[ivanmontillam]

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.

EDIT: Typo

[cguess]

> 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.

[kjfaejgoaeijhei]

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?)

[ApolloFortyNine]

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.

[ivanmontillam]

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.