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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

> There's a competitive marketplace of browsers

There isn't. There are exactly three independent browser vendors:

- Google with Chrome. Chrome dominates the market to such an extent that Google pushes through its internal APIs as "standards"

- Apple with Safari. They flat out refuse to implement many of Chrome's shenanigans, and also have issues with priorities and funding

- Mozilla with Firefox. Much like Safari, they are increasingly refusing to implement Chrome's shenanigans. But Firefox is rapidly declining in relevance, and will be on the brink of extinction within a few years (it already has at best ~150-199 million users)

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Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Brave. At least 5. Also, whipping together a simple browser is quite easy given the embedding APIs available. It's good enough to make the point.

> Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Brave. At least 5.

Chrome, Edge and Brave are the same engine

> whipping together a simple browser is quite easy

Slapping lipstick on a pig doesn't make it a different animal.

Yes, there are superficial differences like watching ads in Brave to earn their "coin", but it doesn't make them a truly different/competitive browser.

Similarity of the code base doesn't matter, because we're talking about what sort of things a browser maker who "goes nuts" might do, like trying to switch off SSL or upload everything you type to their servers. In which case it's easy to patch that stuff out and/or just build a new shell around the underlying (fixed) rendering engine.

That's the reason browser makers open sourced their renderers in the first place - exactly to help the web be more decentralized. And it works. If tomorrow Chrome blocks a website because it mis-gendered someone, OK, I'll switch to Safari. And if they do the same thing I'll switch to Edge. Etc. In extremis, I'll make my own browser based on the open code and sell it to people who really hate censorship. There are lots of ways to respond to this type of 'attack' but they don't rely on cryptography (I can't think of a cryptographic algorithm that could stop such a thing). Instead it's decentralization that fixes it. That's my point.

Ah. Now I got you. Agreed

> Instead it's decentralization that fixes it.

That's FOSS. You can have FOSS using centralized, federated or decentralized protocols, I don't see a direct connection between the two.

To go back a little, Moxie's main point has always been about the advantages of centralized protocols vs decentralized ones, not about FOSS vs proprietary software. In practice, he seems to favor (at least for Signal) centralized protocols and FOSS.

It doesn't have to be open source. The same argument applied when most browsers were proprietary, it was just less strong because it was so much harder to create a competitor. There was still competition though, and a decentralized network of servers (you can think of links as edges in a p2p network).

Browsers based on chromium like brave also refuse to enable chrome shenanigans.

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