Open source group aims to better organize and fund development of browser.
  • recursive_recursion they/them@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    8 days ago

    Chromium really?

    After the whole debacle of manifest v3 they’re really choosing Chromium of all browsers to develop on?

    Mozilla has made some controversial decisions but surely Firefox would be the better decision for the Linux and FOSS ecosystem.
    Even better why not Librewolf?

    Seeing this news makes me sad as there are better options available and the Linux foundation chose the worst one out of all of them.

    Ironically I also just saw this here on the fediverse: Google loses in court, faces trial for collecting data on users who opted out

    • Thinker@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it as someone who has left Chromium behind personally, Chromium is kind of the only choice. I think people outside the browser implementation world underestimate the sheer scale and complexity of the modern browser stack and what goes into maintaining compatibility with web standards, much less advancing them.

      We’ve reached the point where Chromium is essentially the de-facto web standard because Chromium engineers do the lions’ share of feature testing and development, because Chromium receives the lions’ share of funding.

      Igalia, an OSS consultancy that does a lot of fairly-funded independent browser development, has lots of material about this. For example, the recent chat between Igalia members and someone from Open Web Advocacy about what to do if the anitrust ruling against Google jeopardize’s Chromium’s funding, and the options are pretty dire.

      Edit: After reading the article, I think this is a really good sign. Bringing together the immediate stakeholders in Chromium’s development and funding bodes well for the possibility of stewarding Chromium in a less Google-dependent, profit-motivated, ad-centric direction. There’s unfortunately a lot of uncertainty about how this will all shake out, but it’s possible that Chromium could become a truly independent project and move back in the direction of user value instead of user-hostile shareholder value.

      • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        Would you think that maybe the feature set implemented by modern web browsers has grown too large? Perhaps we need to start dropping some features to keep the web browser design lean.

        • Thinker@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          8 days ago

          I think anyone is welcome to try this, but the core ethos of the web is backwards compatibility. To my unending irritation, even non-standard behaviors/APIs like WebUSB have become critical for sites to function.

          The last time we actually dropped a feature, it was Flash, and that took a decade and there is still tons of effectively dead/permanently lost content because of it.

          Creating a browser that only implements a subset of the standards is fine for very niche usecases but I don’t expect it to ever overtake the major browsers. We’ll see how Ladybird fares as it’s compatibility increases.

          • Deway@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 days ago

            Flash wasn’t a web feature, it was a proprietary software that was filling a need that wasn’t met by the actual web standards.

            Flash wasn’t dropped, Flash died when it wasn’t needed anymore (thanks to HTML5).

          • reddig33@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            8 days ago

            I’d rather drop some of the more modern features like WebGL, WASM, and AI. A lot of this crap needs to be plugins instead of built into the browser.

            • JaddedFauceet@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              7 days ago

              What’s the issue with WebGL and WASM? I don’t want to use a plugin to be able to view 3d model, run Figma, play browser game, view WebVR content, …

      • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        We’ve reached the point where Chromium is essentially the de-facto web standard because Chromium engineers do the lions’ share of feature testing and development,

        Most of the web standards driven by Chromium are not particularly beneficial to the web, but are beneficial to Google. This is not an accident. It is how Google has made itself gatekeeper of the web while maintaining the facade of an open and standards-compliant browser.

        This is not a good thing. Community-focused projects investing time and money into supporting it is a bit like digging one’s own grave.