We Need a Chromium Foundation

> "we should really opt to tear the most successful engine from Google's clutches and spin it off into its own entity"

Already done: degoogled chromium. Nobody uses it. It needs volunteers and funding. Once it has funding and volunteers, you can begin to consider revolting from Google and going in a user-friendly direction.

Brian Kardell's recent post "Webrise"[1] has similar exploration of what humanity might be able to do to become responsible stewards of one it's most important common means. Less specific than this article, & spends a lot more time building context & opening the questions, but both are interested in how we maintain user-agency ongoingly, which is a powerful humanistic nigh-unto religious question to me (in a world which otherwise feels technocratically sapping of agency, a world of intensifying infernalization). This Chromium Foundation could be a candidate answer to Webrise.

To this articles point, I generally have been ok with the patronage system that Chrome gets developed under so far. But it feels like there's no one in the standards bodies room who can say no, who can keep real damage from happening when there is a crisis, which is exactly what's happening with Manifest v3, aka Web Extensions[2].

Just last night, a reply to my consternation about the situation, the stripping away of user rights & agency, prompted someone to suggest we get political, organize, change the game. This article presents some possible starting place for re-defining how we'd caretake one of humanity's greatest shared assets.

I also see a lot of hew & cry that makes me sad. I love WebPackage. The use case[3] goals are so noble & pure. But it feels like there's been a lot of outcry & people running around saying the sky is falling. And I don't get it. But I tell you- it sure feels like the sky is falling regarding MV3, regarding killing dynamic code, regarding extensions losing access to most web platform apis.

[1] https://bkardell.com/blog/Webrise.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29425379 (freshly submitted)

[2] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72

[3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-wpack-use-cases/