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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

The idea of moving the web to a single dominating browser engine isn’t a bad one in isolation.

A business monopoly is bad, but a technological monopoly is often just a standard.

Nobody gets upset because every OS under the sun uses OpenSSH rather than competing with their own implementation.

In contrast, Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.

Spin the Chromium project off of being in direct control by Google and into an industry organization and I’d be happy to settle on one browser engine.

Heck, if my iPhone got to use Chromium it would be an improvement.

All the proprietary corporate stuff on top of Chromium isn’t part of the open source project, anyway.

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> but a technological monopoly is often just a standard.

Sure. To use, participate in, and build upon this "open standard", you (or your team) just have to keep up with some of the most well-paid (presumably for a reason) programmers in the world, and then hope they see Chromium as an open standard worthy of pull requests as well.

The model the OP mentions is exactly how openstreetmap functions. A lot of big teddy companies hire people specifically to improve it. Only Google doesn't.

It's not unthinkable for a browser project to work the same way.

Big tech, not teddy :)

Sorry about the autocorrect error. It's too late to change it

Technology monopolies are bad since one critical vulnerability means everybody is impacted. Having a standard that people conform to is fine, but the monopoly on an implementation is bad.

I think the concern here is that, as a practical matter, vendors wouldn't be free to make arbitrary changes within their own forks; some parts of the system would have to remain interoperable. And technical decisions regarding what those parts should do and how they should work would still have to be made somehow, and it's not clear that "open source project" type governance would be better than the W3C process that we have today, especially when it comes to interfacing with governments. Good blog post about this: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/22/chromium-only

I somewhat agree with the rest but:

> In contrast, Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.

Does it? I haven't ever been negatively affected or even affected at all as far as I can tell, I happen not to use Apple products or interact with the Apple ecosystem much.

What would these effects be?

It has some annoying times, mostly for people using apple products, though. Like Macbooks not implementing USB-C monitor chaining but supporting Thunderbolt chaining, or even something as simple as my friend being unable to charge her phone in my car because all of my cables are usb-c.

You don't even have to own Apple stuff to be impacted.

"My phone's dead, can I borrow your charger?"

"Sorry, I have an iPhone."

>Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.

That's a different interface, not just a separate implementation

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