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Comment by zero_shift | Hacker News Reader

You know. That actually highlights an understated risk of the Chromium monopoly.

What happens if Chrome... doesn't become evil, it's just mismanaged? What happens if the team loses personnel and gains too much tech debt? What happens if Chromium is run into the ground just by happenstance? I don't know, maybe they give it to a product manager, or they try Scrum or something.

It's a lot of influence to put in the hands of a single fallible team.

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As we've seen happen before with other formerly-popular browsers like Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Firefox, the users just move on to whichever other browser works better for them at the time.

Internet Explorer was a lot of wandering in the desert. Let’s not repeat IE 6 mkay?

We're already there, ironically mostly pushed by the anti-IE generation.

If it wasn't for the special Safari status on Apple devices, it would be total domination, Web == ChromeOS.

Which was back when you had a bunch of options. If firefox goes under and chromium throws up, it's not like there's a large field of choices.

"What if nobody wanted to continue developing browsers" is an unrelated issue. If Firefox goes under, Chromium throws up, and nobody else thinks it's worthwhile to do anything with the codebases or make a new separate one then the problem is nobody wants to build a browser not how many wanted to build a browser in the past.

I'm seeing this already with how they're handling the new right-click contextual Search feature being moved to open the results in the new "Search sidebar" rather than a new tab. This was supposedly able to be disabled with the flag "Search web in side panel" (there's no option for it in the preferences), however if the completely undocumented "CSC" flag was left at it's default then it overrides any other flag to force enable the feature. You can see the consequences of this decision to this very day in places like /r/chrome with users complaining that disabling the feature flags isn't working.

> What happens if Chrome... doesn't become evil, it's just mismanaged?

When executed by an entity with enormous power, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Is chromium hostile towards non Google contributions? It's not clear to me why a community of many parties couldn't form and prevent this possibility. From what I can tell, the problem is largely a lack of companies who want to participate in chromium development.

This article from Igalia describe pretty well the situation around contribution to gecko/webkit/blink : https://bkardell.com/blog/2023-Mid-Season-Power-Rankings.htm...

Very interesting read!

If the chromium community are unable to write their own browsing engine, then they are shackled to whatever google implements. When WEI turns out to be so intertwined with deep functionality that you can't really excise it, what are these so called "alternatives" going to do, just not update the chromium codebase ever?

That depends if you contribution is conforming with google's strategy / vision. Very likely google is going to be hostile to the future contribution to re-enable extension manifest v2.

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