What Will A Chromium-only Web Look Like?

[Ben Collver]

On the face of it, there is some sense to it–-after all, most W3C and
WHATWG specifications have been written algorithmically (rather than
declaratively) for a while now. Why not just converge on a single
actual codebase? That way, interop on things like HTML parsing is
perfect, but people can still choose the browser with the features
(e.g., privacy protections) that they want.

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/22/chromium-only

[Andy Burns]

Ben Collver wrote:

> Why not just converge on a single actual codebase?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture_(computer_science)>

[Marco Moock]

Am Samstag, 25. Juni 2022, um 13:17:26 Uhr schrieb Ben Collver:

> On the face of it, there is some sense to it–-after all, most W3C and
> WHATWG specifications have been written algorithmically (rather than
> declaratively) for a while now. Why not just converge on a single
> actual codebase? That way, interop on things like HTML parsing is
> perfect, but people can still choose the browser with the features
> (e.g., privacy protections) that they want.

A problem for Google. That is why they create their own standards like
WebComponents.
They want to control everything like MS did with IE 15 years ago.

[Computer Nerd Kev]

Ben Collver <benco...@tilde.pink> wrote:
> On the face of it, there is some sense to it--after all, most W3C and

Actually on the face if it I can't see any sense to this. What's
the action that would actually bring about this "Chromium-only
Web"? For people to create websites there still has to be some
documentation besides source code explaining what different
instructions/elements do. If you have that, then what's to stop
other implementations from existing?

If it comes down to testing, there's nothing to force web
developers to test on Firefox anyway, and obviously some don't.
Plus a few people like me still try to keep websites viewable in
lots of alternative browser engines that are already ignored by
professional web developers, like Dillo and Links. The only way I
can see any meaning in this article is if the author is proposing
that other engine implementations would be made illegal, which is
anti-competitive at the extreme.

Maybe it means that they'll make it so difficult to keep up that
everyone has to adopt the Chrome engine, as M$ have already done
with Edge. But that doesn't mean that Firefox couldn't still be
developed and people couldn't still design their websites to work
with it. It's just a continuation of what's already happened with
the the likes of Dillo and Links that I prefer to any of the major
browsers/engines. But _I_ can still build websites that work with
those simpler browsers, just like I should always be able to make
websites that work in Firefox, so I don't see how the author
imagines a Chromium-only web being enforced by Chrome developers
rather than website developers. I mean aren't the Chrome people
obviously going to think that their implementation is best anyway?

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

[Marco Moock]

Am Sonntag, 26. Juni 2022, um 11:44:06 Uhr schrieb Computer Nerd Kev:

> Actually on the face if it I can't see any sense to this. What's
> the action that would actually bring about this "Chromium-only
> Web"? For people to create websites there still has to be some
> documentation besides source code explaining what different
> instructions/elements do. If you have that, then what's to stop
> other implementations from existing?

The implementation changes very often and isn't standardized like IP,
TCP, HTTP is.
This makes it difficult for other engines to provide a compatible
rendering engine.

[Computer Nerd Kev]

My point is that short of all other implementations being banned
outright, it's up to the website developers to decide which
implementation is correct based on how they interpret the
documentation. Ideally where two engines disagree yet they want
both to be supported, they'll avoid using the corresponding feature
entirely.

With my aim to support viewing in the likes of Dillo and Links,
this has to be realised be avoiding all Javascript and most CSS.
Supporting just Chrome, Firefox, and Safari requires much less
sacrifice, and so long as the latter browsers are trying to match
the featres of Chrome it may remain so.

That the Chrome developers wish everyone would just forget about
the other browsers and always accept their way as right should
surprise nobody. It's meaningless though because it's the website
developers who decide what browsers they want to target, so they're
the only ones who can create a "Chromium-only web".

[Theo]

Chromium is very difficult to deal with:

1. They only support a limited set of OSes (no *BSDs, for example) and
refuse to merge even trivial patches that relate to unsupported operating
systems:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b57hDs8yE4g/m/5tXefZ74AQAJ

2. Chromium updates every 4 weeks, with regular code churn. This makes it
difficult to keep any set of changes rebased on top of Chromium, because as
soon as you've finished one merge you have to start all over again.


The only people who can reliably do this are Google and big companies who
can throw engineers at the problem to keep up with them.

Theo

[Marco Moock]

Am 26 Jun 2022 17:29:42 +1000
schrieb Computer Nerd Kev <n...@telling.you.invalid>:

> That the Chrome developers wish everyone would just forget about
> the other browsers and always accept their way as right should
> surprise nobody. It's meaningless though because it's the website
> developers who decide what browsers they want to target, so they're
> the only ones who can create a "Chromium-only web".

True, but many big websites only care about Chrome (sometimes only
Chrome and not even Chromium-based browsers like Opera).
This is VERY annoying because I have the user interface of Chrome. Too
slow and too less customization possible.

[Zibon Badi]

Computer Nerd Kev <n...@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
> With my aim to support viewing in the likes of Dillo and Links,
> this has to be realised be avoiding all Javascript and most CSS.
> Supporting just Chrome, Firefox, and Safari requires much less
> sacrifice, and so long as the latter browsers are trying to match
> the featres of Chrome it may remain so.

That is a noble goal but realistically speaking Dillo catching up to CFS is
nigh impossible. Modern web standards are infamously bloated and trying to
catch up is not only unfeasible for less than a multi-billion dollar
company in terms of resources, it's also a fool's errand as the modern web
is characterized by "living standards", meaning as soon as you caught up,
things have already changed such that you have to start all over again.

Links is a different story entirely though, as it likely only aims to
implement HTML and maybe some basic CSS due to it's terminal requirement.
Although the CSS standard for example *does* include the media type "grid"
for such cases, I doubt most web developers have ever heard of it.
That leads me to assume that down to it's core Links is a type of browser
not aimed at nor suited for the type of website most people develop, as
modern web development revolves further and further around interactive,
JavaScript-heavy web applications rather than traditional editorial
websites. Additionally CFS has conditioned developers to use all standards
in unseparable conjunction with each other. If you don't believe me,
there's no further proof needed than trying to use the web with JavaScript
entirely disabled for a month. You may even use a CFS browser for that, as
long as you can turn JS off.

> That the Chrome developers wish everyone would just forget about
> the other browsers and always accept their way as right should
> surprise nobody. It's meaningless though because it's the website
> developers who decide what browsers they want to target, so they're
> the only ones who can create a "Chromium-only web".

Again, you're right in principle but throughout the last decade the web has
become incredibly more centralized as web standards exploded in complexity
and the means to create websites fell out of the means of the average Joe
and into a professional industry discipline in and of itself; with Google
right at the core.

What this boils down to is that in terms of what browser users will most
likely see, Google is said website vendor. And they're the vendor of Chrome
too. It's natural to want to optimize browser and website towards each
other but the lack to do so for other browsers is what ultimately lead
Microsoft - a multi billion dollar company with more than enough resources
to throw at the problem - to kill off EdgeHTML so they wouldn't have to
clean up after Google's mess all the time. It's death by a thousand papercuts.

[Computer Nerd Kev]

Zibon Badi <zibo...@usenet.invalid> wrote:
> Computer Nerd Kev <n...@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
>> With my aim to support viewing in the likes of Dillo and Links,
>> this has to be realised be avoiding all Javascript and most CSS.
>> Supporting just Chrome, Firefox, and Safari requires much less
>> sacrifice, and so long as the latter browsers are trying to match
>> the featres of Chrome it may remain so.
>
> That is a noble goal but realistically speaking Dillo catching up to CFS is
> nigh impossible.

True, it's basically a one-man-show and even that one man seems to
be almost MIA for a few years now. Netsurf is another one, which in
theory is closer to the mainstream web feature set, but in practice
it still isn't usable on many websites and their Javascript
implementation seems unable to keep up with the pace of development.

> Modern web standards are infamously bloated and trying to
> catch up is not only unfeasible for less than a multi-billion dollar
> company in terms of resources, it's also a fool's errand as the modern web
> is characterized by "living standards", meaning as soon as you caught up,
> things have already changed such that you have to start all over again.

Yep, though only because most web developers don't bother trying to
keep sites compatible with less full-featured browsers.

> Links is a different story entirely though, as it likely only aims to
> implement HTML and maybe some basic CSS due to it's terminal requirement.

Links actually supports both terminal and graphical modes. The
features page says "HTML 4.0 support (without CSS)", so unlike
Dillo there's no support for CSS at all. The debian package with
graphical mode is called "links2".

http://links.twibright.com/features.php

> Although the CSS standard for example *does* include the media type "grid"
> for such cases, I doubt most web developers have ever heard of it.
> That leads me to assume that down to it's core Links is a type of browser
> not aimed at nor suited for the type of website most people develop, as
> modern web development revolves further and further around interactive,
> JavaScript-heavy web applications rather than traditional editorial
> websites. Additionally CFS has conditioned developers to use all standards
> in unseparable conjunction with each other. If you don't believe me,
> there's no further proof needed than trying to use the web with JavaScript
> entirely disabled for a month. You may even use a CFS browser for that, as
> long as you can turn JS off.

Oh I believe you, I'm always finding blank/useless pages while
trying to browse in Dillo or Links, before resorting to Firefox.

> What this boils down to is that in terms of what browser users will most
> likely see, Google is said website vendor. And they're the vendor of Chrome
> too. It's natural to want to optimize browser and website towards each
> other but the lack to do so for other browsers is what ultimately lead
> Microsoft - a multi billion dollar company with more than enough resources
> to throw at the problem - to kill off EdgeHTML so they wouldn't have to
> clean up after Google's mess all the time. It's death by a thousand papercuts.

Yet for now web developers are still paying attention to Firefox
and Safari, even if it's just me who cares about the likes of Dillo
and Links (Wikipedia still works alright in them though). I don't
believe the thrust of that article which suggests Google are
willfully holding their browser's features back so that the others
can catch up. They know that if they move too far away from the
others, web developers who insist on maintaining compatibility with
FF and Safari will just ignore those new features until the others
catch up anyway.

It's true, as much as I fear it, that one day FF and Safari might
be cast aside entirely by professional web developers in the same
way as Dillo and Links. Given the current usage share of FF I think
it's done well so far in that respect, even though some developers
do already ignore it. I just disagree that Chrome's developers can
sway that entirely on their own. Google itself might though, by
making their own websites work less well in other browsers. Then
once remaining FF users switch browsers so that eg. YouTube works
better, developers of other websites follow.