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Comment by ridiculous_fish | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: what is the population of committers (not contributors) on Chromium? Is there any significant number outside of Google?

Is Chromium de-facto controlled by Google, or more community driven?

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Chromium is completely controlled by Google. The key decision makers are all in the Google reporting structure.

There are a significant number of committers outside Google, yes.

The main part of Chromium that matters here is the content layer and below. The biggest single piece of that is Blink, which already uses a governance model with public intent-to-implement/ship notices that anyone can propose or give feedback on.

The single largest group of committers are employed by Google, but there have been increasing contributions, including to core function and direction, from external people; for example, Opera folks were key in helping change the memory model in Blink ("Oilpan").

Considering that Samsung Internet, Brave, Opera, Electron etc is based on Chromium and at least Samsung Internet adding new features of their own to it, there are at least many other people working on the code base.

I would guess that Microsoft would keep using Chorus rather than adopting V8, but if they aren’t, then V8 has contributions from eg. Node.js

And as states in the article: Edge on Android and on ARM seems to already be Chromium based

There's a crucial difference between "working on the code base" and having commit access. The committers are the gatekeepers and the steamrollers.

What I'm effectively asking is this:

1. If Google opts to steer Chromium in a way that the community finds objectionable, could the community stop it?

2. If the community opts to steer Chromium in a way that Google finds objectionable, could Google stop it?

Yeah, but if many people are working on the browser code and those people don’t like what Google is doing anymore, then they individually or collectively could fork the code, just like Google forked their engine from WebKit when they wanted to move in a different direction than apple

> "1. If Google opts to steer Chromium in a way that the community finds objectionable, could the community stop it?"

The answer to that is obvious. Of course not.

Google owns Chromium's repository. Even if the "community" decides to fork Chromium, Google owns Chrome, so any fork of Chromium is completely irrelevant. That's because people download and install Chrome and not obscure Chromium forks.

And that is why web standards are important ;-)

“Obscure Chromium forks” – like Samsung Internet and Edge?

Remember: Chromium itself is an “obscure fork” of WebKit...

>> "“Obscure Chromium forks” – like Samsung Internet and Edge?"

Yes, exactly like those two.

>> "Remember: Chromium itself is an “obscure fork” of WebKit..."

Actually when Google forked WebKit, Chrome wasn't obscure at all. But yes, that's the perfect proof that Google doesn't want to cooperate when they aren't pulling the strings.

Don't forget Opera is a re-skinned Chrome.

Right, at which point Opera too became completely irrelevant.

First they switched their engine to Blink, then predictably after 3 years sold out to an obscure Chinese private equity fund.

I mean it's re-skinned in the same way as Samsung Internet and I believe Edge will be: a totally different browser UI implementation around the same browser engine.

Samsung Internet has their own implementations of quite a few web standards - calling it a reskin isn’t very accurate

1. No.

2. Yes.

In the past, some Opera employees do have commit access to Blink. When I was working on the content layer of Chromium (and some other parts) as an Opera employee I never had commit access, though I do get bug editing access (which is for triaging bugs).

Overall, it doesn't feel like there is a community at all, it's more like Google deciding everything then tell external contributors as a courtesy. I believe there can be technical influences driven by non-Google contributors but that's pretty rare.

That said, perhaps Microsoft can be an exception if their participation is big enough.

If google is a jerk to Microsoft, you can always fork. That is the beauty of open source software. The destiny is in your hands if you’re willing to put in the work.

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