Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

https://dev.to/kenbellows/chromium-and-the-browser-monoculture-problem-420n

by whack • 7 years ago

203 125 7 years ago

jpochtar• 7 years ago

This is a good take. Standards were a weapon to fight Microsoft's closed source IE— emphasis on closed source. Why? Competing browsers needed to be IE-compatible to matter, and without standards spec-ing out what IE's doing, it's hard for other vendors to know if they were 100% compliant.

Now that the major browser everyone's coding against is open source, and competitors can freely borrow their engine, I'd say we don't really need the W3C anymore.

dragonwriter• 7 years ago

Now that the major browser everyone's coding against is open source

Chrome isn't open source, it's open core.

jhanschoo• 7 years ago

But Chromium is open source and that's what people refer to when they say browser monoculture---not that Chrome is dominant (there will always be a significant minority of Safari, Opera Mini, UC Browser, etc.) but that Chromium-based engines are extremely dominant.

srikz• 7 years ago

I used to feel the same way but I think there should be competing implementation of standards to make faster progress.

GCC vs Clang is what comes to mind. The competition from clang improved the overall quality and performance of c / c++ compilers in general

ryacko• 7 years ago

Compilers are algorithms to convert mathematical expressions to something that can run on a physical computer. Porting optimizations is easier than porting something from Blink to Quantum.

Tinfoilhat666• 7 years ago

W3C failed to create an open platform. Browser vendors use W3C as a rubberstamp for their implementations. There's many W3C Notes and Editor Drafts with only one vendor. Just look at the latest Google firehose of new features.

smittywerben• 7 years ago

This is probably silly, but I've been wondering if IE 11 tracks me the least while providing clickable internet text. It just needs uBlock Origin and a Linux port... maybe?

indalo• 7 years ago

I'd imagine that with MSFT having similar products to Google. there exists an incentive for similar behaviors to occur in terms of data collection.

I hadn't given it much of a thought since edge/ie are such a non starter usually. Would be interesting to look into!

phaedryx• 7 years ago

I am unconvinced. I am less worried about keeping up with the latest bleeding-edge web stuff. I am more concerned about privacy, ad tracking, etc. I know that Google's goals are different than mine, so I don't want 100% Chrome.

danShumway2• 7 years ago

Ultimately, Google will still decide what goes into Chromium. As it stands, Google decides what patches get merged, and Google decides how core features are implemented. And they can be implemented in ways that are very hard to toggle and very specific to Google's business model.

We need to get a version of Chromium that's not owned by Google -- but, I don't see any motivation for Google to give up control of Chromium or move Chrome over to use a different, community controlled fork.

So if you want a version of Chromium that really is community controlled, you'll need to have a community fork of Chromium that we all agree to work on and use as a browser base. Otherwise, we'll just be giving free labor to Google, and they'll still filter contributions so that primarily their interests are served.

Unfortunately, now that we've forked Chromium for all of our browsers, one of two things is going to happen:

- either the fork will need to be tightly constrained by Chromium, in which case Google will still effectively control it, or

- the fork will diverge from Chromium, in which case we'll be back to the exact same position we are now. You'll have multiple competing browser engines, one of which is used by the most dominant browser on the market.

The TLDR is if you're worried about Google controlling the browser engine, it still seems to me that the only solution is to get a non-google controlled browser engine used by a browser with market share comparative to Chrome.

The relative lack of user adoption for Vivaldi, Opera and Brave suggest to me that standardizing on Chromium won't significantly help with that. Edge is now moving over to Chromium -- if it sees a massive influx of new users, maybe it'll be worth taking that strategy more seriously.

In the meantime, since it appears we are going to need a browser engine to compete with Chromium anyway, what's the harm in having one company (Mozilla) try to compete by building their own browser engine the way they want? Sure, Firefox isn't doing great right now, but is it doing any worse than Brave?

potatocannon• 7 years ago

Good thoughts, except for Firefox 'not doing great right now'. I've switched over for almost a year now, both for regular and development use, haven't looked back.

philjohn• 7 years ago

Same - I moved to Safari when I got sick of Chrome making my MBP sound like a jet engine (and be almost as hot to the touch).

Then I got tired with certain sites not working properly and went back to Firefox - and it's plain to see they've done great things to the browser engine, it's fast, pretty lightweight on CPU and power usage and all of the problematic sites in Safari work fine.

genmon• 7 years ago

Is WebKit sufficiently separate from Chromium now that we can regard it as competitive? Safari seems to be doing well at keeping Chrome's "embrace and extend" in check.

lallysingh• 7 years ago

Chromium stopped using webkit. They forked Blink.

kevsim• 7 years ago

We've at least seen some recent examples around browser vendors like Brave and Vivaldi deciding not to take some of Google's Chromium changes around browser extension handling [0].

So while this is not as compelling as a community controlled fork, it at least shows the alternative vendors are not willing to blindly swallow Google's changes.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-...

adrianN• 7 years ago

Not merging upstream changes eventually kills smaller vendors with maintenance burden as the diffs grow larger and larger.

noir_lord• 7 years ago

Firefox isn't doing great right now, but is it doing any worse than Brave?

Maybe in terms of market share as a proxy for success that is true.

As a browser though Firefox has come on leaps and bounds (and has momentum to keep improving), I never switched away from it but used Chrome for dev for the last few years so I have a fair amount of time with both (dozens of hours a week) and Firefox is as fast and reliable as Chrome.

Ironically the one property that gives me issues with Firefox is youtube, they don't fix bugs against Firefox (the white bar header on fullscreen has been in firefox for over a month now and has been reported).

I ended up having to implement a ublock origin rule to remove the header.

EDIT: Mozilla are (to me) so much more than just a browser vendor, MDN documentation is probably my 2nd most visited documentation/help site (behind only stack overflow) because the quality is superb, concise and they quickly mention at the bottom can do this on foo, bar but not fizz which is useful to someone approach 40 because keeping that stuff in my head is well beyond me these days.

danShumway2• 7 years ago

Yep, to be clear, I was talking specifically about browser market share.

Firefox is my daily driver, and it's great.

roca3• 7 years ago

Some major problems with the "let's all use Chromium" approach:

Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting. All the companies that use Chromium are using it because they want Google to do the heavy lifting, so that isn't going to change, even if Google decides to put an open governance face on it, and there's no sign they're going to do even that. Should Google really be ceded complete power over the Web?

A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. Yes, this is already true to some extent, but it could get much worse. So fixing bugs would get harder.

A single codebase makes radical implementation experiments more difficult. Companies can patch Chromium but architectural divergence gets expensive fast. Say you want to rewrite the Chromium style system for parallelism with Rust, like Mozilla did with Firefox, and Google says no? Good luck maintaining that long-term. (A good example was how JSC vs V8 caused endless friction between Google and Apple in Webkit, leading up to the Blink fork.)

Another problem is that it would be very hard to block Web features that Google implements in Chromium. (P)NaCl/Pepper is a good example. "It's a ton of work to implement (especially if there's no spec)" is a helpful argument for not implementing a feature that's bad for the Web, both in public and to one's own product management. Hard to hold the line on something like PNaCl/Pepper or WebSQL if it's just a matter of flipping a configuration flag to increase Web compatibility. If the world was all-Chromium a few years ago there's no doubt we'd have PNaCl/Pepper instead of WebAssembly --- and we'd be stuck with the insane duplication of Pepper vs standard Web APIs, the bloat of LLVM everywhere, etc.

ximm• 7 years ago

Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting

Google already controls the web standardization process with its manpower. So standardizing on chromium would not change that issue, it would just move it to another level.

I am not saying that this is great. I just think the argument is invalid.

roca3• 7 years ago

Google has a lot of power in the Web platform but it's definitely not complete. If it was just a matter of manpower then they would have forced (P)NaCl/Pepper and Dart down everyone's throats and we would have been stuck with Web Components v0.

Sentiments such as "Google controls everything, there is nothing we can do" are inaccurate and also counterproductive.

sureaboutthis2• 7 years ago

Nothing makes it into the standard until there are at least two implementations in browsers. The standard is based on implementation, not invention by anyone.

lazyjones2• 7 years ago

A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them.

It's not the single browser codebase that hurts the web, any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. The main issue is that today, the web as a platform is garbage. It's full of cruft, mostly useless features that cause browsers to be bloated, unmaintainable codebases nobody except 9-figure-budget entities can hope to reimplement. It's an unstable, far too complex platform that wastes billions in unnecessary maintenance work for web developers.

Much of this could have been avoided by knocking some sense into the entities that constantly propose new features and those who implement them as native browser elements instead of JS libraries where possible. Then there's the insanity of preserving unsafe behaviour as default and adding response headers and extra HTML tag attributes to avoid it, so broken sites could stay broken and everyone else had to do maintenance work. I'm not saying Google is the driving force behind this, but it reeks of the same stuff that Microsoft was doing to prevent Word, Excel file formats from becoming readable and writable for the competition.

It's too late to freeze the web platform, it needs to be replaced with something sane and stable, controlled by people with no ulterior motives.

saulrh• 7 years ago

controlled by people with no ulterior motives.

Everyone used to think that was Google.

Anyway, if by some miracle you do find anyone that matches that description but knows where the lever is to kick everything over to a new paradigm, don't tell anyone about them, because as soon as you do they'll have more ulterior motives then you can count.

leoc3• 7 years ago

It's like the cat who gets too far up a tree, then decides to deal with the problem by going further up the tree.

hlkps2• 7 years ago

Much of this could have been avoided by knocking some sense into the entities that constantly propose new features and those who implement them as native browser elements instead of JS libraries where possible.

That's what Google did with the shadow DOM they used on YouTube: since Firefox had no support for it they wrote a polyfill (which is a JS library to emulate a feature) and the resulting performance was terrible.

roca3• 7 years ago

any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems.

No. When Web devs test in multiple browsers and find that something doesn't work in one of them, they will usually pick an alternative solution that does work in all of them, avoiding the bug in the buggy browser, thus avoiding a situation where their site depends on that bug continuing to exist. It doesn't always work out as well as that, but it often does.

You can wish for something better than the Web platform, but it's a tall order. You want a platform that's not controlled by a single vendor, that has multiple open-source non-patent-encumbered implementations with significant market share, that is available across just about every device, that has a vibrant content/application ecosystem and developer community, that supports everything from simple static content to extremely complex applications like office suites and 3D games. Good luck with that.

bobajeff2• 7 years ago

As bad as this all is, it seems like an unavoidable consequence to the nature of our economy. Do we really need separate competing:

• Office Suites

• Search engines

• link sharing sites

• internet runtimes

that all do roughly the same thing?

Maybe we do. Maybe Google should be broken up into a bunch of smaller Google's and be forced to interoperate with smaller search companies like DuckDuckGo, Qwant and TinEye. Like MVNOs but for search engine infrastructure.

z3t4• 7 years ago

If you are fed up with a service/app you can switch to another or make your own.

Certhas• 7 years ago

Maybe not. Maybe these all are more like infrastructure companies rather than service/product providers. But then we should regulate them as infrastructure companies, too.

roenxi• 7 years ago

Need is one of those surprisingly dangerous words. We need a steady supply of potatoes, some leafy greens and mild warm weather to get through life and not much more.

The standard we should strive for is to not lock any given 3rd party in to facilitate data exchanges. If I want to email someone, I shouldn't need to coordinate with Google. If I want to email a document I shouldn't need to coordinate with Microsoft and if I want to browse the internet I shouldn't have to coordinate with the Mozilla foundation.

We've seen this play out a few times; data lock-in is not properly appreciated even within the tech industry, let alone outside it. The risk of making Google a mandatory part of exchanging data between two parties on the internet is serious - if they ever manage to insert themselves in the same way IE got its claws into South Korea back in the day that will be decades of foolish pain for no gain. Great idea to keep people aware of the threat.

What happens if Google shut down Gmail outside the US with no warning and no big export of data? Maybe because the US government decides foreigners need a bit of prodding because of a trade war? That would be a Nasty Shock.

hlkps2• 7 years ago

To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. Yes, this is already true to some extent, but it could get much worse. So fixing bugs would get harder.

If instead of Blink we had Blink AND Gecko, instead of Chromium bugs being the standard, Chromium AND Firefox bugs would be the standard. How is having to implement workarounds for TWO engines worse than having to implement workarounds for ONE engine?

dual_basis• 7 years ago

It seems like you are missing the original point. People aren't working around bugs in Chromium, they are (either inadvertently or intentionally) developing apps which rely on the buggy functionality.

treis2• 7 years ago

A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. Yes, this is already true to some extent, but it could get much worse. So fixing bugs would get harder.

Your last line doesn't follow from the rest of the paragraph. One platform is easier to fix than 4. And it makes it much easier to develop for. Either your site works on Chromium or it doesn't work. You don't get into a situation where it works for 80% of your users.

Say you want to rewrite the Chromium style system for parallelism with Rust, like Mozilla did with Firefox, and Google says no?

I'd be concerned about that if Chromium hasn't been eating everyone's lunch for nearly a decade now. In terms of rendering/js engine they're clearly ahead of everyone else. For all of Mozillas efforts they still haven't matched chromium let alone surpass it.

quicklime• 7 years ago

we're talking Chromium, the underlying browser engine. As it stands, Chromium is the basis for a variety of browsers, not just Google's flagship. From what I can tell (as a non-expert on Chromium's source, so please correct me), the Googley stuff that makes privacy advocates nervous is independent from the core Chromium browser engine

This might be just me being pedantic, but I thought it might be worth mentioning...

Chromium is basically the same thing as Chrome, except that it's missing a few proprietary blobs that Google is not legally allowed to put into Chromium: some DRM stuff, a licensed H.264 codec, a Flash plugin, etc. But if you're worried about privacy, Chromium still has all the Googley stuff. You can still log into Chromium with your Google account, and it'll sync your bookmarks and history and passwords just like Chrome. Chrome extensions are 100% compatible with Chromium, and you can install them into Chromium via the Chrome Web Store.

Some people might be familiar with "Blink", which is the browser engine (and is a fork of WebKit). There's also V8, which is the JavaScript VM. These two components aren't enough to form a usable browser though. So the Chromium Project develops what is called the "Content module" (see https://www.chromium.org/developers/content-module) which combines Blink and V8, and some other pieces, to form a basic web browser. This is what other browsers (like Opera, and I presume Edge as well) are built on top of, and does not contain all the Google integrations that Chrome/Chromium have.

While Content is missing a lot of the Chrome features that make privacy advocates nervous, it's still a problem because most Chromium/Content developers are Googlers, and will probably not implement things like WebKit's ITP or canvas fingerprinting prevention.

oldmanhorton• 7 years ago

Edge basically takes the entire chromium product including the //chrome layer, but we have removed or disabled most/all of the Google service integrations

rvnx• 7 years ago

Which is needed anyway, because you are not allowed (even as Microsoft) to use Google APIs keys. If you don't remove these services, Chromium doesn't build or will be rejected by Google Play.

So it's nothing special.

mda5• 7 years ago

And will replace them with Microsoft versions and will declare soon that Edge is the new savior of humanity because it doesn't contain the evilness anymore.

Terretta2• 7 years ago

And “Edge” and “Chrome” both ship on iOS using WebKit.

Terretta2• 7 years ago

And this is why dropping back to the WebKit that Blink came from is not a terrible strategy, especially since it underpins the best integrated (battery life etc.) browser for MacOS and only browser engine on iPad and iPhone.

I’d like to see the privacy conscious “user agency” browser builders pivot back to WebKit.

iforgotpassword2• 7 years ago

Most of the post resonates well with me, but at that point

Ideally, this codebase would not be controlled by any single company. I'd love to see a common browser engine controlled by an independent nonprofit foundation

I had a bit of a facepalm moment. This is exactly how Google started out: Chrome(ium) was built based on webkit, so basically there was a mini consortium where Google and Apple would work together. But that wasn't moving fast enough for Google's taste so they forked off blink so they could immediately do whatever they pleased.

SquareWheel• 7 years ago

There's a lot you're glossing over there. For instance the split from WebKit resulted in 4.5 million of lines of code that could be deleted, reducing bloat. Apple could then do the same on their end.

It was a relationship which ended on good terms. Your comment makes it sound like it was antagonistic.

iforgotpassword2• 7 years ago

I don't know anything about the relationship back then. But moving faster and more flexibility was even among the reasons Google gave back then iirc. Anyways, what I tried to say was that it didn't work, and you gave a good example why the split was necessary. To me that just confirms that a "chromium consortium" wouldn't work.

vortico• 7 years ago

This is also the facepalm moment for me. Yeah, let's just ask Google to make it an independent nonprofit foundation, because they are 100% certain to say yes. If this is the point of the whole article, I'd have to concede that I fully disagree with the article's idea.

qwerty4561274• 7 years ago

The problem with browsers is they are so complex people can't build alternative implementations and keep them perfectly compatible.

We need concise well-engineered and precisely-defined web standards a small team can implement in reasonable time. Many people would build competing browsers if there were yet we have what we have and no choice but to stick with the Google engine.

icebraining2• 7 years ago

Sure. And then Google will start extending that standard, then sites will start depending on those extensions, and any browser that refuses or is unable to implement them will be extinguished/irrelevant.

qwerty4561274• 7 years ago

How many websites rely on google-specific features not defined by W3C, WHATWG, ECMA etc. today?

vbezhenar2• 7 years ago

The only reason to extend the standard if you can't implement required functionality with acceptable performance within this standard. That is the weak point for web platform: JavaScript is too slow and does not have access to drivers, you can't implement GPU-accelerated H.264 video codec within browser, so you have to implement it with C++ in browser. That means that proposed standard should be Turing-complete, provide C++ level of performance and native access to required hardware, while keeping browser-level safety and isolation. That is hard thing, but I believe, it could be solved using modern virtualization techniques with some advancements from OS and hardware to better virtualize GPU, USB, etc.

petjuh• 7 years ago

The big difference is that IE6 was a PITA to develop against while Chrome is a breeze. Developers wouldn't have hated the IE6 monoculture if it was as fast as Chrome and had developer tools and features as nice as it.

resoluteteeth• 7 years ago

I think you are looking at the later stage of IE's life when it was already dominant.

When IE first caught on it was extremely fast and pleasant to use compared to Netscape (also netscape wasn't originally free). If you only cared about IE it was actually a complete breeze to develop for using proprietary stuff like ActiveX (ignoring the fact that ActiveX was a bad idea for various reasons).

Lots of websites started showing banners saying that they were optimized IE, because people were primary targeting IE when they made new websites, in part because it was such a breeze to develop for. IE had lots of HTML/javascript features that made things much easier than other browsers at the time.

It's important to realize that IE only became difficult to deal with once 1) Microsoft essentially stopped trying to improve it after they won all the market share and 2) people needed to make web pages that worked on other browsers. At this point people wanted to use newer features that IE didn't support, but needing to support IE 6 necessitated either abandoning more modern features or using all sorts of hacks/polyfills to work around IE's quirks.

OrgNet3• 7 years ago

If only there could be no traces of Google inside Chromium... I'll stick with Firefox.

Lendal• 7 years ago

I am one of those who doesn't like to be forced to do anything. I believe in freedom, choice, and competition. Whenever a Fortune 500 company IT department literally pushes a particular piece of software to all their machines, (e.g. Chrome) you can be sure that it's the worst possible option. So I use Firefox instead.

mda5• 7 years ago

Firefox uses Google services as well.

OrgNet3• 7 years ago

yes, for the default settings... but I disabled google search, Phishing and Malware check, etc on mine ... I think I got everything (too bad it isn't the default settings).

xvilka• 7 years ago

This is why Microsoft should have used Firefox/Servo as a base for new Edge. Using Rust to write your web engine will remove a lot of problems.

geophertz• 7 years ago

The thing is if we follow this idea, why don't we all use the same browser, that is open source and "not controlled by any single company"?

la_fayette• 7 years ago

Monopolies are just a different term for stalinism. The question is for how long such a big moloch can control the internet in all domains. Ok they just buy startups in competing subdomains, but i doubt that really anything can be contolled by a single entity. Google is a company and thus a hierarchical system. The distributed innovation on the internet is still possible, see e.g. bitcoin mostl likely started by one person?

luckylion2• 7 years ago

Question is: how well would (the paranoid, control-seeking parts of) Stalinism have worked with today's technology?

rightbyte• 7 years ago

Probably so good that it would be unsustainable. The police, military, government and public officers needs some privacy so they can be corrupt without their superiors noticing and taking a cut. There would be too much control.

We will see how North Korea turns out in the future?

sureaboutthis2• 7 years ago

I've been saying this about dev.io since it's beginning. It's the place for frustrated redditors trying to make a name for themselves but only making fools instead. Do not bother reading anything there. It's as worthless and pointless as reading anything on reddit.

felbane• 7 years ago

As soon as the author started wrapping words with emoji, I lost all interest in hearing their viewpoint.

jefftk• 7 years ago

The premise of Mozilla's Servo is that there are major performance and security issues in all the current browsers that are very hard to fix without a full rewrite. Because we have multiple competing browsers and solid standards, instead of a single widely used reference implementation, it's possible that Servo may succeed at this.

If we switch to an open source browser engine monoculture we lose competition among rendering engines, and may never get something much better than what we have now.

The_rationalist• 7 years ago

If anything, Servo has shown that nobody needs to rewrite an entire engine for improving the state of the art. Servo is modular and can integrate it's style engine or it's layout engine or it's rendering engine into other engines. Btw it use Firefox spidermonkey for js. If mozilla wanted to bring a new inovative layout/anything module into chromium they just could, but they don't want to improve chromium, sadly. Reinventing the wheel with totally redundant pieces is not a goal. Mozilla should focus on reinventing the critical pieces of chromium and only them. They fail to understand their real utility and statistically become inexistant thus their funding too. If only there was debuggers for brains of decision makers, the world would be in much better shape.

bobajeff2• 7 years ago

That's actually a very good point. If Mozilla used Chromium as a base they would be free to invest all their manpower into Servo development.

Then again they would have to work pretty closely with Google on integrating Servo with Chromium. Otherwise they'll get into the situation that Google did with apple over Webkit and then they be at square minus one with a foreign codebase.

qbaqbaqba• 7 years ago

Funny to see this posted to dev.to.

loudtieblahblah• 7 years ago

If everyone who wrote posts and articles about browser monoculture just started using Firefox, this would all be less a problem.

matz1• 7 years ago

To fix this, someone simply need to build a better browser. Chrome did this when they taking over IE domination. I'm not taking about new privacy conscious browser but something that me and many other people really care. Is it hard ? yes but chrome did it before.

chemodax• 7 years ago

Firefox did this when they taking over IE domination. Chrome come later.

yogthos• 7 years ago

At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up.

However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and vendor. If we end up abandoning the standards entirely in favor of just using Chromium, then it’s game over for open web.

Throwing in the towel and making everything Chromium based would be the worst possible scenario because it gives Google an insane amount of control over the future of the web. And the fact that Chromium is open source doesn’t really make a bit of difference here.

The reality is that it takes a huge amount of effort to maintain it. It would require an organization like Mozilla to fork it from Google and take it in a new direction. Since we already have Mozilla and Firefox now, it’s much better to make sure they continue to exist.

ken• 7 years ago

Microsoft was ruthless and technically competent, but in many ways they were also strategically stupid.

- IE was a Windows-only product (after Microsoft dropped Mac support), so as Windows lost its dominance (thanks to the internet, and mobile devices, and Linux, and Apple's rebirth, and...), so did IE. It helped sow the seeds of its own destruction.

- Chrome has an open-source core, so they're going after the embedding market much more than IE ever did. That means that a lot of "Chrome" use is in places where users feel the consequences, but have no control over being able to switch engines (e.g., Electron apps).

Google's web browser group feels like the classic "big, smart" quadrant competitor that nobody will engage. If your only goal were "take over the world usage share of browser engines", it's hard to imagine doing a better job than they're doing now.

The client-side web was not traditionally Microsoft's home. They were a little late to the game, they didn't quite understand it, and they needed a good browser on their platform but it wasn't fatal if it wasn't theirs. (They're doing quite well in services and games and many other areas.) Google was always web-first, and they will never cede that.

Crazy tech prediction: Chrome will be the last dominant web browser engine. What defeats it will be the successor to the web, not another "web browser". Its successor will probably even embed Chrome for backwards compatibility, like Edge embeds IE, or Chrome embeds FTP. We'll look at legacy Chrome-compat internet sites the way we look at Electron apps, or non-TLS websites.

heavenlyblue• 7 years ago

Second point is not exactly strong: loads of apps used IE integration internally. It was one of the stronger points by MS during antitrust investigation.

gridlockd• 7 years ago

People don't remember how awful IE was. Netscape wasn't significantly better. Both were considered "bloated".

Then, along came Firebird, and it was light and fresh. Unfortunately, a lot of sites didn't work with it. But users demanded that it should work, and eventually it did.

Eventually Firefox itself became bloated and Chrome was the faster alternative. It's the guys at Mozilla that dropped the ball this time.

Fast forward to now: Chrome is bloated, everything is bloated, everything is terrible, but we now rely on a tech stack that has grown exponentially just to get really basic stuff working. The difference is, this time we can't reasonably start fresh anymore without breaking backward compatibility.

Perhaps that's what needs to happen though: Break everything. Delete HTML, CSS, Javascript and all that crap. Admit that most non-trivial web sites are not documents, they're applications. Applications can display documents and do all kinds of other things. Figure out the minimal API that can efficiently output graphics, sound and video. Add in some accessibility hooks. Provide some optional interfaces to geolocation, storage, camera/mic etc. Done.

Fuck the semantic web. Just let us write applications.

rayiner• 7 years ago

However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and vendor.

This is an important point. One thing that led to IE's downfall was its lack of standard compatibility. At the time, there were real web standards. Today, the "standard" seems to be whatever Chrome does. (Indeed, despite good standard compatibility, the pre-Chrome version of Edge suffered in terms of real-world compatibility, and that was an animating reason for the switch to Chromium: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...) So we are very differently positioned than we were when Firefox/Chrome overtook IE.

derf_• 7 years ago

So we are very differently positioned than we were when Firefox/Chrome overtook IE.

I would agree, but not for the reason you state. IE was the standard back then, too. The difference is that once it was "good enough", Microsoft reduced investment in it and allowed it to stagnate. Others caught up in terms of compatibility and passed it in terms of usability.

Google, on the other hand, invests so much that no on else can keep up, and knows that this is the means by which they maintain control over the web (and web standards).

elagost2• 7 years ago

At that point, IE was so technically far behind that you could easily point to reasons why Firefox was better: Add-ons, usable tabbed browsing, incredible speed increases, more customization, and websites actually working.

Nowadays, we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser that's not as technically advanced in some ways, with no clear merits and a lot of changes to workflow. The choice today is between freedom and convenience. The reason people flocked to Firefox in the first place was that it was both freedom and convenience.

feanaro3• 7 years ago

The are definitely merits: fingerprinting protection, containers, less memory usage, soon a state-of-the-art parallel rendering engine (Webrender), soon-to-be better adblockers, etc. More novel things will trickle down from Servo in the future.

It's unclear to me Chromium is still significantly faster in any meaningful way. They certainly feel roughly the same.

AJ007• 7 years ago

Going from IE 6 to Phoenix was a profound increase in speed. It was one of those moments where it felt like web browsing could suddenly be fun again.

I was actively using chrome, chromium, and Firefox for a long time. This was probably more because of what I do for work than a personal preference. More recently it’s been 98% Firefox since Chrome has just added too many weird things.

MaxBarraclough• 7 years ago

we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser

Is this still true with modern Firefox?

Personally I don't see a noticeable performance difference between Firefox and Chrome.

Netflix on (pre-Chromium) Edge, really is insufferably slow. General browsing in Firefox though seems perfectly fine; it's not purely an ideological charity-case.

sp332• 7 years ago

IE development was totally stagnant. IE 5.0/5.01 came out in 1999 and IE 5.5 came out in 2005! Chrome rolls out new versions every six weeks. That's why Chrome will not be displaced as easily. They can put serious pressure on the standards bodies to follow whatever changes they want to make to their browser.

Anyway the adblocking thing isn't really related. Extension APIs are not industry standards, Chrome already doesn't allow adblocking on mobile, and maybe at some point they'll just write off the users who care and focus on monetizing the users who will put up with ads.

melenaboija• 7 years ago

I agree with what you are saying but I would also add that it will become harder to change as times goes by as more private interests are involved with it.

Chrome is business for google and obviously will not want to change the situation, but also people with business on the Internet what want is a friendly and easy environtment which is what google is offering.

szczepano2• 7 years ago

If we take into consideration that both firefox and chromium use skia graphics library then there are only two companies apple and google.

Narishma• 7 years ago

Does Firefox still use Skia with Webrender?

szczepano2• 7 years ago

https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/28fa74680f4a3d2c...

I think they're using skia all the time since 2016.

rebelwebmaster• 7 years ago

Skia is just one backend used for drawing pixels on the screen. It has nothing to do with deciding which pixels to draw in the first place (i.e. the vast majority of what web browsers do).

tambourine_man• 7 years ago

Some random thoughts:

- IE vs Chrome dominance is comparable but not equal. One was closed source and stagnant, the other open and constantly evolving.

- “What if we all contribute to the same code base” ignores that not all priorities are aligned. Apple is a lot more focused on user experience and battery life while Google is all about moving the platform forward, see Web Worker conundrum for example.

- Browser are a lot more complicated now than they used to be, so creating anew from scratch is harder. But the Web is also a lot better documented (edge cases specified) and with more open implementations to get inspiration from.

snek• 7 years ago

This would be a fine idea if Google didn't control the Chromium source code. The changes Google is making for webRequest v3 manifests will land in the Chromium repo. The changes Google makes for adding non-standard features happen in the Chromium repo. You can see them all here[1]. You can even sign in with your Google account and comment/review any CL you wish, but that doesn't mean Google listens.

[1] https://chromium-review.googlesource.com

bsg75• 7 years ago

Ignoring for a moment any technical or business considerations, it would have been fascinating to see the long term effect if MS has based its new browser on the Firefox base instead of Chromium.

Given history it is also personally interesting to consider Microsoft as a company that could have furthered open web standards.

writepub• 7 years ago

Imagine if Apple decided they were tired of everyone moaning about Safari's missing features and decided to go the same way as Microsoft.

Not happening. It's likely that Apple spends an inordinate amount of engineering on Safari to lock-out W3C web features that pose a competitive threat to their lucrative Monopoly: the app store. Their strategy has always appeared to be to purposefully cripple Safari to drive developers and users to the app store, and monetize there, both on the $99 annual fee for the developer's ability to publish apps, and that 30% cut on revenues from publishers. Then there's the whole arbitrary bans on certain apps that somehow undermine their control over the device and ecosystem.

If they didn't have a plan to cripple Safari to drive people to the store, why else would they ban browser engines from competitors?

bfrog• 7 years ago

The real question that should be asked is there something fundamentally better than the browser and html. Things like flutter make me think there is a future for native apps that are just as easy to create if not easier.

Yizahi• 7 years ago

Author assumes that Chrome is for some reason different entity than Chromium. He also assumes that Google stuff is separate from pure browser code. And he assumes that 3rd party "modders" (let's be honest, chromium based browsers are simply mods) would want to separate Google stuff from the pure browser even if it is possible. None which I suspect is true. And privacy is not the only concern with Google. I'm more concerned with anti-privacy enabling "framework", in a way of inventing and pushing "standards" disregarding everyone else.

legends2k• 7 years ago

From what I can tell (as a non-expert on Chromium's source, so please correct me), the Googley stuff that makes privacy advocates nervous is independent from the core Chromium browser engine.

You're wrong and sorry to be blunt. If you think Chromium is pure technical code and no Google hooks, you're wrong.

1. I've been working on it for over a year and it's rife with Google hooks. 2. When we have a thriving project named Ungoogled Chromium, you'd start believing point 1.

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

combatentropy• 7 years ago

I'm currently very frustrated that while CSS Subgrid has been implemented in Firefox Nightly, Chromium has yet to start working on it. Imagine if the Firefox devs' work contributed to Chrome as well! This problem would vanish!

I doubt the problem is too few developers. Google has over $100 billion, it can hire as many people as it wants. And didn't you already say at the beginning, "Google is huuuuuuuuge. They just have so many people working there."

Rather I wonder if there are just only so many people who can collaborate on a codebase, there are just only so many features you can push through at a time. If all the Firefox developers moved to Google, I doubt we would see features faster. I bet we would see features come out at the exact same pace. It is not a matter of labor but of leadership, and each project will prioritize features differently. Therefore this is an argument for more than one implementation.

Is this not the subject of the famous book The Mythical Man Month, by Fred Brooks? Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. I know that Google is a massive company, but I wonder how many employees literally write code for Chrome.

Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

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