Whether you like it or not (and I certainly don't), you've gotta sort of admire the sheer vision of a fifteen-year project to build a browser so good it comes to monopolize the industry, all because you've had the foresight to realize that monopoly will be crucial to securing your position as the adtech hegemon. An underrated masterpiece of evil genius.
And tech people fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
It's completely and utterly irrelevant that Chromium is open source, because the web is a protocol, and having the source for an implementation of the protocol doesn't matter in the least when you don't control the protocol. You can't just fork Chromium and remove a feature, because websites expect the feature, and your browser won't work on them. You can't just fork Chromium and add a feature, because websites don't care about your tiny fork and won't use your feature. You can't fork Chromium, you have to fork the entire web.
That's exactly what we need to do. More specifically, we need to decouple the app web from the document web. Most of the value of the web to society lies in text, images, and video, in that order. We need a version of the web refocused around basic content with a spec simple enough for a small team to implement a browser for. A subset of HTML/CSS is probably the only way to succeed, since sites would need to work with current browsers. I think a few HTML tags + flexbox + fonts + colors would get you pretty far.
> You can't just fork Chromium and remove a feature, because websites expect the feature, and your browser won't work on them. You can't just fork Chromium and add a feature, because websites don't care about your tiny fork and won't use your feature. You can't fork Chromium, you have to fork the entire web.
In some cases you can (although it may be difficult, because the code might be difficult too and maintaining with merging changes can make it difficult too).
You can remove features you don't want, possibly adding fake features in its place or those that access other features, e.g. the microphone access to instead access a file, etc.
You can add features that most people don't use even if you do use them. It can also be implemented in ways that are backward-compatible. Also, some features that are added are not features that the web pages will need to know anything about, because they are user features instead.
Nevertheless, some things cannot easily be forked in this way. For example, adding a "Interpreter" header to add support for additional file formats and make it compatible even with browsers that do not support it, cannot be made compatible unless you add a request header to specify its availability too I suppose, and then just complicates it.
Of course you can. Microsoft's Edge and Brave already add proprietary features like AI and reader mode, tab groups, video calling, crypto wallet etc.
Brave could add a custom CSS or HTML feature. Hell that was the status quo we came from ten years ago when each vendor had their own feature flags and implementation for WebRTC and proprietary video codecs, etc.
Brave already explicitly removes ads and blocks all kinds of things websites expect to work on Chrome.
I think you missed the point of the comment you’re replying to. Without market share, the custom feature will never be respected by the web. At best if web developers don’t have to do any work for it you might get something that you can maintain for a while.
In fact, Edge is a perfect example of "nobody caring about your tiny fork": No matter what Microsoft tried, the internet no longer cared about Trident and IE/Edge. The only way Microsoft could regain some semblance of existing was to turn IE/Edge into Chrome and play the internet game as Google dictates.
Nowadays Edge has some superfluous features that differentiate it from Chrome, but they are still superfluous. Underneath it's still Chrome, because the internet demands Chrome.
Still bummed they didn't go with gecko.
(I know chromium is the superior engine, but Microsoft could've pushed gecko development to new highs for sure)
And I believe this strategy was how Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google. He oversaw the chrome project in the early days and its incredible success catapulted him up the management ladder at Google.
I wouldn't necessarily view it as malice from the beginning. It's entirely likely that early Chrome was really trying to solve usability problems in hosting complex applications like GMail. A goal that was attempted throughout history, as seen from the days of ActiveX, Java Web Applets, Flash, etc.
But capitalism does what it does best, and will happily take advantage of (and try to prolong) a natural monopoly situation even if the origins were genuine.
In fact this is why there are regulations around "utilities". They are also an area where a natural monopoly is the optimal, so they shouldn't be treated as a free market.
(Food for thought: Perhaps the Internet infrastructure should be a utility too? Browser makers could be forced to be non-profit, which would mean companies need to divest themselves of the "Internet business" if they want to do "business _over_ the Internet")
> I wouldn't necessarily view it as malice from the beginning. It's entirely likely that early Chrome was really trying to solve usability problems in hosting complex applications like GMail. A goal that was attempted throughout history, as seen from the days of ActiveX, Java Web Applets, Flash, etc.
I would say that the actual goal early Chrome was really trying to solve, was to prevent the browser monopoly of the day from being used against Google. It's similar to how Valve invested on Steam OS, as insurance in case Microsoft used its operating system monopoly to degrade the Steam experience relative to Microsoft's application store.
That's a fair take. Which kind of begs the question: How much innovation in tech is actually just people getting around limitations imposed by monopoly/high influence players?
