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by domenicd 7 days ago
Fascinating to see that Chromium/Gecko/WebKit are now more "open" browser engines than Ladybird, at least in one important respect.

(Servo is arguably in the middle, accepting outside contributions as long as you don't use AI.)

It's understandable that a team without much funding would have to close off contributions to spare on labor costs. But, it makes me feel that people don't give Google/Mozilla/Apple enough credit for the economic resources they put into enabling openness.

(Personal bias/experience alert: I'm currently retired, but formerly worked at Google on Chrome. I saw many of my coworkers nurture outside contributors, and did some of that myself, both informally and through programs like internships.)

3 comments

Those corporations are not doing that out of the good of their hearts. They are doing so to assert control, in order to protect their business value. If it stopped being economical for them, they would stop tomorrow.

I do not think we should be eternally grateful for monopoly building.

Yeah, they are essentially praising price dumping.
> Chromium/Gecko/... Are now more "open" browser engines than Ladybird

Chromium? You mean the browser engine controlled by the Be-Evil corporation Google, which recently killed support for a huge swatch of important extensions (manifest-v2)? And thus prevents much of adblocking?

Gecko... now that's something less people are aware of, but let's just say if you know how the Mozilla ecosystem is governed internally, I believe you would be rather aghast.

Chrome is Google's loss leader.
It sure is, but it’s a bit weird to call loss leader the cornerstone of their trillion dollar monopoly.