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Comment by re-thc | Hacker News Reader

Can Google just "donate" Chrome to a foundation like a lot of big companies do to deal with this?

Maybe we'll soon have Apache Chrome!

There is no foundation with the budget to even maintain a web browser, let alone keep developing. If Google is not footing the bill then Safari will become the torch bearer, and Apple has no incentive to make Safari become more capable to threaten that sweet IAP revenue.

Have there been meaningful changes to the browser spec since ES2015 support was baked in? Chrome, Safari etc. are not developing their browsers for the betterment of the web. One company wants to shove ads in your face, the other wants you out of the web entirely and into their walled garden of apps and ads.

From a security standpoint, I'm sure it's more complicated, but UBO and warning dialog boxes about downloading files to your device, logging into services without 2FA would probably solve a lot of those problems. Does a billion dollar corp have to be involved considering how much has gone into Linux from people's pro bono efforts?

Linux kernel gets so so much of corporate support, and is still a much more smaller project than any web browser. People's pro bono efforts stopped being enough for linux about 2 decades ago at the very least.

Do you all forget the web pre chrome? Google and Chrome forced browser vendors to do better by standards in the first place. Google’s stewardship forced browser vendors to compete like never before.

I don't remember Google doing that. What I remember from that time is a browser war happening between the power players in mobile with iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

I would attribute the improvement in browser standards support to the finalization of the HTML5 spec by the W3C in 2009, which led to browser vendors harmonizing their feature set. We still needed jQuery to ensure cross-browser support, and floats and polyfills to get sites to work on mobile. That ended when browsers harmonized ES2015 support and built in support for flexbox and grid.

> I don't remember Google doing that.

They didn't

> I would attribute the improvement in browser standards support to the finalization of the HTML5 spec by the W3C in 2009

I would attribute it to IE losing market share. It was always IE... and <the rest>.

> There is no foundation with the budget to even maintain a web browser

There doesn't need to be. Google can keep building it just with regulators out of sight.

IBM and lots of other companies "donate" software for similar reasons.

Like what Mozilla was supposed to be doing all along?

Apache is where projects go to slowly die.

Is this really true? Something that can be supported by clear evidence? I’ve seen this trotted out many times, but it seems like there are interesting Apache projects:

https://airflow.apache.org/

https://iceberg.apache.org/

https://kafka.apache.org/

https://superset.apache.org/

It's superficially true of any large stewardship organization. After N years some significant percent of projects will be on their way out. These will continue accumulating year over year and they potentially won't be disposed of for decades (and for good reason).

Meanwhile only a vanishingly small fraction of projects remains at the center of public attention for an extended period of time. People develop a skewed perspective because we interact with many of the most popular projects on a daily basis.

https://openoffice.apache.org/ is the context in which I've seen this saying get regurgitated the most.

I wrote about the situation with Apache Open Office here:

https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-softw...

Or Oracle. :D

Really? Airflow, Arrow, Iceberg, Kafka are dying projects?

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