently many users choose to use forks, which isn't a very likely scenario.
    - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
      They can make some specific features of any forks useless, not all of them as the FlOC situation has demonstrated. But the same is true for features of alternative browser engines that don't gain enough market share.
      - skinnymuch 4y ago
        This stuff isn’t that big of a deal in the overall scope. Not when compared to seeing how Google controls Android which has a longer history of others trying to get away from it. It didn’t work. Android is even more entrenched in most of the world sans China. These sorts of arguments probably help cement Google’s power. By giving the guise that the open source part of the equation can be the key to usurping Google’s power. Instead of it mostly being the other way around. It would not be surprising if Google loves these tiny changes from Chrome and Android. So the discussions and sentiment never get close to how bad it got for IE or other monopolies and dangers of power.
turminal 4y ago
Open source means next to nothing in Chromium's case.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
That's exactly where F/OSS has failed us big time. Just because it's "open source" doesn't mean browsers have to aggregate to whole operating systems. There was once this idea, you know, of exchanging documents and links via TCP/IP, and it was good. Then came platforms and browser wars, and the piece of crap that is JS and CSS along with them. In the end our only way out of this is to start over with a decentralized/p2p medium for document exchange. But F/OSS don't seem to get it that we need open standards not necessarily open implementations. The same thing has happened to Linux which was ok as long as it was chasing commercial Unix, spawning POSIX even; but look what happened with systemd, wayland, snaps/flatpacks, Docker, k8s, and all the other erratic developments - all the while not a single end-user app was created in the last decade.
- justcodin 4y ago
  Javascript sucks. CSS is misunderstood.
  - admax88qqq 4y ago
    JavaScript is misunderstood, CSS sucks.
    - tannhaeuser 4y ago
      You don't know how much CSS sucks until you understand it. Which is kinda the problem. CSS, its lack of formal semantics, self-serving spec process (as W3C's last holdout), and aura of Stockholm's is bordering on the criminal. There's no comparable tech as CSS that is as directly associated with the slip of the web into the hands of "browser vendors", for professionals and laymen alike.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  I don't think that's a failure of FOSS, just a scoping problem. Open source is a good thing and a contributor to a strong ecosystem, but it's not sufficient by itself.
  - 4y ago
chrismsimpson 4y ago
Licensing isn’t what is important here, control is. The vast number of major contributions and contributors come from Google, and therefore they can steer the project in any direction they wish. That it happens in the open is and accidental side effect that Google can leverage at will to claim it isn’t really in control when regulators come knocking.
falcolas 4y ago
Chromium may be open source, but chrome and many of its derivatives are not. The core being open source won’t protect any but the tiniest minority.
NoGravitas 4y ago
It's not that different a situation. Chromium is open-source, but it's not community-based. If Google wants to do a rug-pull on Brave, they can do so at any time. Not as trivially as if it were closed-source, but not that difficult, either. I doubt Brave have the resources to maintain security updates, much less keep up with standards, on an abandoned browser engine codebase.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Is someone maintaining a significantly different version of the chromium engine that I'm not aware of? Google can always change the license on Chromium as well which would require a hard fork and basically you end up with diverging versions. No we need multiple (or at least two browser engines) browsers.
- mildred593 4y ago
  No, Chrome came from WebKit and from KHTML. The code does not belongs to Google at all and they can't re-license it.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match. Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, might pose an alternative.

paol 4y ago
Exactly. Even further, without market share it means very little. You could fork and fund a parallel browser, but if it has no market share then it has no influence on the web. That's where Firefox is right now, unfortunately.
- esclerofilo 4y ago
  Maybe if Mozilla had just forked Chromium in ~2015, its market share wouldn't have gotten as low as it is right now. I've told some people to switch to Firefox. A lot of them switch back to Chrome after a while, simply because it's faster.
fauigerzigerk 4y ago
>Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Open source is that option. The economics of starting from scratch vs starting from Chromium's latest commit are fundamentally different. I'm not saying that it's easy, only that it is not remotely comparable to the IE situation.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  The problem is that Google controls both the overwhelmingly dominant browser and the standard. MSIE was bypassed not by a code fork of MSIE (itself originally based on the Spyglass browser, which was a fork of the NSCA's Mosaic codebase), but by independent implementations of an HTML-standard parser. Microsoft had some influence over Web development (noteably through ActiveX) but far less than Google has now. My point is that Open Source of itself is not sufficient, and moreover simply is not viable. Glibly asserting that it is ... is utterly unrealistic. Though the alternative of forking a Web-like markup and transport, as Gemini is attempting to do, is one option. For other technologies which have become sufficiently baroque, similar worse-is-better alternate paths have been pursued. Otherwise, this is an antitrust issue, and Google very badly need busting.
  - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
    >My point is that Open Source of itself is not sufficient And I didn't claim that it was. My point was merely that Chromium being open source changes the equation pretty fundamentally compared to the IE situation. Whether it's enough to make a Chromium monopoly consistent with an open web, I really don't know. There are very good reasons to be sceptical.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      Your comments appear to be saying that Chromium being open source makes the equation better. Like the comments defending this point about Brave and other wrapper browsers. So you’re not claiming open source is sufficient but you are seemingly defending it is a better situation. While I and some other commenters are signaling we don’t think the situation is better. To me the fundamental part of the equation is outsized power and influence. Being open source or not is part of the equation, but not as close to as fundamental as the core issues with this. This is made much much worse now than 20 years ago with the costs to get your own browser going so much higher. Which leads back to the outsized power being the fundamental issue. Open source can even be argued to be a benefit to Google retaining power. Having enough attention diverted to the possibilities of open source when Google has only monumentally gained from open source with paltry benefits that are usually brought up as defenses against its power. Like AOSP mattering because China doesn’t use Google’s Android and some other irrelevant projects. Any fundamental differences so far are giving Google and any other major central powers more power.
megaman821 4y ago
Why don't these criticisms apply to Linux? The relationship between Linux Core and the Flavors of Linux seems to work well. Edge, Brave, Opera and more are all using the Chromium engine. If Google went off the deep-end, they would easily have enough resources to maintain a fork.
- ciphol 4y ago
  If one Linux distribution had 90% of Linux users, that might be a good comparison.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  For what it’s worth, there are those of us who don’t think it’s great for GNU/Linux to be overwhelmingly dominant in the FOSS operating system sphere. It’s a wonderful project that we’re fortunate to have, but monocultures are rarely healthy.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    I'd be among that number.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  They do. Linux itself is at least not a proprietary and commercial entity, though quite arguably its development has largely been captured by a set of proprietary and commercial entities. There's enough multilaterality in that group that fixed loci of control don't seem overwhelmingly apparent, but I'd definitely watch for those. I've been concerned over numerous elements of Linux development (including viewpoints expressed by senior developers) for a decade or so. I think you'll find some level of concern expressed by others, including some very senior former Linux devs. (I'm not positive A.C. has said as much, though that's a vibe I get.)

contravariant 4y ago

I'm not sure Brave can go against Google's most fundamental interests, without not using Chromium.

vanviegen 4y ago
Why not? Brave, or any small team really, can disable privacy infringing and google oriented features, and other user hostile behavior.
- turminal 4y ago
  Until those features become core web functionality and websites stop working without them.
  - vanviegen 4y ago
    Of course. But the question at hand is: does it matter that the competition is using chromium to power their browsers? At least with chromium, competition is somewhat viable, in case Google goes over more lines than even the general public can stomach.

Yizahi 4y ago

Those are not fundamentals, more like bells and whistles. Fundamentals are strictly dictated by what Google want in the Chrome and its clones and will never change, at least with current trends when even MS switched to Chrome.

vanviegen 4y ago
The point is that Google can't dictate what browser behavior the forks ('clones') choose to enable.
- Kye 4y ago
  There's a reason people fork Chrome instead of Firefox. All Google has to do is slow walk making it hard to fork the way they did with Android.
- turminal 4y ago
  The point is they can make the forks useless, unless sufficiently many users choose to use forks, which isn't a very likely scenario.
  - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
    They can make some specific features of any forks useless, not all of them as the FlOC situation has demonstrated. But the same is true for features of alternative browser engines that don't gain enough market share.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      This stuff isn’t that big of a deal in the overall scope. Not when compared to seeing how Google controls Android which has a longer history of others trying to get away from it. It didn’t work. Android is even more entrenched in most of the world sans China. These sorts of arguments probably help cement Google’s power. By giving the guise that the open source part of the equation can be the key to usurping Google’s power. Instead of it mostly being the other way around. It would not be surprising if Google loves these tiny changes from Chrome and Android. So the discussions and sentiment never get close to how bad it got for IE or other monopolies and dangers of power.

turminal 4y ago

Open source means next to nothing in Chromium's case.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

That's exactly where F/OSS has failed us big time. Just because it's "open source" doesn't mean browsers have to aggregate to whole operating systems. There was once this idea, you know, of exchanging documents and links via TCP/IP, and it was good. Then came platforms and browser wars, and the piece of crap that is JS and CSS along with them. In the end our only way out of this is to start over with a decentralized/p2p medium for document exchange. But F/OSS don't seem to get it that we need open standards not necessarily open implementations. The same thing has happened to Linux which was ok as long as it was chasing commercial Unix, spawning POSIX even; but look what happened with systemd, wayland, snaps/flatpacks, Docker, k8s, and all the other erratic developments - all the while not a single end-user app was created in the last decade.

justcodin 4y ago
Javascript sucks. CSS is misunderstood.
- admax88qqq 4y ago
  JavaScript is misunderstood, CSS sucks.
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    You don't know how much CSS sucks until you understand it. Which is kinda the problem. CSS, its lack of formal semantics, self-serving spec process (as W3C's last holdout), and aura of Stockholm's is bordering on the criminal. There's no comparable tech as CSS that is as directly associated with the slip of the web into the hands of "browser vendors", for professionals and laymen alike.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
I don't think that's a failure of FOSS, just a scoping problem. Open source is a good thing and a contributor to a strong ecosystem, but it's not sufficient by itself.
- 4y ago

chrismsimpson 4y ago

Licensing isn’t what is important here, control is. The vast number of major contributions and contributors come from Google, and therefore they can steer the project in any direction they wish. That it happens in the open is and accidental side effect that Google can leverage at will to claim it isn’t really in control when regulators come knocking.

falcolas 4y ago

Chromium may be open source, but chrome and many of its derivatives are not. The core being open source won’t protect any but the tiniest minority.

NoGravitas 4y ago

It's not that different a situation. Chromium is open-source, but it's not community-based. If Google wants to do a rug-pull on Brave, they can do so at any time. Not as trivially as if it were closed-source, but not that difficult, either. I doubt Brave have the resources to maintain security updates, much less keep up with standards, on an abandoned browser engine codebase.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

Is someone maintaining a significantly different version of the chromium engine that I'm not aware of? Google can always change the license on Chromium as well which would require a hard fork and basically you end up with diverging versions. No we need multiple (or at least two browser engines) browsers.

mildred593 4y ago
No, Chrome came from WebKit and from KHTML. The code does not belongs to Google at all and they can't re-license it.