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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>Specifically, it's not worth it if no one uses it because they've switched to Chrome to get the functionality they want.

Agreed with the overall comments in comment section. Seems like an overreaction or making a big deal out of nothing.

Am I missing something?

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If running Chromium is no longer viable, and the web increasingly doesn’t work on Firefox, then for the first time in the web’s history, we don’t have an open-source browser. The web becomes proprietary tech owned by Google. Just let that sink in.

... or just like the last browser war that Firefox won.

But all this really does is prevent some google services from working. Why does that make it "no longer viable"?

I use both Firefox and Chromium on ppc64le because only Chromium has a working JIT compiler through IBM's V8 port. I don't use sync or any of Google's services, because I'm just not interested.

Talking about dropping Chromium entirely over it feels like either an overreaction or a political move to try and get Google to acquiesce.

> and the web increasingly doesn’t work on Firefox

I have been using Firefox as my daily driver for years now and I can assure you the web works perfectly fine. I can't remember the last time I came across a website that was even slightly broken on Firefox and worked on Chrome.

Yeah this is the sentence which jumped out at me too. Like, what? Across the diversity of new products out there, I've never had any problems with stuff not working on Firefox.

I can, but it’s nearly always Google properties that are broken. E.g. the date picker in Google Books search was broken for a month up until a week ago. Oops.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871251023278080

Jitsi has issues with Firefox (https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758) preventing it to work as well as in Chrome.

This is not a Firefox issue

  Quote from your link Nov 1, 2019

>we will soon start working on better Firefox support

It's not a Firefox issue, it's an issue Jitsi has with Firefox which is the context of the parent comment

Just to be clear, Firefox is my main browser. Maybe we use different websites/webapps, but I run into more and more “optimized for Chrome” messages every year. There are lots of examples all over this discussion.

https://i.imgur.com/G20vFBJ.jpg

But, what exactly do these APIs do that would make chromium , and open source browsing, "no longer viable"? A browser works perfectly fine without bookmark sync, and apparently that's the most painful API to remove.

Maybe. I think this single action cements Google as a bad actor and pulls the "open source" rug out from under Chrome. This ONE thing will be the defining factor in me dumping Google moving forward.

Really, couldn’t one that cared about this just add bookmark syncing to chromium? Using some other service?

One could, but the Chromium sourcecode provided by Google is a quickly moving target. So your patch will need to be updated very often. Distro maintainers are already complaining about Chromium being a lot of work because of the rate of change and build breakage. A patch will make that worse.

Also, I would bet Google would do a few "neccessary" changes in the bookmark parts over the next releases, just to make your patch not work.

The specific problem of syncing bookmarks is probably solvable with an extension. But the move suggests that Google doesn't view Chromium as something that people will use directly, like they're not interested in people using open source Android without their proprietary components. If they gradually make more and more pieces Chrome-only, it will get harder to make a relevant browser by forking Chromium, because there will be more to reimplement before people consider using it.

And, of course, that makes perfect sense for Google. Chrome is no longer the scrappy insurgent. It's the king of the hill now, so it can start putting the fences up against competitors.

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