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Comment by earenndil | Hacker News Reader

Second point I agree on, first point--how? Chromium is opensource. What can google do?

People need to stop with this argument. Chromium might be open source, but it's still Google who decides what get merged. And yes, people can fork, do their own patches, fixes, but if it deviates too much from Google, you'll end up with a new browser to maintain on your end without a team the size of Google. If all theses teams choose to not implement their own browser, it's for a reason: a web browser is a complex piece of software. And the best example of this is the Edge team who forfeited implementing their own and just went with Chromium.

I think Edge is good for Chromium. That puts Microsoft as a stakeholder there too, which takes power away from Google. If Apple were to move to a chromium-backed Safari, that would mean that three major players would be stakeholders in Chromium having a sane future.

This means that if you send a meaningful patch, Google doesn't like it, but Microsoft and Apple do, it might get merged.

Google owns and controls the chromium project, if they don't like a patch, its not getting merged.

I kinda agree that we don't need myriad of browsers. OS and CPU duopoly seems to be kinda ok. But for something that's _supposed to_ be universal it makes no sense to encourage fragmentation...

> chromium-backed Safari

Double whammy. Chromium runs on fork of WebKit which is Safari's engine.

I don't understand why you think this means that Google can easily kill all Chrome clones in one funny day.

Blacklist their user agents/fingerprints from all Google services (usually by citing some security concern).

Edit: sure, there's perhaps 1% of alt-browser users who actively avoid all Google's services, but rest actually depend on them...

This could happen with literally any browser and has absolutely no relation to whether or not they are based on the chromium source.

They definitely can't reasonably do that but in the long run I don't think Brave has the resources to maintain a hard fork from Chromium. That's the main reason I don't really get the Brave hype when Firefox does the job just fine and is actually a fully independent codebase instead of a relatively shallow customization of Chromium.

The only argument that keeps coming up is that Brave has a built-in adblocker but it's not like installing ublock origin is very challenging in Firefox (and on top of that your extensions are automatically synchronized if you use the Sync feature) and the relatively blurry monetization scheme of Brave makes me think that in the long run this built-in ad-blocker might prove a liability more than a strength. I'll take my ad-blocking independent, third-party and non-profit, thank you.

Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Epic, Blisk, (and Edge?) can pool development resources. I dont think all the forks would have as much problem as people believe they would. A ton of webkit users switched to blink nearly overnight.

I think the bigger issue is chrome implementing an new web feature that blink-fork2 and firefox dont agree with, that web devs start implementing anyway. Google controls web development more than they control browser development.

Theres also the WideVine argument, but for me personally I dont see why i need my primary browser to also play netflix. Its not that hard to open a separate netflix app/browser. The amount of drm encapsulated video I watch in my browser is minimal to none.

Google can make forks of Chromium unusable in practice by refusing to license their WideVine DRM module.

This has already happened: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/03/googles_widevine_dr...

> Developer Samuel Maddock found this out to his cost. He's been working on an open source Electron-based (Chromium) browser called Metastream that allows users to stream videos in sync with one another. It's designed to be a way for friends to watch shows together even when they're apart.

> But Google's Widevine DRM business doesn't want to work with him. After four months of waiting, the firm responded to his request to license their proprietary DRM code, in conjunction with the castLabs API, with a denial.

(edited: formatting)

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