7 ms·

There is one interesting force acting against that though (or it would probably already have happened). It is the simple fact that most people that are competen

by attah_ 3y ago

There is one interesting force acting against that though (or it would probably already have happened). It is the simple fact that most people that are competent enough to actually implement these things also understand the problems with doing so. For the most part anyway. If we could just agree to not do that... well, what are "they" going to do? And of course: we owe it to the web to use Firefox. The Chrome clones are only stalling; not counteracting the impending monoculture even one bit. It doesn't matter how fancy their marketing is.

thriftwy 3y ago
This never stopped Facebook from being Facebook.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Yeah, chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems. There are many browsers, many apps, many everything... you can switch whenever... but the DRM and attestation pushes with browsers (and mobile devices) means, that sure, you can use a different browser, but your bank, your streaming service, your newssite might not work unless you're using chrome with drm and hardware attestation. This is already true with many banking apps, where you cannot even start the app on a rooted phone, a phone with an unlocked bootloader or even just a phone that's "not on the list". So yeah... google is the silent killer of the "free interet" and te world happily follows... sadly.
- attah_ 3y ago
  Then switch from these services while they are still only a few. Revenue is a language they understand. I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. The browser war can at least still be won or settled; mainstream apps are a lost cause outside the legal arena. Edit: and by switching i don't mean going to some tinfoil grayweb nonsense. Go to their direct competitor.
  - KirillPanov 3y ago
    The banking system does not care. The banks don't need your money.
    - attah_ 3y ago
      That same logic says you should not vote either. If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will care.
      - tsss 3y ago
        No, that logic says you can vote or you can not, it makes effectively zero difference.
        landemva 3y ago
        I always vote the local issues. For the national bozos I can leave it blank, which is "none of the above".
      - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        You assume there is a “less shit bank”. Not everywhere is like the USA with a wide choice of banks. In some countries the banking landscape has, through mergers, become limited to just a few choices, and they all require SafetyNet attestation for their phone apps.
      - est31 3y ago
        "voting makes no difference" is one of those rules which apply really well to the individual, but if you apply them to a larger group of people, they become wrong.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > That same logic says you should not vote either. Indeed. > If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will care. That's an impossible number of people to coordinate on something like this, and even if, I doubt banks would care. There exist no less shit banks, and retail is a rounding error anyway. Banks aren't shit because of incompetence or a not-give-a-damb attitude. They're shit because it makes them more money, both directly and by reducing risks.
- EGreg 3y ago
  If the ecosystem is based on open source software, the community will fork it like it always does when someone tries to control it. You’ll end up with a fork of Chromium/Blink that doesn’t have WEI. And it will be used to surf web sites. While the official browser from Google would be used to access sites that require WEI attestations. Just like the Bank of America app would. Corporate power in pushing Chrome for everything can be limited if we have open source alternatives. Look at Firefox and what it did to M$IE, which had the full power of Micro$oft behind it. That only happened because Netscape chose to OPEN SOURCE their code base. They couldn’t beat IE on their own, but the open source community could. Well, that and WebKit, which was basically adopted by Apple (Microsoft’s competitor) from another open source browser, Konqueror! And that led to Chrome, Chromium and Blink etc. In short — open source is the best way we can check corporate power on the software side. On the hardware side, it’s far more difficult, and if the vendors choose to ban any “unapproved” apps (eg requiring Safari WebView rendering engine in all apps on non-jailbroken iPhones) then the best tool we have is government antitrust laws. Maybe one day, in that area too, open source hardware will be the people’s best weapon. But not today :-/
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    Sure, but if netflix, your bank, your power and water service, and a chat app, where 80% of your contacts are only support chrome, what will you do? Many banks already require hardware attestation from google for mobile apps and mandatory 2FA via that app is a pain on a rooted phone and workarounds are painful. I mean sure, you can just not-use those services and not chat with everyone else, but that's a bad solution.
    - attah_ 3y ago
      And just doing nothing is somehow a better solution?
    - EGreg 3y ago
      You should use them with Chrome And the rest of the web can be accessed using the fork of Chrome What’s the big deal? People have been using Popcorn Time to view movies that they couldn’t access, and so on.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Not true, there's also Huawei, who is definitely not 'following' anymore. Which means that every service in countries where Huawei has major market share definitely can't require Google anything.
- latexr 3y ago
  > There are many browsers Not if one doesn’t want to end up supporting Chromium in any way. Which one shouldn’t if they believe “chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems”. On macOS, that leaves essentially Firefox and Safari. Except Firefox has no support for AppleScript so it’s excluded from a ton of useful automations and is thus not suitable as a daily driver for many people. So Safari remains. And Orion, which is also based on WebKit. Both are closed-source. There are indeed many browsers if all you want to do is display webpages. But as soon as you have any hard requirement, be it ideological or technical, the choices drop dramatically. Unless you don’t mind supporting Google, that is.
quickthrower2 3y ago
What about Safari too?
- simon1573 3y ago
  Safari is WebKit based too since a few years back
  - attah_ 3y ago
    It always has been.
  - isametry 3y ago
    What does this mean, "WebKit based too"? WebKit is primarily developed by Apple, Safari is the canonical browser that uses it. It is actually Google's Blink that split off of WebKit, not the other way around.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      It all came out of Konqueror
- attah_ 3y ago
  It is the one Chrome fork that sees some development. (Yes, of course the forkage was the other way). So while they do have a seat at the standards table, i can't say i see much potential (or results). They also don't offer it outside their own locked-down platform by the looks of it. I.e. they have permanently kneecapped their market-share to near-pointless levels.
  - kmlx 3y ago
    > they have permanently kneecapped their market-share to near-pointless levels. they have 25% of the mobile browser market share.
- svantana 3y ago
  It seems like Apple is intentionally dragging its feet in implementing new web standards in Safari (webusb, webgpu, webmidi, bluetooth, filesystem, etc) in order to keep native apps relevant (which is a big cash cow for Apple).
sneak 3y ago
I think the ship has sailed for the web. Many apps don't even bother with making functional webapps any longer; the go to market are mobile apps for the censorship platforms. The web lost. Now it's just a transport layer for mobile app API requests.
- attah_ 3y ago
  > Many apps don't even bother with making functional webapps any longer It seems they have gotten inside your head. If services are no longer that, but "apps", then of course people lose sight of the problem.
- layer8 3y ago
  Apps shouldn’t be web apps anyway. Local-first apps should be the default, in the context of digital freedom. The only exception being self-hostable web apps.
  - attah_ 3y ago
    You misunderstand. The point is that online services now come with apps for no reason. Very few things are so local that what you say applies. Though those few definitely should be! And as you are already on to, not all web apps are cloud. What can be on-device webpages (e.g. routers) should be.
  - dTal 3y ago
    I see your point, in the sense that local software is in theory more permanent, more reliable. But the issue is more subtle that you are describing. Is the local-first program* free software, or proprietary adware? Is its sole function to communicate with some particular company's API? What is better for digital freedom, the Reddit website or the official "Reddit app"? If a company is going to be gating their API behind some proprietary shovelware anyway, I would rather they write it in a plaintext scripting language (JavaScript) that runs inside a free software virtual machine (Firefox) which lets me intercept and control it. *Yes, "program". How I hate "apps". Perverse term.
    - 3y ago
huhtenberg 3y ago
> And of course: we owe it to the web to use Firefox. Mozilla is hanging tightly on the Google's tit though. It won't be shocking to see Firefox deteriorate rapidly should it start gaining ground on Chrome. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
- generic92034 3y ago
  On the other hand Firefox development could be paid with a small fraction of Mozilla's current budget. They are doing all kinds of un-/semi-related stuff. But of course, it remains to be seen if the organization could survive such a financial drought.
- attah_ 3y ago
  Sigh. Another of the long line of defeatist non-arguments. What is your point? Should we all just roll over and die? Writing just to be contrarian?
  - huhtenberg 3y ago
    The point is that for the Firefox to gain more foothold Mozilla first needs to break the dependency on Google's money. And this won't happen without deep restructuring of the Mozilla corp, starting from the top and shedding all the blubber all the way down. The chances of that happening are next to zero. You can label that as "defeatist non-arguments" all you want, but that's a very unfortunate reality. Saying this as a die-hard Firefox user of almost 20 years.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  Which, in this world, can happen. The part that irks me the most isn't so much that, but that Mozilla is more than happy to suckle at that teat and not change the current status quo.
dismalpedigree 3y ago
Disagree. Money is a hell of a motivator. I know multiple people who say “yes my employer XYZ is doing horrible things. I’m at peace with it because they pay so well.”
TehCorwiz 3y ago
"My poverty, but not my will, consents." -Apothecary
gavinhoward 3y ago
> It is the simple fact that most people that are competent enough to actually implement these things also understand the problems with doing so. For the most part anyway. If we could just agree to not do that... well, what are "they" going to do? Which is why we should shame every one of us that does do it.
- attah_ 3y ago
  Yes. A thousand times yes.
- doctor_radium 3y ago
  > Which is why we should shame every one of us that does do it. I don't tend to have the issues people are describing using Firefox for banking, paying bills, etc. And when I'm shopping for something at random and looking for the best price, if one site I've never heard of doesn't work (typically Cloudflare) I just go somewhere else. But Verizon reworked their back end within the last month, causing UBlock Origin to SCREAM (over 2000 blocked scripts and counting when all was done), although the real trick was spoofing as Chrome because until then only the page headers and footers would appear, not the body with the "Pay my bill" button. Opera was even worse, so somebody screwed up something badly! I was chatting with support all this time and they logged at least one ticket. Thinking through the "public shaming" bit, if the issue reoccurs next month, I'm going to the Better Business Bureau. While they can't guarantee a resolution, it is a very simple way to publicly shame a company doing wrong. Long term, I'm thinking we need to add "user agent" to the list of "protected classes", i.e. gender, race, sexual preference, etc. to really hammer the point home. While it's just a piece of software, there is a real person behind it. Bots need not apply. And from there perhaps a law or FTC rule to state that public web sites must be accessible by the public. I do wish the EFF would take up this cause.
npteljes 3y ago
>If we could just agree to not do that Just forget about that. If you don't, I'll take the google software engineer salary and build it. The issue is not technological, it's a natural outcome of how people work on and individual, and on a societal level. Regulation is the closest that can affect this situation, but as it turns out, no large entity has the same goals as "the people" - hence, I'm not holding my breath. I am using Firefox and other FOSS software though, and contribute back what I can, donations, bug reports. It's a nice privilege.

by attah_ 3y ago

thriftwy 3y ago

This never stopped Facebook from being Facebook.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

Yeah, chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems. There are many browsers, many apps, many everything... you can switch whenever... but the DRM and attestation pushes with browsers (and mobile devices) means, that sure, you can use a different browser, but your bank, your streaming service, your newssite might not work unless you're using chrome with drm and hardware attestation. This is already true with many banking apps, where you cannot even start the app on a rooted phone, a phone with an unlocked bootloader or even just a phone that's "not on the list". So yeah... google is the silent killer of the "free interet" and te world happily follows... sadly.

attah_ 3y ago
Then switch from these services while they are still only a few. Revenue is a language they understand. I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. The browser war can at least still be won or settled; mainstream apps are a lost cause outside the legal arena. Edit: and by switching i don't mean going to some tinfoil grayweb nonsense. Go to their direct competitor.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  The banking system does not care. The banks don't need your money.
  - attah_ 3y ago
    That same logic says you should not vote either. If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will care.
    - tsss 3y ago
      No, that logic says you can vote or you can not, it makes effectively zero difference.
      - landemva 3y ago
        I always vote the local issues. For the national bozos I can leave it blank, which is "none of the above".
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      You assume there is a “less shit bank”. Not everywhere is like the USA with a wide choice of banks. In some countries the banking landscape has, through mergers, become limited to just a few choices, and they all require SafetyNet attestation for their phone apps.
    - est31 3y ago
      "voting makes no difference" is one of those rules which apply really well to the individual, but if you apply them to a larger group of people, they become wrong.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > That same logic says you should not vote either. Indeed. > If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will care. That's an impossible number of people to coordinate on something like this, and even if, I doubt banks would care. There exist no less shit banks, and retail is a rounding error anyway. Banks aren't shit because of incompetence or a not-give-a-damb attitude. They're shit because it makes them more money, both directly and by reducing risks.
EGreg 3y ago
If the ecosystem is based on open source software, the community will fork it like it always does when someone tries to control it. You’ll end up with a fork of Chromium/Blink that doesn’t have WEI. And it will be used to surf web sites. While the official browser from Google would be used to access sites that require WEI attestations. Just like the Bank of America app would. Corporate power in pushing Chrome for everything can be limited if we have open source alternatives. Look at Firefox and what it did to M$IE, which had the full power of Micro$oft behind it. That only happened because Netscape chose to OPEN SOURCE their code base. They couldn’t beat IE on their own, but the open source community could. Well, that and WebKit, which was basically adopted by Apple (Microsoft’s competitor) from another open source browser, Konqueror! And that led to Chrome, Chromium and Blink etc. In short — open source is the best way we can check corporate power on the software side. On the hardware side, it’s far more difficult, and if the vendors choose to ban any “unapproved” apps (eg requiring Safari WebView rendering engine in all apps on non-jailbroken iPhones) then the best tool we have is government antitrust laws. Maybe one day, in that area too, open source hardware will be the people’s best weapon. But not today :-/
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Sure, but if netflix, your bank, your power and water service, and a chat app, where 80% of your contacts are only support chrome, what will you do? Many banks already require hardware attestation from google for mobile apps and mandatory 2FA via that app is a pain on a rooted phone and workarounds are painful. I mean sure, you can just not-use those services and not chat with everyone else, but that's a bad solution.
  - attah_ 3y ago
    And just doing nothing is somehow a better solution?
  - EGreg 3y ago
    You should use them with Chrome And the rest of the web can be accessed using the fork of Chrome What’s the big deal? People have been using Popcorn Time to view movies that they couldn’t access, and so on.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
Not true, there's also Huawei, who is definitely not 'following' anymore. Which means that every service in countries where Huawei has major market share definitely can't require Google anything.
latexr 3y ago
> There are many browsers Not if one doesn’t want to end up supporting Chromium in any way. Which one shouldn’t if they believe “chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems”. On macOS, that leaves essentially Firefox and Safari. Except Firefox has no support for AppleScript so it’s excluded from a ton of useful automations and is thus not suitable as a daily driver for many people. So Safari remains. And Orion, which is also based on WebKit. Both are closed-source. There are indeed many browsers if all you want to do is display webpages. But as soon as you have any hard requirement, be it ideological or technical, the choices drop dramatically. Unless you don’t mind supporting Google, that is.

quickthrower2 3y ago

What about Safari too?

simon1573 3y ago
Safari is WebKit based too since a few years back
- attah_ 3y ago
  It always has been.
- isametry 3y ago
  What does this mean, "WebKit based too"? WebKit is primarily developed by Apple, Safari is the canonical browser that uses it. It is actually Google's Blink that split off of WebKit, not the other way around.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    It all came out of Konqueror
attah_ 3y ago
It is the one Chrome fork that sees some development. (Yes, of course the forkage was the other way). So while they do have a seat at the standards table, i can't say i see much potential (or results). They also don't offer it outside their own locked-down platform by the looks of it. I.e. they have permanently kneecapped their market-share to near-pointless levels.
- kmlx 3y ago
  > they have permanently kneecapped their market-share to near-pointless levels. they have 25% of the mobile browser market share.
svantana 3y ago
It seems like Apple is intentionally dragging its feet in implementing new web standards in Safari (webusb, webgpu, webmidi, bluetooth, filesystem, etc) in order to keep native apps relevant (which is a big cash cow for Apple).

sneak 3y ago

I think the ship has sailed for the web. Many apps don't even bother with making functional webapps any longer; the go to market are mobile apps for the censorship platforms. The web lost. Now it's just a transport layer for mobile app API requests.

attah_ 3y ago
> Many apps don't even bother with making functional webapps any longer It seems they have gotten inside your head. If services are no longer that, but "apps", then of course people lose sight of the problem.
layer8 3y ago
Apps shouldn’t be web apps anyway. Local-first apps should be the default, in the context of digital freedom. The only exception being self-hostable web apps.
- attah_ 3y ago
  You misunderstand. The point is that online services now come with apps for no reason. Very few things are so local that what you say applies. Though those few definitely should be! And as you are already on to, not all web apps are cloud. What can be on-device webpages (e.g. routers) should be.
- dTal 3y ago
  I see your point, in the sense that local software is in theory more permanent, more reliable. But the issue is more subtle that you are describing. Is the local-first program* free software, or proprietary adware? Is its sole function to communicate with some particular company's API? What is better for digital freedom, the Reddit website or the official "Reddit app"? If a company is going to be gating their API behind some proprietary shovelware anyway, I would rather they write it in a plaintext scripting language (JavaScript) that runs inside a free software virtual machine (Firefox) which lets me intercept and control it. *Yes, "program". How I hate "apps". Perverse term.
  - 3y ago

huhtenberg 3y ago

> And of course: we owe it to the web to use Firefox. Mozilla is hanging tightly on the Google's tit though. It won't be shocking to see Firefox deteriorate rapidly should it start gaining ground on Chrome. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

generic92034 3y ago
On the other hand Firefox development could be paid with a small fraction of Mozilla's current budget. They are doing all kinds of un-/semi-related stuff. But of course, it remains to be seen if the organization could survive such a financial drought.
attah_ 3y ago
Sigh. Another of the long line of defeatist non-arguments. What is your point? Should we all just roll over and die? Writing just to be contrarian?
- huhtenberg 3y ago
  The point is that for the Firefox to gain more foothold Mozilla first needs to break the dependency on Google's money. And this won't happen without deep restructuring of the Mozilla corp, starting from the top and shedding all the blubber all the way down. The chances of that happening are next to zero. You can label that as "defeatist non-arguments" all you want, but that's a very unfortunate reality. Saying this as a die-hard Firefox user of almost 20 years.
deafpolygon 3y ago
Which, in this world, can happen. The part that irks me the most isn't so much that, but that Mozilla is more than happy to suckle at that teat and not change the current status quo.

dismalpedigree 3y ago

Disagree. Money is a hell of a motivator. I know multiple people who say “yes my employer XYZ is doing horrible things. I’m at peace with it because they pay so well.”

TehCorwiz 3y ago

"My poverty, but not my will, consents." -Apothecary

gavinhoward 3y ago

> It is the simple fact that most people that are competent enough to actually implement these things also understand the problems with doing so. For the most part anyway. If we could just agree to not do that... well, what are "they" going to do? Which is why we should shame every one of us that does do it.

attah_ 3y ago
Yes. A thousand times yes.
doctor_radium 3y ago
> Which is why we should shame every one of us that does do it. I don't tend to have the issues people are describing using Firefox for banking, paying bills, etc. And when I'm shopping for something at random and looking for the best price, if one site I've never heard of doesn't work (typically Cloudflare) I just go somewhere else. But Verizon reworked their back end within the last month, causing UBlock Origin to SCREAM (over 2000 blocked scripts and counting when all was done), although the real trick was spoofing as Chrome because until then only the page headers and footers would appear, not the body with the "Pay my bill" button. Opera was even worse, so somebody screwed up something badly! I was chatting with support all this time and they logged at least one ticket. Thinking through the "public shaming" bit, if the issue reoccurs next month, I'm going to the Better Business Bureau. While they can't guarantee a resolution, it is a very simple way to publicly shame a company doing wrong. Long term, I'm thinking we need to add "user agent" to the list of "protected classes", i.e. gender, race, sexual preference, etc. to really hammer the point home. While it's just a piece of software, there is a real person behind it. Bots need not apply. And from there perhaps a law or FTC rule to state that public web sites must be accessible by the public. I do wish the EFF would take up this cause.

npteljes 3y ago

>If we could just agree to not do that Just forget about that. If you don't, I'll take the google software engineer salary and build it. The issue is not technological, it's a natural outcome of how people work on and individual, and on a societal level. Regulation is the closest that can affect this situation, but as it turns out, no large entity has the same goals as "the people" - hence, I'm not holding my breath. I am using Firefox and other FOSS software though, and contribute back what I can, donations, bug reports. It's a nice privilege.