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by kevwil 651 days ago
Not to disagree with you specifically, but this seems a good context to make this point:

Maybe I missed the memo that we stopped hating monopolies? Every browser worth considering, except Firefox and Safari, is based on Chromium. Firefox and Safari make up about 20% global market share, meaning Chromium in about 80% [0]. A bug in Chromium is a bug in all of them. A backdoor in Chromium is a backdoor in all of them. A feature of Chromium, good or __bad__, is a feature in all of them. It baffles me that this isn't a bigger concern to more people.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
2 comments
zamadatix 651 days ago
This is one of those situations where "monopoly" is a very overloaded word in terms of what it means to different people in different situations, causing confusion when it gets broken down into specifics.

Most people were never worried, and probably will never be worried, with the points you're listing there. That's not to say they've stopped hating browser monopolies, just maybe not your definition of what a browser monopoly is or why they're problematic.

In general (not just browsers) most people treat "popularity" and "monopoly" as completely orthogonal concepts. I.e. something unpopular can still be a monopoly, something with 99% usage can still not be a monopoly. There is typically just a tendency for extremely popular things to also happen to be a monopoly.

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bad_user 650 days ago
Because it doesn't matter that much, as Chromium is open source, not to mention it did a fine job thus far in advancing the open web.

I'd like Firefox to stick around, but as far as I'm concerned, if Safari goes away, I couldn't care less.

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ThunderSizzle 650 days ago
Sure, it's open source, but it's controlled entirely by Google. No work has been done on Chromium that Google hasn't wanted done.

Said another way, Chromium can not be updated to risk Google's business or profit.

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bad_user 649 days ago
Chromium can be forked. Minor browsers like Brave or Vivaldi do that, although they have to keep up with upstream, but they are shipping an ads-blocker that are blocking Google's search ads.

Note that Firefox or Safari aren't going after Google's business due to the search deal. At this point, Google is funding all 3 major browser engines, so they have a level of control going beyond just controlling Chromium.

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