"If one product like #Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium. That’s what happened when #Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before #Firefox was released. And it could happen again.
If you care about what’s happening with online life today, take another look at Firefox." https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/12/06/goodbye-edge/ #edge
... Or a WebKit based browser. Diversity matters in order to maintain a free and open web!
@bjoern I'm more and more unsure about that, to be honest. At one side, yes, Firefox has a different engine, whic is good, but at the end, there's "Google money" in Mozilla too, which makes me wonder. Plus: At some point, why not make sure we have *one* robust, solid, maintained #FLOSS browser engine to build upon? My take on that is here, especially looking at Chromium and Microsoft: https://dm.zimmer428.net/2018/12/edge-chromium-and-web-monoculture/
Because corporate forces will always strive to make the web more closed (more DRM, more obfuscation, more tracking, more monetization); if de facto standardization (through the implementation) has to happen in a space that is dominated by corporate players like Google and Microsoft, their interests will always prevail, even if the implementation is nominally open source.
Mozilla/Firefox is a deeply imperfect alternative - but the best one we have.
@eloquence I see these issues, but I wonder whether we really solve them by building different browser *engines*. Just looking at, in example, #brave and what they do on top of the #chromium engine. They actually come up with a new (and IMHO rather interesting) approach to balancing interests in online ads without ditching users privacy. I wonder whether talking about different browser *engines* leaves us forever working on a level way too low to solve the actual problems..
@z428 @eloquence if you create a monopoly of exactly one browser engine you basically replace all standards with "it works as implemented in Chromium". You might not care as long as every Browser uses Chromium but think about the power we would put in one hand. Keep in mind, Chromium is (and most likely always will be) tightly controlled by Google and Chrome is always the reference browser - 1/2
@bjoern Well, like I said, I'm pretty torn here: Yes, more implementations would be desirable. Yet, maybe the sheer complexity of everything required to build a browser these days is a major problem, here? After all, most of the #FLOSS desktop operating systems these days rely upon the #Linux kernel as well, for the same reason: You don't easily replace this. Yes, having alternatives would be great, but this is complex. Plus, again, how do we ...
