Brave is also contributing to the Chrome monoculture, same as how the Android forks are contributing to the Android culture. The base projects are so large that no team will do a proper job updating it if, or when, the source project stops being open source. They are entirely beholden to the original developers, and they will also merge whatever change the original developers do, as the cost of maintaining a fork is big enough as it is, without breaking changes.
I do appreciate these being open-source. But there must not be an illusion that these large projects being open source means that "just forking" works. A culture is much more than a repository.
The way Google handles the Chromium source (one big Git monorepo that's undergoing near-constant refactoring) means anything that doesn't want to hard fork is limited to bolting on a new UI and features around the core rendering engine -- but anything inside that core rendering engine won't be long-lasting.
So Brave, Arc, Dia, Edge, et al., all add their own sauce on top of Chromium, but none of them can make changes like back-porting Manifest V2 back into their Chromium.
The main issue with Chromium is not that it's not that it benefits Google.
The main issue is that it's so mainstream, it strongarms standardization bodies making them ineffective.
Chromium is so mainstream that developers think developing for other browsers is irrelevant, even putting notices of deprecation for Safari and Firefox.
W3C is on the brink of irrelevancy, because if it works on Chromium, why bother with the others? if W3C cannot enforce the standard.
> Chromium is so mainstream that developers think developing for other browsers is irrelevant, even putting notices of deprecation for Safari and Firefox.
Hugging Face's spaces does this, throwing banners saying it only supports Chrome. Makes me throw up a little bit every time I have to switch over.
i kind of agree - although all of this does end up indirectly benefitting google. while the project is open source, they're the ones maintaining the project, and believing that they won't do anything they think they can get away with to grow their power and influence is extremely naive.
if safari dies, firefox won't be far behind, and by then there's no way a fork of chromium will be able to "keep up" when google starts pushing chrome-only features, killing ad-blockers etc etc etc
(not sure if any of this matters, though. will there even be any real people left on the web in a 5 years?)
How has chrome abused there'd position? Generally from what I've seen most of their standards are sane and improve the web.
I was told they were breaking adblockers, using ublock lite which complies with the changes I don't notice a difference. And even this change I could have switched browsers it didn't break the web.
There's some pwa features only they support, and that's a feature I think could actually benefit me.
Chromium is in such position that their implementation of new elements and APIs set the de-facto standard for the Web and Safari and Firefox have to follow suit.
This overpowers the governing body (W3C), where they have to accept it and pretend they remain relevant.
A bit of history: When Internet Explorer was the dominant browser of the Internet, other browsers existed and their usage was in healthy proportion, among each other. People could choose whatever browser they wanted and be sure its browser engine was independent.
When Chromium/Chrome came in 2008, it changed the game to what we have today: 85% Chromium-based browsers, 8%-10% Safari/WebKit and 2%-3% Gecko-based browsers (Firefox)
Whatever Chromium does, others have to follow suit. The bulk of the userbase is there (unfortunately). No real choice exists for a governing body to effectively apply standards.
The ability to contribute and the rights granted by the license are two separate issues. Google isn't obligated to accept and is more than likely to reject patches that don't align with its incentives (reversal of recent anti-adblock changes, removal of telemetry/spyware, etc.)
I do appreciate these being open-source. But there must not be an illusion that these large projects being open source means that "just forking" works. A culture is much more than a repository.