4 ms·

I'm not sold that avoiding Chromium is any sort of win. It seems to be BSD licensed. The code comes from a long and storied OSS tradition. It is unclear why th

by roenxi 2y ago

I'm not sold that avoiding Chromium is any sort of win. It seems to be BSD licensed. The code comes from a long and storied OSS tradition. It is unclear why that having multiple different browser engines is strategically important. As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript. Brave's existence and success suggests that competitors building on Chromium are viable. Not to say it is a bad thing to have alternatives floating around; but at this point it is probably easier to have multiple forks of Chromium than strive to have code with a completely independent genealogy.

mr_sturd 2y ago
The problem with Chromium is that it's controlled by Google. Given they control the engine in the majority of browsers, they get to call the shots on the direction of the web as a whole.
- roenxi 2y ago
  They're not in any position to control the web as a whole; Safari is too strong a competitor. But even if Chromium was at 100% market share they couldn't control the web. If they start throwing their weight around then the other web companies will start organising around a Chromium fork. The important thing here is OSS/not-OSS rather than market share. Market share can change quickly enough in response to problems. It is like GCC - there was that spat back in the day, someone forks the code and there is a little war until people figure out which is better. Then the better version became "GCC". It is fine to have one custodian as long as the actual power is retained by the users. Efficient, even.
  - nileshtrivedi 2y ago
    What "other web companies"? Everyone has an app or an app store.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      Whoever. Whatever. OSS is a system for finding the most capable entity in the world at developing a software capability and letting them get on with it. It'll find someone to pick up the slack if Google starts doing a terrible job. In this world of 8 billion humans and however many thousands of companies, there'll be one who knows how to put a web browser together. If I were going to guess today it'd be brave.com, but the world is large and competitive.
      - kalaksi 2y ago
        I think that's a tad idealistic, though. You'd need the resources to keep fighting against the constant changes and ever diverging codebase the more Google goes it's own way. And already has been doing it slowly. Also, Mozilla and Apple have been important for keeping privacy relevant every time Google have tried to push for some privacy eroding web standards. Edit: I agree with the sentiment though but I just trust the current situation more.
        roenxi 2y ago
        > You'd need the resources to keep fighting against the constant changes and ever diverging codebase Assuming that Google is making Chromium better, sure. If they are making it worse then not keeping up with the changes is an advantage of the fork. If Google starts making changes that reduce the value of the codebase, then a hard fork immediately becomes viable. If they are good custodians even a totally separate codebase isn't enough, it'll end up in the same position as Firefox - marginalised.
      - 63stack 2y ago
        This is very handwave-y and idealistic. Sure, 8 billion humans, and thousands of companies on a cosmic timeline will lift the "most capable entity" to the top, but the road there is going to be extremely long if you just "nah they'll get it" and not do anything else.
        roenxi 2y ago
  - wobfan 2y ago
    Isn’t the push to deprecate and remove Manifest V2 in favor of V3 and therefore removing or at least significantly cutting down possibilities for users to block ads a major push from the Google side? A field in which they, conveniently, make their major cut of their profit? Brave is a big company already, still they’ve already announced that they won’t be able to support V2 for too long as the codebase will break over time. Only because something is OSS doesn’t mean it’s not controlled by a single entity or consortium. We need competition, especially in something so damn critical like web browsers (which are like OSes for the web). Mozilla is and has been a savior. They’re doing weird shit, but compared to Google and Apple they’re still as transparent as possible, even with their shit. And their shit is not even THAT bad, while I still dislike it and also thought about replacing FF for a short time. I just hope they come back to the right path, at least in their communications.
- everdrive 2y ago
  Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking. Whether or not Webkit can be thought of as disjoint from Chromium is really the question here.
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    WebKit is substantially disjointed from Blink at this point, a natural result of differing priorities from their developers. WebKit remains highly embeddable for example, so if you drop a WebKit webview into your Cocoa/GTK/whatever toolkit app you’ve got a mostly-complete multiprocess browser and just need to build your UI around it. Blink on the other hand is hard-coupled with Chromium for things like multiprocess support, which leaves no practical alternative to forking the whole browser (which as an aside, is why Electron drags around the full heft of Chromium instead of just Blink). That’s moot though because Google has no qualms with pushing through Chromium-only “standards” that make non-Chromium browsers less viable since sites that use these “standards” simply don’t work in anything but Chromium. It’s like the situation with Internet Explorer and its collection of IE-isms all over again. One could argue that Mozilla and Apple should just follow Google and implement these “standards” themselves, but that lands us right back where we started in that this effectively gives Google full unbridled power to steer the direction of the web as it pleases, which is a massive conflict of interest.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? No, Google owns Blink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) which outright forked in 2013, though at that point it sounds like they were already carrying enough patches to constitute a soft fork (which then became a hard fork).
husam212 2y ago
There's a value in keeping using a non-WebKit browser.
hypeatei 2y ago
> As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript. You should look into Ladybird[0] then. Their JavaScript engine ("LibJS") scores very well in conformance test suite test262[1]. [0]: https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/ [1]: https://test262.fyi/ https://test262.fyi/
- everdrive 2y ago
  >modern JavaScript This is really one of the major problems. Much of the web is now fairly terrible, and so for a browser to get any meaningful traction it must work on nearly all websites; which means that any browser is going to be compromised unless it aims to remain incredibly niche. Some days I can't decide who I dislike more; MBAs or web developers.
- Valodim 2y ago
  People like to point at ladybird, but really the way to go before this can become a daily driver is probably in the hundreds of person years of development
Timon3 2y ago
IMO the critical factor will be whether any Chromium forks keep support for Manifest V2 alive. If yes, it will be a viable alternative to Firefox (or FF forks), but I haven't seen indication that a project will pick up the slack. A browser without proper support for uBlock Origin or similar extensions isn't a browser I'm willing to use, even if ad-blocking is integrated into the browser itself. The freedom to actually control the browsing experience is essential for long-term user freedom.
- Valodim 2y ago
  It'll be gone the moment upstream drops it. Maintaining this in a fork will be a lot of work. Fortunately it's still available even in Chrome for a while, but that's just an ultimatum
  - Timon3 2y ago
    That's my expectation too, but it makes avoiding Chrome & Chromium unavoidable.
  - tzs 2y ago
    Even if maintaining Manifest V2 is too much work after upstream drops it that doesn't necessarily mean that they just have to accept Manifest V3 as shipped in upstream. From what I've read there are two main problems with Manifest V3 when it comes to ad blocking. Problem #1. The webRequestBlocking permission is gone: > Note: As of Manifest V3, the "webRequestBlocking" permission is no longer available for most extensions. Consider "declarativeNetRequest", which enables use the declarativeNetRequest API. Aside from "webRequestBlocking", the webRequest API is unchanged and available for normal use. Policy installed extensions can continue to use "webRequestBlocking". That does not necessarily mean good ad blocking must break. Most people find the ad blockers on Safari to be fine, and Safari does not have that kind of blocking. It has long required the declarative rule kind of blocking. Some brief searching suggests that the rules for Chrome's declarative blocking are actually more powerful than Safari's. That brings us to the second Manifest V3 problem. Problem #2. The declarative rules only allows something like 30k rules. Apple found that such a low limit is not sufficient and raised it to 150k. I'd guess that maintaining a fork that just raises the limit in Chrome would not be a problem for the Chromium-based third party browsers. The big question would be whether the current 30k limit is there for technical reasons or for marketing reasons like not wanting ad blocking to be too effective. If it is a technical limit the forkers might also have to rewrite the rule processing engine which would likely be more than they would want to deal with. [1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/webRequest https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w...
everdrive 2y ago
This is something I'm confused about. When people "build browsers" it's largely just Chromium with a couple of features tacked on top. I'm not sure why no one is trying to keep only the rendering engine and building their own, much better browser on top of it.
- HayBale 2y ago
  There are people doing that, Qutebrowser, Nyxt does that for WebKit(and they are moving to chromium engine). The main issue why others are not doing that is the issue with cutting yourself from extensions.
bo1024 2y ago
Manifest v1/v2 is already an illustration of the problem. Google will use its power to impose (de-facto) standards that hurt users and give itself more money and power.
ForTheKidz 2y ago
I can't say that any of the changes of the last fifteen years have really brought about a better or more usable internet. Ads are worse than ever, the browser still doesn't know whether it's for browsing documents or hosting interactive apps, we're still stuck with javascript and no real standard library, and there don't appear to be real efforts towards reigning in complexity. From my perspective the current mode of development failed a long time ago.

by roenxi 2y ago

mr_sturd 2y ago

The problem with Chromium is that it's controlled by Google. Given they control the engine in the majority of browsers, they get to call the shots on the direction of the web as a whole.

roenxi 2y ago
They're not in any position to control the web as a whole; Safari is too strong a competitor. But even if Chromium was at 100% market share they couldn't control the web. If they start throwing their weight around then the other web companies will start organising around a Chromium fork. The important thing here is OSS/not-OSS rather than market share. Market share can change quickly enough in response to problems. It is like GCC - there was that spat back in the day, someone forks the code and there is a little war until people figure out which is better. Then the better version became "GCC". It is fine to have one custodian as long as the actual power is retained by the users. Efficient, even.
- nileshtrivedi 2y ago
  What "other web companies"? Everyone has an app or an app store.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Whoever. Whatever. OSS is a system for finding the most capable entity in the world at developing a software capability and letting them get on with it. It'll find someone to pick up the slack if Google starts doing a terrible job. In this world of 8 billion humans and however many thousands of companies, there'll be one who knows how to put a web browser together. If I were going to guess today it'd be brave.com, but the world is large and competitive.
    - kalaksi 2y ago
      I think that's a tad idealistic, though. You'd need the resources to keep fighting against the constant changes and ever diverging codebase the more Google goes it's own way. And already has been doing it slowly. Also, Mozilla and Apple have been important for keeping privacy relevant every time Google have tried to push for some privacy eroding web standards. Edit: I agree with the sentiment though but I just trust the current situation more.
      - roenxi 2y ago
        > You'd need the resources to keep fighting against the constant changes and ever diverging codebase Assuming that Google is making Chromium better, sure. If they are making it worse then not keeping up with the changes is an advantage of the fork. If Google starts making changes that reduce the value of the codebase, then a hard fork immediately becomes viable. If they are good custodians even a totally separate codebase isn't enough, it'll end up in the same position as Firefox - marginalised.
    - 63stack 2y ago
      This is very handwave-y and idealistic. Sure, 8 billion humans, and thousands of companies on a cosmic timeline will lift the "most capable entity" to the top, but the road there is going to be extremely long if you just "nah they'll get it" and not do anything else.
      - roenxi 2y ago
- wobfan 2y ago
  Isn’t the push to deprecate and remove Manifest V2 in favor of V3 and therefore removing or at least significantly cutting down possibilities for users to block ads a major push from the Google side? A field in which they, conveniently, make their major cut of their profit? Brave is a big company already, still they’ve already announced that they won’t be able to support V2 for too long as the codebase will break over time. Only because something is OSS doesn’t mean it’s not controlled by a single entity or consortium. We need competition, especially in something so damn critical like web browsers (which are like OSes for the web). Mozilla is and has been a savior. They’re doing weird shit, but compared to Google and Apple they’re still as transparent as possible, even with their shit. And their shit is not even THAT bad, while I still dislike it and also thought about replacing FF for a short time. I just hope they come back to the right path, at least in their communications.
everdrive 2y ago
Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking. Whether or not Webkit can be thought of as disjoint from Chromium is really the question here.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  WebKit is substantially disjointed from Blink at this point, a natural result of differing priorities from their developers. WebKit remains highly embeddable for example, so if you drop a WebKit webview into your Cocoa/GTK/whatever toolkit app you’ve got a mostly-complete multiprocess browser and just need to build your UI around it. Blink on the other hand is hard-coupled with Chromium for things like multiprocess support, which leaves no practical alternative to forking the whole browser (which as an aside, is why Electron drags around the full heft of Chromium instead of just Blink). That’s moot though because Google has no qualms with pushing through Chromium-only “standards” that make non-Chromium browsers less viable since sites that use these “standards” simply don’t work in anything but Chromium. It’s like the situation with Internet Explorer and its collection of IE-isms all over again. One could argue that Mozilla and Apple should just follow Google and implement these “standards” themselves, but that lands us right back where we started in that this effectively gives Google full unbridled power to steer the direction of the web as it pleases, which is a massive conflict of interest.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? No, Google owns Blink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) which outright forked in 2013, though at that point it sounds like they were already carrying enough patches to constitute a soft fork (which then became a hard fork).

husam212 2y ago

There's a value in keeping using a non-WebKit browser.

hypeatei 2y ago

> As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript. You should look into Ladybird[0] then. Their JavaScript engine ("LibJS") scores very well in conformance test suite test262[1]. [0]: https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/ [1]: https://test262.fyi/ https://test262.fyi/

everdrive 2y ago
>modern JavaScript This is really one of the major problems. Much of the web is now fairly terrible, and so for a browser to get any meaningful traction it must work on nearly all websites; which means that any browser is going to be compromised unless it aims to remain incredibly niche. Some days I can't decide who I dislike more; MBAs or web developers.
Valodim 2y ago
People like to point at ladybird, but really the way to go before this can become a daily driver is probably in the hundreds of person years of development

Timon3 2y ago

IMO the critical factor will be whether any Chromium forks keep support for Manifest V2 alive. If yes, it will be a viable alternative to Firefox (or FF forks), but I haven't seen indication that a project will pick up the slack. A browser without proper support for uBlock Origin or similar extensions isn't a browser I'm willing to use, even if ad-blocking is integrated into the browser itself. The freedom to actually control the browsing experience is essential for long-term user freedom.

Valodim 2y ago
It'll be gone the moment upstream drops it. Maintaining this in a fork will be a lot of work. Fortunately it's still available even in Chrome for a while, but that's just an ultimatum
- Timon3 2y ago
  That's my expectation too, but it makes avoiding Chrome & Chromium unavoidable.
- tzs 2y ago
  Even if maintaining Manifest V2 is too much work after upstream drops it that doesn't necessarily mean that they just have to accept Manifest V3 as shipped in upstream. From what I've read there are two main problems with Manifest V3 when it comes to ad blocking. Problem #1. The webRequestBlocking permission is gone: > Note: As of Manifest V3, the "webRequestBlocking" permission is no longer available for most extensions. Consider "declarativeNetRequest", which enables use the declarativeNetRequest API. Aside from "webRequestBlocking", the webRequest API is unchanged and available for normal use. Policy installed extensions can continue to use "webRequestBlocking". That does not necessarily mean good ad blocking must break. Most people find the ad blockers on Safari to be fine, and Safari does not have that kind of blocking. It has long required the declarative rule kind of blocking. Some brief searching suggests that the rules for Chrome's declarative blocking are actually more powerful than Safari's. That brings us to the second Manifest V3 problem. Problem #2. The declarative rules only allows something like 30k rules. Apple found that such a low limit is not sufficient and raised it to 150k. I'd guess that maintaining a fork that just raises the limit in Chrome would not be a problem for the Chromium-based third party browsers. The big question would be whether the current 30k limit is there for technical reasons or for marketing reasons like not wanting ad blocking to be too effective. If it is a technical limit the forkers might also have to rewrite the rule processing engine which would likely be more than they would want to deal with. [1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/webRequest https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w...

everdrive 2y ago

This is something I'm confused about. When people "build browsers" it's largely just Chromium with a couple of features tacked on top. I'm not sure why no one is trying to keep only the rendering engine and building their own, much better browser on top of it.

HayBale 2y ago
There are people doing that, Qutebrowser, Nyxt does that for WebKit(and they are moving to chromium engine). The main issue why others are not doing that is the issue with cutting yourself from extensions.

bo1024 2y ago

Manifest v1/v2 is already an illustration of the problem. Google will use its power to impose (de-facto) standards that hurt users and give itself more money and power.

ForTheKidz 2y ago

I can't say that any of the changes of the last fifteen years have really brought about a better or more usable internet. Ads are worse than ever, the browser still doesn't know whether it's for browsing documents or hosting interactive apps, we're still stuck with javascript and no real standard library, and there don't appear to be real efforts towards reigning in complexity. From my perspective the current mode of development failed a long time ago.