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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

I have a naive question. If chromium is open-source, why not strip it from telemetry and other “badness” and use it as a base to build a browser, which is essentially just UI around the rendering engine? I simply don’t understand how a $3M CEO and >>250 employees is required for a program to exist, which shows tabs, address bar, list of downloads, settings form and a couple of sites for extensions and installation. Today people are writing entire 3d high-tech games on unity/unreal by a team of two, but to render some text and images we suddenly need all that enterprise monstrosity.

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> If chromium is open-source, why not strip it from telemetry and other “badness” and use it as a base to build a browser

That's exactly how qt-webengine is packaged. And qutebrowser (based on qt-webengine) is fantastic for a volunteer effort, but memory leaks and other issues, too much stuff for one volunteer to realistically address, make it difficult to use as a daily driver. And that's just building a UI around an existing rendering engine!

The root of the issue is: W3C specifications are >100 million words, and growing at a rate of hundreds of new standards per year. So even if the Chromium code base were forked from its current state, a team of full-time developers would be required just to keep up with new W3C standards.

What I find tragic about the Mozilla mismanagement is, if one guy is willing to develop and maintain qutebrowser as a volunteer, then surely Mozilla can find developers who would be willing to work on Firefox at sub-FAANG-but-reasonable salaries without the waterfront San Francisco office.

I see. But did anyone try to fix that >100M words issue? Is there even a point to have a standard that only a couple of direct-profit bigcorps can implement in reality? Even MS could not and gave up, as I understand it.

The standards you need to implement a functioning web browser are far less than ">100M words". W3 has published a lot of stuff in the last 20+ years, but you don't need much of it.

If they did that all the USP that exists in Firefox would be gone and their market share would fall to 0.001% instead of 3%.

People might praise Microsoft for moving Edge to Chromium but ultimately it's because Microsoft couldn't compete on web standards and security and didn't want to invest further resources in to something not earning them money.

The idea is to have more than one rendering engine so no one can push their own agendas through dictating the web standards.

But if google pushes its agenda through chrome, it stays in chrome, non-issue. If it does that through chromium, isn’t it easier to remove it from there and not spend a fortune? Or if with time it will pull code from chromium to chrome (thus crippling the former), isn’t it easier to work on existing codebase until it really does that?

Un-googled chromium exists...

Yes, but what's the market share of that?

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