this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Some day someone is gonna have to explain this take to me.
Standards for the web are a good thing. Websites being slightly different to straight up breaking depending on what browser you use is an awful user experience.
I see nothing wrong with everyone defaulting to blink and v8. Makes the web better for everyone be it users or developers.
Chromium is open source! It feels like people's blind hatred / paranoia of big tech makes people reject it on principle more than anything.
Standards are good. What's not good is that Google controls the standards.
Open source or not, Google currently has the ability to dictate web standards as they see fit.
Why? There are 2 reasons:
There's a reason so many of these browsers just use Chromium. It's because Google is doing the Lion's share of the work. Modern web browsers are some of the most complicated pieces of software ever written. They are comparable in complexity to entire operating systems.
When Google makes a change to the Chromium project everyone follows suit, lest you fork it which leaves development and ensuring interoperability entirely up to you. The complexity of this task depends on how far you want to take your browser.
Even those who fork Chromium will pull changes made by Google to the original Chromium project because making and maintaining your own web browser is really, really difficult.
They are trying to develope enough dependency on them that they could stop being open source and the majority of browsers and websites dependent on their development just fold and allow google to control the internet.
Big companies only let stuff be open source in order to rugpull it if and when it would allow them to be successfully anticompetitive.
Well it is really easy. Read this hyperbolic statement:
Is having a government good for a country? Yes. Then why don't you want an unelected elite control your country?
Sounds stupid right?
The people like standards. People don't like when google can define standards alone. Especially when they have at least tried and most people hated the idea. Remember google topics? The thing that google advertised as more privacy protecting while just opening you up more track you even better by giving you more identifying features?
Lastly google is an advertisement company, trying to shape the web in their favor when most people will agree that the web became very privacy invading. Like come on and you ask why people don't like that google, an advertisement company, has the ability to just force a new web standard in a world where advertisement companies are invading their privacy?