Before you downvote check the community and maybe read my argument.
In recent times on Lemmy or really in any tech affine corner its become the norm to trash Chrome and ALL other Chromium based browsers. However I’d argue thats complete nonsense and maybe even counter productive. Really Safari and GOOGLE Chrome should be enemy #1. Not smaller Chromium browsers. The fact that two 100% big tech controlled browsers have such a dominating position is the real cause for concern. And lets not pretend that Firefox’s further development is also heavily predicated upon Google writing them a check.
Because really the issue right now is that the if both Google and Apple come together to start enshittifying their browsers by for example adding invasive DRM that allows websites to deny you service if you run adblockers, rooted or jailbroken devices (like Google tried) with their combined market share of > 90% they could just push through. Since many websites would loose very little in terms of potential users if they outright denied service to any browser (Chromium or not) without that DRM in place.
However if Google Chrome and Safari had lets say less than 40% market share another 50% was controlled by a dozen or so smaller based Chromium browsers, these browsers could simply first off not merge in these anti features into their codebase and maybe even deny merging any new Chromium changes in protest until Google or Apple give up on it. Because what use is there for Chrome to add new features if only a third of the browsers support it? No website can really use them
Also I’m still in full support of Chromium’s idea of giving webapps more capabilities. In my opinion giving webapps the ways to access System stuff like Bluetooth, USB Devices, … through a robust permission system and making them a even more viable type of Application is a great cause. The Applications are still sandboxed, they are multiplatform by nature and the web is a very democratic and user-friendly way to distribute them (way more so than the big tech owned Appstores). Or let me put it this way : If i have to run a closed source Application, I at least feel better doing so if its in a sandboxed environment like a browser and without supporting the iron grip the Appstore or Playstore have on their respective platforms.
My approval for Chromium however does not extend to electron and other “Website packaged as a ‘native’ App” frameworks. Fuck that crap. Especially since 90% could just be a regular Webapp or PWA but yet decide to ship and entire browser along with 1MB of JavaScript code that uses maybe 1% of the Browsers features.
Google controls the Chromium project. They decide what gets merged in or not. The other browsers are basically soft-forks. They can rip stuff out after the fact, but they can’t stop Google from merging stuff into Chromium in the first place.
I’d argue Chrome’s marketshare may not have been as high as it is right now if every browser out there didn’t cave in and become Chrome-in-disguise.
Don’t get me wrong, I still use Chromium browsers for a bunch of stuff, but its hegemony on the web and the fact Google doesn’t have to wait for anyone’s approval before merging their shit is basically turning Chrome into the new IE.
+1
Personally, I abandoned chromium last year when Google forced the web drm nonsense into the code base. It was a grand example of the problem. Sure, they backed out the change a few months later. But the damage was done and I already migrated to Firefox. It’s been great.
For anyone not familiar, here’s a random article on the topic: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
With their combined single digit market share? I don’t think it would have changed much.
And sure they control Chromium but their control only has power if websites use these features on a large scale. And if the Softforks had a large enough market share and removed antifeature xyz websites can’t really on it without annihilating large chunks of their userbase, thus it won’t get used and the feature is meaningless and might as well not exist.
For example in Internet Explorer you could use Visual Basic Script instead of JS for client side scripts. But no other browser ever supported it, it never got adopted by any website and so it became nothing more than a footnote and nobody ever noticed that feature not being in other browsers.
Thing is, we’re not in that hypothetical world, we’re in a world where Google has a near monopoly on the browser space, and controls and steers the very project most of the others use as a base. In this context, I don’t think it’s particularly hard to see how the Chromium hegemony is hurting the browser landscape.
The view on “just don’t use it” is a bit more nuanced than that. For example, Manifest V3. Deciding not to use it means those browsers would have decided to completely break Chrome extension support in their browsers. Keeping it would also have meant literally re-implementing V2 support in their browser as it would be gone from the mainline. So what can browsers realistically do other than fold and adopt V3?
The mainstream usage of features can come from Google themselves. I’m thinking for example of the old YouTube Angular redesign, which used a pre-standards V0 Shadow DOM API that was only ever implemented in Chromium and relied on a very slow polyfill everywhere else, which resulted in majorly degraded performance on one of the most visited websites on the internet for anything that was not their own browsers.
“This site was optimized for Chrome” is only gonna get worse.
Google can steer Chromium all they want, if others refuse to update at all and make up a big enough userbase no website can use these features rendering them useless and giving Google no power. You just gave a perfect example with Shadow DOM and Manifest V3.
Lets say Google in Chromium 140 they add Manifest V3 and in Chromium 141 Shadow DOM V2. If lots of non Google Chromium browsers with lets say a combined 30% market share refuse to update to Chromium 140 because of what a terrible antifeature manifest V3 is and thus never implement Shadow DOM how many websites are ever going to use Shadow DOM V2? Probably almost non. And thus the feature is already doa making your experience not a percent worse if you use a older chromium base. Basically I don’t see why the resistance to Google can’t come from within the Chromium browser space - given enough market share.
Google was only able to pull this shit on YouTube because on iOS 99% of people are accessing YouTube through the YT App anyway and on the Desktop the loss of annihilating the 5% of Firefox users was worth it.
good and well written post, OP. i agree with you and this is definitely an unpopular opinion.
the only reason to hate on non-google chromium in general is when it narrows the pool of browsers in the market, and therefore gives chromium devs more opportunity to make web-breaking changes, and lazy web devs an opportunity to make less compatible sites, thereby giving google something of a brute strength monopoly.
for example, when edge switched to chromium, that was a genuine loss to the user. you know those pop-ups you get that say “this site works better on Chrome?” yeah, it’s not a coincidence that has been happening since the Edge transition and loss of EdgeHTML/Trident.
my only two disagreements: when you say safari is enemy #1. again, engine diversity is important to the quality of web pages, keeping control of the web out of the hands of one company, and WebKit is safari’s unique engine. it’s good that safari continues to exist. if safari just disappeared, or switched to chromium, we would be absolutely fucked because we’d all be left with one monolothic version of the web led by google and microsoft.
other disagreement is yours and others’ distaste for mozilla taking funding from google et al. they need cash to keep existing, and they have been nothing if not transparent about the changes they make to their browser in exchange. if they did shady things for pay it’d be a different story but that’s just not the case.
Thanks I appreciate the long comment :D.
Maybe it didn’t come across right but Mozilla taking Google funds is no problem for me, but people just need to be honest about the situation and aware that Firefox isn’t 100% independent and could have serious trouble staying alive if Google ever decided to stop funding them. If Google really wanted to go all out and really kneecap Firefox into the ground, antitrust aside they would have a lot of leverage to do so.
About the whole engine diversity argument - I removed my argument in the original post because really the whole post was already long enough. For me this falls into the same category as people wanting a third mainstream Smartphone OS besides Android and iOS. You already need a monumental amount of investment to even get a browser that even works with the top 100 most visited sites. On top of that you also need at least significant better performance (almost impossible) or some big new feature for the mainstream to even be interested adding further to the cost. And finally you also need to convince product managers and developers to make sure that the experience on browser #4 is also on par with the other 3 - in a age where some sites can’t even manage to even function properly on all 3 I think honestly this is a lost cause and instead we should make sure the entrenched goliaths are kept in check.
And in the end I don’t even know how desirable a potential 4th browser engine with its own quirks and workarounds really would be. I think 2 or 3 is usually the magic number for these large fundamental technologies. We have 3 major browser engines, 2 major mobile operating Systems, 3 major Desktop Platforms, 2 Graphics APIs, 2 major consumer CPU architectures, … . And in cases where there are more developer support usually is strechted very thin and neither Platform feels compelling. Case and point - Smartwatches, Smarthomes stuff and Smart TVs.
And finally about Safari and why I despise it. Safari and WebKit have an iron grip on the web experience on iOS and iPad OS and thus a huge chunk of users. And they have many times shown that they blatantly put Apple’s profits higher in priority than providing a feature complete browser. They kneecap many PWA related features - most prominently the Notifications API on iOS. Not to mention that testing if your site even works on Safari requires you to use Safari which requires an Apple device as there aren’t really any other Webkit browsers, other than tiny projects around.
valid points against safari. still do think it would be worse to lose it but yeah it would be better if apple opened it to other platforms. perhaps call it enemy #3 :P
my thought on the “fourth engine” is that 4 actually is the optimal number. before chrome we had monopoly issues caused by microsoft, and after the death of edgehtml we have an exacerbation of monopoly problems from chrome. the decade or so between with 4 major engines in the market we were all slightly better off.
I think the big difference why IE was so problematic is that was absolutely proprietary so there was no way of even soft forking it and that it and that many features were deeply tied to windows having the secondary effect that it kept people locked into windows.
chrome is not fully open source either, nor is (most distros of) android or chromeos. google are using the “open source” banner as a facade to get away with the same nonsense ms was doing in the 2000s. we are slightly more protected as consumers since the engines involved can be forked, but that does not excuse the immense power of the monopoly, only softens it.
Chrome isn’t open source, but Chromium is, which is what OP is getting at. The Google bloat is what is wrong with it, not the FOSS framework.
If anyone doesn’t like the direction Google is taking the Chromium project, they’re free to fork it.
Chromiums alright, most people tend to dislike google chrome like myself.
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As FOSS-friendly as Lemmy is, there is definitely a lot of hostility towards Chromium and Android, which are also still FOSS. Even de-Googled.
