The endless browser wars

I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel?

I believe browser diversity is healthy for the world wide web. I don't want Firefox to become dominant either, but right now there is a short supply of browsers which are independent from Chromium. I don't want the W3C to be replaced by the Chromium Project.

I believe Firefox is a good enough browser to go toe-to-toe with Chrome. It and it's developer are not without problems. However, at this point I'd use Firefox even if Mozilla was just as bad as Google because I think the diversity is worth it.

> Much of what appears to be Chrome (or Chromium) functionality is, in truth, provided by servers in Google's data centers. These include bookmark synchronization, the safe-browsing feature, search suggestions, spell-checking, and more.

> On January 15, the Chromium blog carried this brief notice that, as of March 15, non-Chrome builds of Chromium would lose access to these APIs.

> Anticipating this, distributors are already wondering whether packaging Chromium is still worth the effort.

From a first read, I guessed it is time to install Firefox. However, I noticed that I: 1) don't sync bookmarks, 2) don't care for the safe-browsing feature (I understand it is the annoying message that a website is "not safe"?), 3) have my own spell-checking service. So what exactly is meant by "search suggestions"? Is Google actually disabling access to their search API? Why wouldn't this affect Firefox? Why would Google even consider doing this? And, I guess that 4) I can still use another search engine.

So, does anyone know what's hidden under "and more"? Because even if all the features from above were missing, I fail to see why this should result in Chromium being removed from distros. It's still a functional, reliable and very fast browser. I am additionally confused because Chromium without these features is more attractive to me than the current version.

What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway.

Other than Firefox and Brave, I can't think of any "mainstream" browser choices that can be considered free software or open source.

The depressing part is the freedom, the new that the internet once provided is over. It's been turned in to a commercial breeding ground and we are the cattle to be milked and bred. Until we create a whole new infrastructure, protocol suite away from the broken existing OSI model, the internet isn't going to heal. It's going to be robbed and stabbed repeatedly over and over again.

Look at your browsing history today, how many times have you visited that one site in the last year? Now compare that to how many new sites you have visited in the same year; not a lot I expect.

Pardon ? I don't run on any issue that requires using Chrome instead of Firefox. At least, not usually.

Also, as web developer I always work on Firefox and then I try on Chromiun and Edge to see if I run on a Blink bug (Yeah! I hit a few working on this way) or something that it's different between Firefox and Blink engine

It's very rare that I need to pull up Chrome to use a site, and frankly I blame the website developer. How hard is it to write a web application that works in Firefox? IMO, one has to be pretty sloppy or lazy to wind up creating a Chrome-only site.

Firefox allows me to customize it exactly that way I want, and it's reached the point where I haven't been forced to change that look and feel in a long time. It has a ton of cool features I haven't even had a chance to take advantage yet, such as setting up my own sync server.

That said, it has its warts, and the developer's decisions have frustrated me at times, but this goes for pretty much any software that gets "upgraded" on a regular basis.

Give is a shot. You might find you like it more than you expected.

I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for speech-to-text/text-to-speech, etc.

This gap will grow more and more as new machine learning features are introduced (e.g. natural lang page searching, better translation, etc) which would be very easy for Google to add to it's browser but very expensive for open source projects.

A lot of things could be done to simplify the amount of labor it takes to build a web browser. If you look at the architecture of the web, there is no reason for things to be this complicated - the web doesn't need a complicated high-level language runtime when it could have bytecode a la WASM, for example. But that's exactly the problem, because the reason why things have become so complicated is not because that's just how complicated the problem space is that a web browser attempts to solve, but because the people in charge of the web actually have a vested interest in things being as complicated as possible. When you already have the budget of a nation state, there is not only no benefit to your job requiring less labor to perform, it actually harms you because now competitors need that many fewer resources to compete with you. That's the real problem - they don't want it to be simple and easy, they want it to be complicated and hard, and the present problem of lack of browser diversity is just a consequence of that.

This is the real reason why things have gotten this bad in the browser space, and it's never going to get any better without first addressing this fact and then by breaking basically the entire web by decimating the volume of standards documents web browsers have to follow. There is no other option. Nobody is going to sift through 114 million words of specification documents to build another web browser for the web that exists today.

The web can't be saved. Its replacement will have to start from scratch.

It actually seems like this move by google is what people claim to want: an open source browser that doesn't phone home to google.

HTML5 has long been an open standard, maintained by the W3C. Google's role as a W3C member was to end the original browser war by supporting W3C processes with implementations and evangelism that lead to Chrome becoming the most popular browser.

The article's news, about Chromium losing access to app features such as syncing, is a different battle. It is not about arbitrary syntax being controlled by a corporation vs a standards body. It is about the cost of making useful software that serves the public and is given away for free to enable the commons.

Everybody has the right and the technical opportunity to make a browser and ancillary services such as sync. However, a couple of people in a garage don't live long enough to make a browser. Only well funded and well organised groups have the resources to do so.

Even Mozilla relies upon funding from Google to implement Firefox, so really, Google is funding the whole browser ecosystem. That's an entirely different problem to the one Microsoft got busted for in 1996.

It's a problem alright, and one that needs air and sunlight.

To really give this problem the prominence it deserves and requires, we shouldn't be calling it "the endless browser war". We should be calling it something else. Until we do, the status quo is just going to get stronger and more entrenched, because it isn't anything illegal, proprietary, or closed.

The fact that most consumers like Google and don't see the problem makes it all the more urgent to give this problem a name.

This creates a shift among users, who notice that every site works in the top browser, but only 90% work in browser x, and they start shifting to the top browser and often won't even report problems they have with other browsers. The effect is obviously self-reinforcing, and the top browser continues to gain share.

The counter-measure to this is standards. With rigorous web standards followed by websites and browsers, if the top browser works, so do all the rest.

There isn't much to enforce this though, and there are temptations on all sides not to do the right thing.

There's a separate problem in that Chromium isn't capable of any other ways of more freely and openly syncing the things it used to sync to Google's servers. But when thinking about any open source software, I feel that its important to separate "things it does which I don't want it to do" and "things I wish it did". In other words, code which was written that doesn't serve the users' interests, and code which could serve the users' interests if it were written. I don't believe its productive to worry or complain about the latter; its more productive to just write it, file feature requests, etc. Of course, in Chromium's case, its unlikely they'd be accepted, but that's a separate, third issue.

I also disagree with the article's position that Firefox isn't a valid alternative. Firefox is somewhere within the range of 98% to 102% as good as Chrome, depending on the website you're visiting. By comparison, I would place Safari (the only other real alternate browser on any OS) at 92%-96%. Firefox is a fantastic browser which can absolutely replace Chrome/Chromium, and should be used by more people if for no other reason than to add more balance to the Big Three. Throw out the FOSS ideals for just a second; there are effectively three browsers left, and the most ideal marketshare for those three is 33% each, given that the primary long-term benefit and risk from marketshare is, at the end of the day, power toward influencing the future of the web. Power should be distributed, always.

And this is hardly contentious, but the industry need a 4th browser. I would rank this as the single most important project any company, group, or individual could commit productivity to at this time. Of course, important things are rarely easy, but to me, it doesn't even matter if its open or closed source; open source would be better, but what matters far more is distributing power further.

But on the other hand, I recognize that I am an outlier amongst outliers. The everyday user of Chrome probably does make use of and depends on the Google-specific services embedded in the browser. And so by revoking the API keys for those features, Chromium is crippled and no longer at feature parity with Chrome. While I don't care, a lot of other people will, and so those who might be inclined to install Chromium are going to be less inclined if Chromium is now less featureful and useful to them. Only the especially hardcore about software freedom and personal privacy are going to to see installing the feature-stripped and less-useful Chromium as worth the tradeoff. Those persons are like me, outliers amongst outliers. The net effect? Distros stop providing packages for a browser with an install base that shrinks to something too small to be worth supporting. And now, the only option becomes the proprietary Chrome.

Honestly, this strikes me as a tactic similar to, if not the same as "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" for which Microsoft was so roundly lambasted in the late 90s and early 00s. The question remains then, what to do about it? Anti-trust or other regulations? Something else?

https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-avail...

Yes, chrome has supperior functionality, if you don't care about privacy and freedom then there is no discussion to be had here. If you do care, please don't throw arguments like your fans going loud and your ram filling up. Instead, support open source projects financialy or put volunteer some of your time to help fix these problems.

I am not saying that privacy and freedom should be hard, but as of right now, they are. You either accept it, suck the downsides and help to fix any issues, or you give up and surrender the fate of the field to a single company, Google.

We are all free to do what we think best for ourselves. But please, no fooling ourselves. No excuses.

> Chromium has taken a path similar to Android's; there is a core built with free software, but getting its full functionality requires accepting layers of proprietary code on top of it. The fact that said code is running on a remote server somewhere does not really change that situation.

Google has used this wolf-in-sheep's-clothing approach for yeas, and it has worked. Fortunately, though, it's also backfired a bit. With things like Microsoft Edge using the open core that google has provided (Chromium) on the market, users have a choice of browser host, including what servers their bookmarks/syncing lives on. Not the best choice, perhaps, but still, a choice. :)

HTTP is a lost cause. At this point we need new protocols that are designed to be impossible to monetize. From there new browsers can be built. It'll never get to be as big as the WWW, but I think sub-Internets are the best way to ensure the spirit and creativity of the early WWW lives on.

I was somewhat surprised to see that all the syncing features seem to still exist in this close-to-stock Chromium. It encourages you to sign into a Google account to sync data, use and to use Google for search suggestions, and to install extensions from the Chrome Web Store. Does anyone know how that's possible?

I'd actually be quite pleased if all of this stuff just got stripped out of Chromium. As it is, I spent quite a bit of time going through and turning off as much of it as I could, in some places via semi-confusing defaults write commands.

1: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy

I don't know what Mozilla can do even if they do all the right things, because Google will just keep throwing money punches.

I'm completely unaware of how Google handle these decisions internally, but from the point of view of an outsider they are trying to optimize their resources and output as much as possible. If some service is not extremely successful and profitable, and it's being actively maintained, someone at Google will eventually suggest to move on to other stuff.

The protocol is openly documented afaik, and there might already be efforts to implement an open server. It also has e2ee built-in.

Of course then you might as well go off and use Firefox, Brave or Vivaldi, but it'd be an option nonetheless, if not quite an expensive one.

I have no reason to bookmark pages between devices - different devices for different purposes. I don’t need my work bookmarks on my gaming computer.

For posting random comments to social media I don’t need spell checking either. If grammar needs to be spot on, I use Word etc.

I, for one, have been using Firefox both on desktop and mobile for years without ever having to install Chromium, or even any Webkit-based browser.

Where does the idea that the web does not work well with Firefox come form exactly ?

In between I am slowly moving to Firefox on Fedora, but mostly because I can watch HD videos there, not on Chromium. Firefox is also much faster than Chromium.

Two thousand years later and massive betrayals are still happening on March 15th.

I'd also be okay with a degoogle chromium.

Aren't those mostly Windows users?

  - reminder: Chrome is not/was not opensource
  - Chromium is losing features like bookmark sync on Mar 15
    because Google will no longer issue API keys
  - if you care about opensource, run Firefox (or Chromium)
  - if you are a web dev, support Firefox

It's laughable that Microsoft was under anti-trust scrutiny when they were much smaller company. The Microsoft anti-trust situation created enough lanes for smaller companies at the time, like Google, Apple, etc. to gain traction.

The situation is the same now, anti-trust rules are in place to promote healthy competition at all levels. All these big companies has to be broken up under anti-trust rules to further competition in technology space.

Similarly, the vast majority of new browser APIs are absolute garbage infested with security flaws. Most of them are abused almost exclusively by ad networks, including WASM, Audio Context, Beacon and more.