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Comment by taf2 | Hacker News Reader

I can't be alone in my view that open source won. Just not the original Mozilla open source browser. Instead the re-invented one spear headed by Google - Chrome. Chrome is like the 2.0 of everything the IE6 team and Mozilla team learned the hard way. It was built by many of the original founding members of those teams. It's not a bad thing when Microsoft now uses the open source Blink rendering engine. It's not a bad thing that Apple uses the open source Webkit engine. My feeling is "we won". The web is so much better today thanks in part to the amazing teams that came together sponsored by Google to build Chrome. Time marches forward and there are plenty of interesting problems to overcome for the web as a platform. I just think we can move on from M$ bad, Mozilla good... Mozilla showed us we could have a better browser and helped break the web free from the shackles of Microsoft. There's new problems to solve new fights to win just this one, is IMO, over.

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Open source won the browser battle versus proprietary browsers, but it feels like FSF style "free software" is losing the war. Chrome is certainly open source but product development is completely dominated by Google. Google drives the web standards; they design the "reference" browser; as Google shifts to maintain ad-driven profit margins they're positioned to displace ad blockers.

It doesn't matter if they Manifest V3 implementation is open sourced; If Web Environment Integrity is ultimately implemented then having access to the source doesn't really buy you anything. In a future where WEI is mandatory then being able to build Chromium without WEI empowers you to run a browser that's summarily locked out of services that demand WEI.

Open source mattered much more when simple access to source code gave users meaningful freedom but we're transitioning away from that era. Google is on the path to make open source irrelevant by providing an open source browser that must be built with the Google-specified set of features in order to operate correctly.

We can't claim a victory when open source software implements embrace-extend-extingush semantics.

That would be great, if Chrome was actually open source, and if the Chromium and Chrome projects weren't run by a company with perverse incentives (see: Manifest v3).

That's just splitting hairs. Chrome is not holding back features from Chromium, so Chromium has everything that Chrome has. The only things it's missing are things that literally don't matter to Chromium users (like google sync, what are you going to do, make your own google corporation?) or things that literally can't be open-sourced (non-free codecs).

The point here is that open-source "won" because nobody is trying to push features on the W3 Consortium without providing a reference implementation that is also the live, production code in the flagship browser of the largest browser company.

Well the closed source bit is that you also cannot reproduce the binary yourself (so we don't actually know if there is other code in Chrome), and Chrome presumably adds a load of (non open-source) code around sending your browsing data and history to Google servers.

The open source version also doesn't include any way to do automatic updates, sync with your google account, or have access to the extensions store. None of this is inherent to the open source version, but presumably it benefits Google to push their closed-source version which includes all their secret-tracking-sauce and allows them to avoid people forking the project entirely to remove ads.

Firefox manages to support all different video types while having reproducible builds (see: OpenH264) :)

> cannot reproduce the binary yourself

Don't need to, I'm not using Chrome

> sync with your google account

Don't need to, I don't have a Google account

> or have access to the extensions store

The store that will soon ban adblockers..? Also, Firefox can't access the Chrome store either

My point is you can't find fault with Chromium without conflating it with Chrome

We don't move on until Google lets us protect our privacy. Containers would be a good start.

Google stands ready to snatch our victory away.

Honestly I feel like the world would have been better without Google and Microsoft.

The Web has been co-opted, and until those entities lose influence over standards, the environment is at risk.

They should have moved onto their own protocol already.

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