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Comment by discopicante | Hacker News Reader

I am less convinced by the same argument used when IE was the dominate browser: that consolidating browser rendering / JS engines is at odds with innovation and freedom.

IE was closed source and proprietary; Chromium is open source and not proprietary. IE was closely integrated with Windows; Chromium is OS agnostic. IE developer tools were completely insufficient or even non-existent; Chromium developer tools are accepted as setting the bar / standard.

Note that I am not advocating for Firefox to adopt Chromium, only that the common argument against that decision seems tired and outdated.

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Everything you said should come with the caveat for now. There's no reason that Google couldn't take the tack that Android, ChromeOS, etc. require Chrome. Chromium could also be closed off with no warning like nearly every product Google has shut down without warning. As soon as it stops being economically efficient, or Google just plain decides to move on.

No as outdated. Chromium is google, plain and simple. Anyone else is tailing behind. Without a solid alternative, it will suffocated even more competition and allow to have a blind/single view on how the web is.

As long is a cocacola/pepsi thing, the web MUST collaborate and hear at least 2 strong opinions.

The problem is not as bad as IE, for sure.

However, Chromium is just as much a strategic asset for Google. If Google were to decide to have APIs that work only for Google properties (hint: they already do), they can introduce them in Chromium and none of the Chromium-based browsers can reasonably decide to go in a different direction.

Now, if you recall, Google/Alphabet has interests in many pies around the world. It's not very hard to imagine how Google/Alphabet could introduce APIs that would let them leverage their web monopoly towards other fields. Think credit cards, banking, shopping, wearables, DRMs, cars, ...

Again, just as in the Microsoft era, I don't know that Google will do that. But just as in the Microsoft era, it's a question of how much power you are willing to put in the hands of a single monopoly.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, that's what I was thinking as well.

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