The problem with Chromium is that it's controlled by Google. Given they control the engine in the majority of browsers, they get to call the shots on the direction of the web as a whole.
They're not in any position to control the web as a whole; Safari is too strong a competitor.
But even if Chromium was at 100% market share they couldn't control the web. If they start throwing their weight around then the other web companies will start organising around a Chromium fork. The important thing here is OSS/not-OSS rather than market share. Market share can change quickly enough in response to problems. It is like GCC - there was that spat back in the day, someone forks the code and there is a little war until people figure out which is better. Then the better version became "GCC".
It is fine to have one custodian as long as the actual power is retained by the users. Efficient, even.
Whoever. Whatever. OSS is a system for finding the most capable entity in the world at developing a software capability and letting them get on with it. It'll find someone to pick up the slack if Google starts doing a terrible job. In this world of 8 billion humans and however many thousands of companies, there'll be one who knows how to put a web browser together.
If I were going to guess today it'd be brave.com, but the world is large and competitive.
This is very handwave-y and idealistic. Sure, 8 billion humans, and thousands of companies on a cosmic timeline will lift the "most capable entity" to the top, but the road there is going to be extremely long if you just "nah they'll get it" and not do anything else.
I named a specific company, pointed out a specific example of the dynamic featuring GCC and Debian is just one iceberg in the OSS ocean demonstrating that there are more than 30,000 packages built on the principle that free software is better than closed source.
I'm not sure how much more specific and concrete you want the argument to get, but that seems fine to me. The market is big, people care about this part of it. There will be a sponsor for the work if Google isn't up to the challenge.
The only reason everyone uses Chrome is it is really good at what it does and to date Google has been a high quality steward.
I think that's a tad idealistic, though. You'd need the resources to keep fighting against the constant changes and ever diverging codebase the more Google goes it's own way. And already has been doing it slowly.
Also, Mozilla and Apple have been important for keeping privacy relevant every time Google have tried to push for some privacy eroding web standards.
Edit: I agree with the sentiment though but I just trust the current situation more.
> You'd need the resources to keep fighting against the constant changes and ever diverging codebase
Assuming that Google is making Chromium better, sure. If they are making it worse then not keeping up with the changes is an advantage of the fork.
If Google starts making changes that reduce the value of the codebase, then a hard fork immediately becomes viable. If they are good custodians even a totally separate codebase isn't enough, it'll end up in the same position as Firefox - marginalised.
Isn’t the push to deprecate and remove Manifest V2 in favor of V3 and therefore removing or at least significantly cutting down possibilities for users to block ads a major push from the Google side? A field in which they, conveniently, make their major cut of their profit?
Brave is a big company already, still they’ve already announced that they won’t be able to support V2 for too long as the codebase will break over time.
Only because something is OSS doesn’t mean it’s not controlled by a single entity or consortium. We need competition, especially in something so damn critical like web browsers (which are like OSes for the web).
Mozilla is and has been a savior. They’re doing weird shit, but compared to Google and Apple they’re still as transparent as possible, even with their shit. And their shit is not even THAT bad, while I still dislike it and also thought about replacing FF for a short time. I just hope they come back to the right path, at least in their communications.
Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking. Whether or not Webkit can be thought of as disjoint from Chromium is really the question here.
WebKit is substantially disjointed from Blink at this point, a natural result of differing priorities from their developers.
WebKit remains highly embeddable for example, so if you drop a WebKit webview into your Cocoa/GTK/whatever toolkit app you’ve got a mostly-complete multiprocess browser and just need to build your UI around it. Blink on the other hand is hard-coupled with Chromium for things like multiprocess support, which leaves no practical alternative to forking the whole browser (which as an aside, is why Electron drags around the full heft of Chromium instead of just Blink).
That’s moot though because Google has no qualms with pushing through Chromium-only “standards” that make non-Chromium browsers less viable since sites that use these “standards” simply don’t work in anything but Chromium. It’s like the situation with Internet Explorer and its collection of IE-isms all over again.
One could argue that Mozilla and Apple should just follow Google and implement these “standards” themselves, but that lands us right back where we started in that this effectively gives Google full unbridled power to steer the direction of the web as it pleases, which is a massive conflict of interest.
which outright forked in 2013, though at that point it sounds like they were already carrying enough patches to constitute a soft fork (which then became a hard fork).
But even if Chromium was at 100% market share they couldn't control the web. If they start throwing their weight around then the other web companies will start organising around a Chromium fork. The important thing here is OSS/not-OSS rather than market share. Market share can change quickly enough in response to problems. It is like GCC - there was that spat back in the day, someone forks the code and there is a little war until people figure out which is better. Then the better version became "GCC".
It is fine to have one custodian as long as the actual power is retained by the users. Efficient, even.