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by t0astbread 2744 days ago
Undoubtedly, Google controls what happens in the Chromium stack (Blink/V8). I gotta admit that I don't know if MSFT's actually using Blink or just WebKit, so idk how much power Google effectively has over that.

But either way, the platform is not really controlled by the community. Sure you can file issues and pull requests or even fork Chromium but ultimately, Google still controls what's merged into the global Chromium master, so it's not really decentralized power.

Also, you've missed the main point. The problem here isn't that we don't have enough free/open source browser engines, the problem is that we don't have enough _different_ browser engines. If there's only one dominant browser engine, then whoever maintains that engine can decide how the web works. And that's kinda scary.

1 comments

Google controls but knowing Microsoft, they'll probably pull what Google did to Apple with WebKit.

My bet is that Microsoft will offer everything that google offers, AND some more extras that google probably won't want to offer to protect their business plan.

Also, my bet is that Microsoft will make kick-ass documentation for Chromium and kick-ass developer integration with the popular VSCode so web developers will reach for that first.