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Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source. If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then
by StilesCrisis 2mo ago
Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.
If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoBut the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. There are all kinds of features and things they are working on that the general public really does not care about.
- StilesCrisis 2mo ago[dead]
- paulryanrogers 2mo ago> But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. Not at first. Yet over time the work increases as one must differ more and more from Chrome. I believe that's why so many forks are giving up on Manifest V2.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoDifferentiating isn’t as important as not engaging in Google‘s heinous practices
- charcircuit 2mo agoForks are giving up on mv2 because it's not as important as the people online say it is. If mv2 was what would cause a browser to gain market share they would keep maintaining it, but if the market is not rewarding browsers with mv2 then it does not make sense to maintain.
- armadyl 2mo agoSeriously. The average person in real life has no idea what MV2 or MV3 is. And despite what people here would have you believe uBlock Origin Lite works nearly as good as uBO and is generally indistinguishable from its MV2 counterpart. A casual user wold not be able to tell the difference, nor do they care.
- nottorp 2mo agoIndistinguishable because ad blocking still works at the visible end of the spectrum. Under the hood, what the MV2 uBlock can do and Lite can't is at the least stripping tracking parameters from links and block 3rd party trackers that are cloaked in a subdomain of the originating site.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoYou’re right it doesn’t impact most people’s decisions but m2 and m3’s differences are quite substantial and meaningful.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoThat’s overly simplistic and glosses over the actual objections to mv3.
- RunSet 2mo agoChrome attained its user base not by merit but by paying third party Windows installers to bundle it.
- wwiinn 2mo agoForcing it down users’ throats at the world’s most popular website might have helped. Slightly.
- cosmic_cheese 2mo agoYep. Google has been incredibly aggressive in promoting Chrome over the years, including practices similar to those Microsoft gets lampooned for doing the same with Edge. The thing is that most of this is invisible to people who already live within Google’s bubble which is probably why they don’t get called out for it. The promotion is visible mostly to those of us who don’t, and it gets irritating.
- izacus 2mo agoThis is complete nonsense, it's a post hoc copium where you're trying to dishonestly rewrite history from your personal hatered. Chrome was better than competition pretty much all its lifetime and there's plenty of historic articles to prove it, no matter how much your emotions refuse to accept the history.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoYou can argue the merits of a product without personally attacking people.
- izacus 2mo agoThe only personal insult to everyone here is such blatant lying and rewriting of history. And it's telling about the bottom barrel culture of the internet that you're angrier about having someone called out as a liar they are instead of actual lies. We were there and we didn't install Chrome via some made up toolbar installer, but because it was significantly better than what Mozilla and Internet Explorer offered.
- redeeman 2mo agobut perhaps we dont need several gigabytes compressed code to have a browser. perhaps what google have been doing is an utter abomination?
- atomicnumber3 2mo agoThis is cool until Google doesn't load in your free browser.
- bossyTeacher 2mo agoThen, you use this: https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ Actually, use it now.
- jchoksi 2mo agohttps://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
- drnick1 2mo agoThis. Also, use OSM for maps and run your own SMTP server, if you can. Nobody should need Google.
- hobo123 2mo agoSadly, the to me most important parts of Maps are live navigation and live traffic status. I'm assuming you can't get those with osm (yet). The actual maps are much better in osm than in Google.
- drnick1 2mo agoOsmAnd does have live navigation as far as I understand it (turn-by-turn directions), but no live traffic status, because for that you a lot of drivers willing to surrender their location/sensor data. Anything "live" cannot be privacy respecting. I never found live traffic information particularly worthwhile to be honest.
- ocdtrekkie 2mo agoThe bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor. Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.
- mitxela 2mo agoWindows only isn't still 90% market share because of Wine, then Proton.
- ocdtrekkie 2mo agoNeither Wine nor Proton run on Windows. Building Android emulators for Linux: Worth your time. Building Android knockoffs which claim to remove the Google from Google's operating system? Foolishness.
- mitxela 2mo agoReactOS was also a good idea.
- wwiinn 2mo agoA lot of react os helped wine/proton. It’s still was a good idea.
- xmprt 2mo agoValve is working on supporting apks for their new VR operating system. If this goes anything like Proton then I'm hopeful for the future of Android without Google.
- pjmlp 2mo agoGamedevs would still target Android, just like they target Windows, letting Valve run after them. Android is even more of tragedy, given how all relevant NDK game development APIs are also available on GNU/Linux.
- floxy 2mo ago>wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome. It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.
- kjs3 2mo agoOr go the other way and make web pages not programs at all, like they originally were. Unfortunately, just communicating information isn't cool, doesn't monetize, and certainly doesn't get clicks.
- mapontosevenths 2mo agoThe biggest mistake the web ever made was leaving it up to to the website to choose how content renders. It should be the users choice how their browser renders, it's their damn browser. Instead, browsers are built to follow standards that mostly favor the developers preferences above those of the person who actually own the device rendering it. The modern web is user hostile by design.
- Xirdus 2mo agoIf a web browser allows images, then the website always has full control over how content renders. It's the default. HTML and related standards are trying to persuade developers to cede some of that control in the name of accessibility, user choice, searchability, device compatibility etc. that all-image websites lack. But this can only succeed if the developers still can do everything they want to. If they can't, then they'll fall back to images and everyone loses.
- Sophira 2mo agoThis is true. A lot of websites back in the 90s were just made up of images that were clickable using image maps. It was not a fun time. I get what the parent comment is saying, though, and it's why I use Gemini (the protocol[0], not the AI). It doesn't align with corporate interests, but for now I consider that a good thing. [0] https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://geminiprotocol.net/
- seb1204 2mo agoNot denying than many engineers work on Chrome just wondering how many of them work on Chrome features that are anti pattern, reducing privacy, improving information collection or tracking or against users interest in broad.
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoYou can just look at the commit stream and see for yourself. Despite community pearl-clutching, 99% of the work is just good old fashioned software engineering.
- MiroslavPokorny 2mo agoCan anyone actually share 1 - 3 examples where a hard fork of a living os project has actually succeeded ? If AMZN couldnt make their fire whatever it was called fork of Android really grow, what chance has the community got ?
- hex-m 2mo agoOwnCloud -> Nextcloud, OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, Elasicsearch -> OpenSearch, privacyIDEA -> eduMFA
- MiroslavPokorny 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice Difficulties maintaining a sufficient number of contributors to keep the project viable have persisted for several years. In January 2015, the project reported a lack of active developers and code contributions.[49] There have been continual problems providing timely fixes to security vulnerabilities since 2015.[50][51][52][53] In September 2016, OpenOffice's project management committee chair Dennis Hamilton began a discussion of possibly discontinuing the project, after the Apache board had put them on monthly reporting due to the project's ongoing problems handling security issues.[54][55][56] Sounds like AOO is effectively dead, so this example is a fail to my challenge. OpenSearch & ElasticSearch both seem alive, as well as OC & NC. Neither https://github.com/privacyidea/privacyidea https://github.com/privacyidea/privacyidea or https://github.com/eduMFA/eduMFA https://github.com/eduMFA/eduMFA say either is a fork of the other. I think you failed to share 3, 2 seem to valid examples of my challenge but the other 2 are questionable.