(Regardless of motivation, they’re lending more support than most other companies, so it’s applaudable nonetheless.)
(Regardless of motivation, they’re lending more support than most other companies, so it’s applaudable nonetheless.)
Both companies are basically hedging against future incentive misalignment with other (larger) companies, and reducing their dependencies on platforms they have ~zero influence over.
Hedging on a promising upstart makes a lot of sense.
Who else would you consider?
Chromium-based browsers from companies other than Google are still contributing to Google’s hegemony. And Mozilla is funded by Google.
Interesting take, since Google has both authored and supported hundreds of FLOSS projects over many years. They even sponsored summer "internships" for students to contribute to Open Source software as long as a maintainer bothered to register and promise to mentor the student via "Summer of Code"
They aren’t going to do this, though, so long as new releases of Chromium are reasonable.
Also, I don’t see any sign that Google even wants to do it? This is not really evidence-based reasoning, it’s just “I can imagine something evil that Google might do.”
Google markets Chrome relentlessly, with popups in search and YouTube if you're using other browsers, browser choice dialogs in Google iOS apps (despite iOS having a default browser setting for 5 years now), Chrome getting bundled into random Windows software installers, etc.
Many devs actively desire single-engine development and testing and many aren't shy about using Chrome only features already. If they had the capability to tell users to go install Chrome instead of targeting broadly supported features, they would do so in a heartbeat.
Please read Mozilla's story on how Google sabotaged them: https://archive.is/tgIH9
Oh. And they very literally killed Internet Explorer: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
Oh. And Google's mobile apps always conveniently forget the setting of "always use system browser and never ask me", and will keep asking you to open with "chrome", "google", or "system browser".
Oh and...
I disagree with this. Firstly, in this article they talk about how they "killed" IE6 in favour of later versions of IE, but MS ultimately killed IE with neglect until it was far too late.
Never having to use polyfills or CanIUse tables, plus testing on the same environment they develop on.
The moment iPhones aren't allowed to force browsers to use Webkit (the EU is already pushing for this), the open web dies. There will no longer be any draw for web developers to develop for standards instead of developing for Chrome.
This is a problem of Apple's own making.
My work sent over some old MacBook for when we need to test something unique to Safari, so it's not even the hardware aspect. It's the "I need to find another place to stash a machine, and then wire up KVM switches to use my highly opinionated I/O device choices, on a finite sized desk" factor.
As sickening as thought as it is, the best hope there is Microsoft-- they can afford to hire the necessary army of developers, and their incentives are aligned just far enough away from Google's that they would have reasons to do it.
The problem is that they're also in the ad economy now, so their opportunity to play it for relevance is shot.
They had a window where they could have said "Edge: the Chromium-based browser that treats uBlock Origin as a first-class citizen" but instead they'd rather add weird popups to credit card fields asking if I want to use Klarna instead.
The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because of their ad monopoly. Same with search, Gmail, Translate, Maps. None of those things can exist without the ad monopoly funding it all.
Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
Until that’s addressed, Chrome being dominant is a problem, because Google has created an “open moat” with their resource expenditure. Microsoft sure as hell isn’t going to be able to justify that kind of spend on their Chromium fork, and so their influence will never be of note.
> (at least until there’s a massive shift in political headwinds)
It did look like it for a while with the US its antitrust action and the EU also taking aggressive action. But then Google kissed the ring and the DoJ pulled back it's recommendation of Google divesting DoubleClick, and the EU lost the staredown with Trump and made their measures toothless too.
Who knows what will happen in the 2030s though. If the Democrats get into power again, I'm sure they'll remember how big tech switched up on them and there will be a serious reckoning.
I haven't trudged through Chromium's commit statistics but has Microsoft been upstreaming many contributions? I'm skeptical that they are ready to take on the full brunt of Chromium maintenance on a whim, it would take a decent while to build up the teams and expertise for it.
Just like management doesn't a F about the state of UWP, WinUI and anything related to it.
When Microsoft beat Netscape with IE, it was by building a far better browser. Google is a stronger competitor than Netscape ever was though. Without Google dropping the ball (like Netscape), Microsoft would never exceed Chrome's performance by enough to be the fastest, most compatible (with Chrome), etc.
It is also just classic Microsoft when they are hungry. Like making Word use WordPerfect files and keyboard shortcuts. Only today it is that their browser is mostly Google, Linux is built into Windows 11, SQL Server ships on Linux, and their most popular IDE is open-source built on open tech (Electron) they didn't create.
When they get threatened, nothing is too sacred for Microsoft to kill or adopt.
Microsoft firing on all cylinders, when they want to, is a terrifying force.
Microsoft lands many changes in Chromium first before they show up in Edge (logistically it's easier to do things this way for merging reasons), but they do also upstream changes to Chromium that show up in Edge first.
It would very unlikely be something which would affect Microsoft’s bottom line. They wouldn’t care.
> and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
Who’s “everyone”? Anyone who cares minimally about possible shenanigans in Chromium is already selectively merging changes.
Edge aggressively sets itself as the default browser and slurps information from Chrome without permission. Edge and Microsoft are not and will not be a saviour from Google and Chrome.
Why would people trust Microsoft more than Google, though? Even with really bad actions, switching browsers is very difficult (i.e. it requires making an active choice and change about an obscure topic) and I don't see normal people doing it, which is what would be required for this to happen.
Microsoft can't get any traction for Edge even with the pushiness on their OS and massive market share. I recently installed Windows 11 on a box and even searching for Chrome had the top portion of the screen show "You don't need a different browser!" at the top of Bing. Did that stop me? No. Not going to use a Microsoft browser, thanks.
My 70 year old mother doesn't want the faff of installing Firefox so Edge fits the bill. It provides for her, her needs. I've installed Firefox and it sits untouched.
Microsoft doesn't care if people use it or not. It's easier and cheaper for them to integrate as Chromium does than it is to upkeep Trident. It's not their business too.
My take to why they chose Chromium is that Firefox (Netscape) has always been seen as an independent rebel.
Microsoft is corporate as is Google. I'm sure some backhand deals too.
I don't have any more insight than any other commenter, but in my estimation a major factor is how practical the browser is to fork. By the time Microsoft switched to a Chromium base for edge, creating and maintaining a Chromium fork with meaningfully different UI was fairly well-trodden ground because it had been done several times already, whereas almost nobody had forked Firefox (except for toggle some flags or keep the UI frozen in time). The one countervailing example, Brave, also switched to Chromium for similar reasons.
Additionally, this was the beginning of the arc of working overtime to court web developers that it's still in the midst of. By shuttering Chakra (the old Edge rendering engine) and switching to Blink, Microsoft improved its reputation with web devs.
They do. If they merge DRM into it tomorrow or something alike, it trickles down to all users of Chromium and Google Chrome.
You can build _a fork_ of it. But the enormous majority of the masses don’t use your fork — they use upstream.
However, Google Chrome is so ubiquitous that any changes Google makes to it are expected to be available in all other browsers and its a kind of defacto control even if it isn't technically control of the upstream Chromium project.
If we're discussing someone else forking Chromium because hypothetically Google decided to once again Be Evil it is important to understand, from a technical standpoint, that the fork comes from code before Google does their stuff and not after. Ripping all of google's tendrils out would be a monumental undertaking. Building a similar browser from before Google bakes in their telemetry is infinitely easier and more trustworthy in my opinion.
It is correct that Google can and does decide that some features should remain private before they are developed. However, there are significant logistic and cultural hurdles to keeping something private, and as a result it's really only possible in certain parts of the codebase. Sometimes things that have been developed in private are eventually made public, and Chrome devs will often call that "upstreaming", but I think that's not really the same thing as what most people are talking about when they use the words upstream and downstream. And these instances are fairly uncommon in the history of the project.
Otherwise, IMO it is not really correct to say that changes flow from Chrome into Chromium. Nearly all development is done in the public repos and so they would be available simultaneously for either build. There aren't really official releases of Chromium per se, but a full build of Chromium containing a given change is basically always available before the corresponding full build of Chrome. There may be very rare exceptions for security fixes that are shipped before they are made public, but it would actually pretty hard to land such a change so I doubt it's happened more than a few times.
So, more generally speaking, in my opinion it's not really useful to talk about "upstream" and "downstream" for Chrome and Chromium, definitely not in the day-to-day sense. Chrome and Chromium are multi-repo projects, and there is only ever a single copy of a particular repo that is used for either. The same branches in a given repo are used for both Chrome and Chromium at any point in time. There is a main branch and release branches, and most of the time (but not always) a change will land in the main branch before a release branch. But I don't think most people would call "main" upstream of "release" in that sense.
[ There are rare situations where Google will develop experiments on a private branch of a repo, but those don't usually end up getting shipped to anyone. ]
This is different from how (most of?) the other Chromium-based browsers operate, where my understanding is that they usually do have true forks of (some of) the repos and changes flow downstream from the Google-maintained ones to ones under their control in the normal sense of the word.
They do have technical control over the upstrean Chromium project. There's an invite only pool of developers who decide what gets committed to Chromium and they are Google employees.
The real difficulty is that you need someone with large pockets to fund any forks if those forks are going to be viable. And that is due to the complexity of the web as a platform.
As you noted, I don't think forking and maintaining a Google sized code base is a realistic alternative. But by the same token, I don't think that the possibility of forking said code base is what people typically mean by not having control.
“Each other”? Google forked from Apple; Apple forked from KDE, not Google.
There's a tightly controlled pool of developers who make up the decision-making body about which commits get approved. That pool is dominated by Google employees so they effectively control whether something gets committed.
So it's not open in the sense that would be most people's first impression, which is that anyone can contribute code to the project and see it realized. You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.
>Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
I don't see how that follows. Google disproportionately invests in a browser, controls it and with it much of the destiny of the web. The fact that Google is leveraging their ad monopoly to create and maintain a dominant browser is the issue. At least, it's an issue. The ad monopoly powers their control over the web and vice versa.
As opposed to maintaining an alternate google size code base of a non-chromium browser?
Getting your Steam library to work on Linux before it got Valve's blessing with Proton wasn't a great experience. If they wanted to, they could have easily decided to block games from running on Linux and gave some statement about preventing piracy and protecting users from malware.
I'm optimistic that this investment means we'll see more open standards and large browser makers being forced to collaborate and create simpler standards without compromising security.
That at least demonstrated, to some extant, that Valve doesn't care where you run your games, as long as you buy them on Steam.
There weren't any real roadblocks for that caused by Valve. And it definitely wasn't as hard as you're implying.
> If they wanted to, they could have easily decided to block games from running on Linux and gave some statement about preventing piracy and protecting users from malware.
They could have just like any software developer could but they didn't. They also didn't block the Steam for Linux client from running on unapproved distributions or even FreeBSD.
Which Proton are you referring to?
As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
For-profit companies care about profits for their shareholders, that's it. Heck, even non-profit often tend to value more profit than their integrity or cause but that's a topic for another day.
I wish this wasn't the case but even good-willed individuals at the helm of for-profits are forced to pursue profit and avoid anything clearly leading to losses, else they are sacked.
Now, it's in Cali, where it's not as strong a statement as in some other states, but it's still got a lot of precedent behind it.
Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication.
Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available.
Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.
Examples of things which don't count:
- Supporting an open source competitor to avoid getting hammered by antitrust
- Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing
- Giving money to a foundation ran by a friend/family member
- Doing an activity to try to fix an evil thing they did before and backfired
- Doing something good for obvious PR reason (e.g. By being heavily advertised) but then do something even worse in the same area later on
I'm genuinely interested in a healthy conversation about this. But I honestly cannot think of anything which either is generally free for the company or that will help them getting (or not losing) more money. Happy to be wrong.
You are arguing from a prejudiced position.
What evidence would be required for you to believe that a donation to an environmental cause wasn't greenwashing?
Your list of exceptions seems fairly obviously aimed at making the task impossible because it's all based on interpretation of motives. You're essentially discounting all actions that have positive societal effects as long as doing so is motivated by money which is counter to the point I was making.
Giving money away to charity, by the meme interpretation of fiduciary duty, would be illegal. Instead, companies do it all the time because it makes them look better which might improve their business outlook in the future. That satisfies fiduciary dury despite it being a red line in the accounting books.
Wouldn't you like to live in a world where people care enough about doing good things that they'd prefer to patronize companies that do good things? That seems like an incredibly positive effect, regardless of the business' motives.
This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
When VC money is flowing, you see things that look like (or even can be) altruism - but when the belts tighten and waste is eliminated these endeavors need to align with the company's goals.
Therefore, look for what Cloudflare is "buying" in this transaction. I suggest they probably want the PR win as it distracts from their objective of locking down the web, and it's worth the expenditure to them.
You can't even do that honestly. Look at Boeing. It got taken over by know-nothing managers that followed that religion of shareholder value, and what did it do? Destroy shareholder value!
I think we should instead say "we can't rely on any institution to be stable over time". That's a much more sane statement imo.
Startups nominally care more about the long view, as they need to convince investors that they high long-term value and have to act accordingly. As companies grow from VC-funded, to fast-growing public, then to well-established public company, the culture shifts to match dominant shareholder expectations.
For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the prophet stream. That's definitionally why they exist, and we have enough evidence from the history of everything ever to assume that they will for the most part act that way.
You are saying something different. You are pointing out that the people making decisions aren't necessarily good at making those decisions. Or maybe the incentive structure is set up such that the people making the decisions do not share the goal of profit with the company, and so decide according to what's best for them, which might or might not be what's best for the profit objective.
The instability of institutions in general is yet a third characteristic.
!!!
But they won't. This statement is a declaration of faith/religion, not a statement of fact. It's a common belief, but that doesn't make it true.
There are exceptions all over the place where businesses don't act like robber barons, sure. Take for example Market Basket up here in New England, where the CEO for years and years resisted raising prices and tried to treat workers well, in the interest of maintaining a long-term positive image and being a sustainable element of the region's economy. But guess what: he was just forced out for not being greedy enough. Lots of people seem to be expecting a private equity takeover soon.
This is like saying that history bears out that you can't rely on governments to do anything but prepare for war and then send you out to die in one.
I would like to understand where this breaks down. Would a for-profit individual be more reliable? Would a non-profit? At which point does quality deteriorate?
I recently switched to Kagi and their Orion browser, and that's when I learned about PBCs.
A PBC legally takes a triple mandate, the first is just as any for-profit corp, to maximize shareholder value, the second is to the benefit of the stakeholders, and the last can be anything they write down when they register as a PBC. The Delaware law says:
> The board of directors shall manage or direct the business and affairs of the public benefit corporation in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the specific public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.
If they fail at any of these mandates, you can sue them.
That means they are still for-profit, but also can't decide to favor profit over their other mandate or change their mind. Their other mandate being stakeholders interests, like users, as well as the explicitly stated benefit. For Kagi, that benefit is:
> Kagi is committed to creating a more human-centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities, and society as a whole, with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved.
Now it's not all roses, Anthropic I learned is another PBC. Their benefit is:
> the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity
Which is quite vague, and can be taken in many directions.
But overall, it's much better than normal corporations, because here they are legally obligated to care about stockholder, stakeholder, and some additionally specific "public benefit".
where are you getting this? PBC has no actual legal aspect to it at all - its all self reporting and self adherence. PBC is more marketing/signalling than legal requirements
But IANAL. I am just learning about this, so I'm curious, if you know more than I do, please share.
1) Legally Enforceable: periodic self reporting of public benefit related activities 2) Not legally enforceable: the detailed scope and actual delivery/implementation of said benefits. Third party auditing
i.e. if you try going and suing OpenAI, Anthropic etc. on their stated public benefit contradicting the severe impact datacenters are having to water/electricity in some areas, im quite certain that you would lose.
1) like 1 cent or fraction of cent to get access to page
2) scrawlers will just cache this data on their server or just train on it so will pay just once
3) small content creators will get just make like few dollars our of it
4) CF will get some 10-30% cut from their content semaphore.
5) in the end you small content creator trading their whole content for few dollars but because CF has mass of scale they will make multi millions or more.
I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.
What ridiculous statement.
I've started taking more extreme stance these days of ctrl+w instantly and maybe email the admins if I'm particularly angry that I will not buy whatever they're selling because I simply can't be bothered with their spyware blocking me. Maybe some day people will wisen up on the damage cloudflare is doing to their business.
I compare Cloudflare to border control. Open up your bag. Answer the questions. Present your papers.
I'm not going to say that Cloadflare isn't doing anything fishy, but if they are, it's probably more complicated.
Cloudflare can't determine who you are? No website for you.
This doesn't resonate with me generally. How are you trying to browse anonymously?
Cannot blame CloudFlare for that; they have an obligation to try protect the users of their CDN.
Lacking lived experience re: discrimination is something that's pretty common. I hate to compare my entirely optional 'software veganism' struggles with real discrmination issues, but just because you don't experience discrimination doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I go to online stores, government services, even places of recreation and I get denied service because I have to tunnel to avoid my ISP's unethical practices and I don't use a cloudflare approved browser. It feels bad.
Browsing through a proxy does not need to change your User-Agent. I do this all the time.
Xfinity is not MITMing HTTPS sites! You control your trusted CA list.
You don't need to allow JavaScript to run on all sites.
I think general distrust with any major company these days is warranted, especially one with so much control over the internet. But I agree with your points, too.
This should be relevant to the Cloudflare discussion, posted today:
A New Internet Business Model?
(The site that was "deplatformed" was fine and still exists, much to the chagrin of the minorities it directs hate towards and the people literally stalked there.)
Because they all seem to eventually "screw" us. Google seemed (and maybe actually was) altruistic at some point, and even Apple seemed to be (when the only way they could make money was to do right by the users).
If the CIA wanted to MITM all web traffic, and why wouldn't they, a company like Cloudflare is probably exactly how they'd do it.
They're a gatekeeper to a large chunk of Internet already. If they decide that your IP range stinks? Hope you enjoy your ration of 22 captcha pages a day!
Now, they're making some very transparent moves to leverage what they have to get even more control. And once they get even more control? It's not an "if" they start choking you with it to get more revenue. It's a "when".
People used to say "I wish more companies were like Google". They don't say that anymore.
> The big new game for them is AI crawler metering. Don’t think browser matters much anymore from their perspective.
Truly open browsers are easy to spoof. Approved browsers with whatever attestation features they champion builtin are hard to spoof. So browsers do matter.
Edit: authentication => attestation for accuracy.
Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point.
Hell, Apple device users already get to go in the internet "approved" fast lane because of attestation. iDevices and M-series Macbooks can send out a special response that bypasses all captchas.
Windows 11 has a requirement for TPM2, which features hardware attestation too.
Linux of course cannot be locked down in a similar manner, thus cannot attest and will have to suffer for it.
It would probably be illegal for CloudFlare + Google to outright block you from accessing the internet, but they can just drown you in a sea of captchas until you give up and join the attested crowd. Hell, YouTube outright forces you to sign in if they detect a VPN, they won't even offer a captcha.
Like 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' points out, it isn't a 1984-esque brutal fascist control that will erode our freedoms, but rather a Brave New World-esque situation where people will sign away all (digital) control because the dopamine must flow.
I'm also not sure how this can/would shake out when you can just use tools like Playwright/Puppeteer to manage a real browser. Both Google and MS do this (not as much as bare crawlers) to handle SPA-like site content.
SafetyNet doesn't lock anything down, it just provides an API for applications to verify the app is running in a verifiable and untampered environment.
FTFY
It seems your confusion stems from this premise. Is it possible this is not a correct assumption?
CloudFlare is in the CDN business.
If CloudFlare gatekeeps who can access their CDN, then people will move to a different CDN. Because people want their websites to be accessed by as many people as possible.
Your statement does not compute.
so I doubt they want that
a murky world where you "need" a guardian middle-man is what they want to preserve
there are a alternative on the market like akamai and fastly
people free to use their favorite cdn over CF lol
> whether that’s the least bad practical solution on offer for website owners
> I don’t want to make a judgement on that
I explicitly said I don't want to debate that. Take a deep breath, no one is taking away your favorite CDN.
but replace CF with another provider and they would do the same shit