[dcow]

This whole chrome fetish thing you've got is actually the issue. Everyone thinks "there is only Chrome" so in a sense we all deceive ourselves. I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome. Maybe you do but that's not really the point. If you don't want a Chrome hegemony then don't fool yourself into thinking there is one and don't proliferate that ideology. Tell your product people that NO, you're not going to just ship the Chrome version and support Safari and Firefox later. Put in the work to make software work on other browsers. That's how you break the status quo. The amount of times I've seen some software company tell users "our product only works on Chrome" is disgusting. No wonder it's popular... people don't have a choice because of shitty software.

[nemothekid]

>I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome.

I find this very hard to believe. Everyone you know uses Firefox?

[dcow]

And Safari and Brave and Edge (so some use Blink).

[nemothekid]

So Safari and Chromium and Chromium. I'm not sure who the one here is deceiving themselves.

[dcow]

Chromium != Chrome. We're talking about some world where Google Chrome takes over everything not where Chromium derivatives compete with Google Chrome for browser market share based on features and merits. That latter outcome defeats the "chrome hegemony" which is what the person I initially responded to is complaining about.

[nemothekid]

Chromium dominance is effectively Google dominance when it comes to the open web. That is a world where Google no longer has to follow any sort of standards body because it is the standard. Another commenter, snowwrestler[1], put it best:

>With full control of the rendering engine on all platforms, Google can stop engaging with standards bodies. Web rendering standards will become simply what Google says they are, even if it is to their benefit. Imagine AMP but on steroids. When Safari stops rendering mobile sites correctly, there will be lots of helpful friends and family (and ads) telling folks to "just switch to Chrome, it's a better browser anyway."

>Google could also ship their own root certificate list and take control of Web PKI. Imagine Symantec but entirely at Google's option. Play ball or get security warnings. This would allow an end run around the democratization afforded by Let's Encrypt, for example. Controlling 99% of the client end of TLS confers just as much power as controlling the CA end.

All of these items are built into how Chromium renders the web. The other Chromium derivatives will be forced to swallow these changes because what are they going to do? Fork and maintain their own browser engine? Bisect patches from upstream forever? How many of these Chromium forks will have the resources to maintain their own fork of something as complex as Chromium?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31898439

[est31]

A 95% chromium world is the same as a 95% chrome world in many regards.

Following Chromium upstream is an extremely hard effort if you have done any kind of non trivial changes to it. There are constant refactors and changes. This means that your chromium using browser can't be anything more than just a reskin of Chrome, which means that you don't have the agency to support some feature that Chrome chose to not support, and the features you do support are likely going to be implemented 100% the same due to using the same code, including the bugs. This leads to the same "code assuming the bug" issues that if everyone used Chrome.

Furthermore, Google has a monopoly on Chromium developers, with only few people contributing from the outside. Your Chrome reskin team will likely be very skilled in maintaining a Chrome reskin but if Google ever decided to stop the Chromium project in favour of a closed source Chrome, there would be nobody who knows how to properly maintain the fork going forward, neither at your company, or available for hire.

You are 100% at the mercy of Google if you do a Chrome reskin.

[ajdude]

Through this logic, iOS already allows firefox etc to run on its platform, if Firefox != Gecko.

except the issue here is the rendering engine and who controls in at the top level.

I don’t wanna live in the world we’re 90% of the Internet only supports chromium, yet everything from Edge to Opera use it now. Firefox and Safari the last holdouts keeping google from dominating all web standards.