I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest!
Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink.
The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8.
In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork of Webkit. So, does that mean Apple controls everything?? But Webkit actually came from KDE's KHTML, didn't it.. Linux wins...
The kicker for me is: Blink and V8 are open source, and anyone can fork them at any time. Because of this, Microsoft, Oracle, Brave - every "Chromium" based browser vendor is contributing code. So does Google really control us that much? Blink and V8 make a rock solid browser core and are being worked on by a lot of companies, not just Google. It's like the Linux kernel - kind of a marvel of open source. Not something we need to fight against so viciously, in my opinion.
(Edit: "rock solid" might sound extreme to some... The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0. There's a lot of bloat in modern web, no doubt. But if you're really worried about crazy JS features cluttering your browsing experience, you can go clone the Chromium source and pull out the crap you don't like.)
Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. Google still makes the big decisions about what gets to enter the codebase: which web features to support, which ones to deprecate, how to interpret standards, and how to slowly align the web with their own financial incentives.
>Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing.
I think the idea of gp's point about others forking code means the forkers can also influence the code because they control the fork.
Otherwise, if we take your comment at face value, we'd conclude that Google's contributions to Webkit means it can't "suddenly control the direction" of Apple's Webkit. That's true, but also becomes irrelevant because Google controls its fork of "Blink".
In other words, does Apple's Webkit control us that much? No, because it seems like Google's Blink/Chromium is sufficiently independent. If we go back farther in the timeline, are we concerned that KHTML controls us? No, because it seems like Apple's fork of Webkit is independent and not beholden to KHTML decisions.
If Microsoft really wanted to, it seems like they have the resources to do what Apple did to KHTML and what Chrome did to Webkit.
This makes no sense because it ignores the reality that unlike KHTML, or WebKit, the vast majority of browsers were not based on those rendering engines. There was never a time where a web app developer saw your browser was not Webkit or KHTML based and told you to upgrade to them on every platform. There was never a time where KHTML or Webkit completely dominated browser share.
There was also a much wider array of browser engines at the time (MS had 2, Opera had 1, Firefox had much higher market share than it does today).
So KHTML/Webkit hardly had control over the web the way Chromium might because they never had the market share Chromium did, and further, they were never the dominant engine embedded in nearly every browser the way Chromium/Blink are now.
I guess the question I'd ask here is: why does it matter that Chromium has massive market share?
The usual answer I see is along the lines of "because Google is too big, has too much control". To reiterate the original argument in this thread: Chromium being open source makes this a hard sell.
There are forks, and there are forks. If you take a codebase like Blink, fork it, and commit to maintaining that fork entirely by yourself independent of the upstream then yeah, what the upstream does at that point is kinda irrelevant. If, however, you're still relying on upstream for important patches and you're just rebasing your small changeset on top of that every so often, then there are limits to how far you can diverge from upstream before pulling in those necessary changes becomes impractical.
If I understand correctly, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc are all running on the later type of Blink "fork".
Does Google still contribute to Webkit? I was under the impression that stopped a long time ago after Blink and Webkit sufficiently diverged.
True. People forgot that Microsoft had been developing its own browser for years before they moved to Chromium. That team and expertise didn't just disappear. They've been doing significant work in that code base. See https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1329200077517295618 from a year ago. Having that technical power does give them quite a lot of control over the code base which can help balance the political power here.
I have not forgotten, but Gates and Ballmer are gone and the market situation for MS is totally different. People don't have to take their Evil Empire monopolist crap of the past.
That doesn't stop them from trying though, and there are plenty of examples from recent times that prove that the difference between the old MS and the new MS are much smaller than their PR department would like you to believe.
The biggest difference is that the new MS is no longer selling you software but access to software.
> People don't have to take their Evil Empire monopolist crap of the past.
Advertising in the Start Menu enters the room
Often enough, it feels as if there are two brains inside Microsoft - shiny new MS with Azure, WSL, VSCode on the one side, and old, schoolyard bully MS with advertising, telemetry, forcing cloud everywhere on the other side.
> They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.
And the "just works" part won't happen without the other browsers' competition. It will become "just works with other Google products, for those who hold the same values as Google holds".
Case in point: on a fresh install of Ubuntu googling for adblock using Firefox (yes, I know, stupid) leads straight to Google ramming Chrome down your throat.
In fact, what's often forgotten is that even before MS's illegal monopolization, IE dominated Netscape because it was genuinely better.
But a few short years later it was regular end users who were suffering due to IE and it's lack of competition, which led to MS sleeping on it and letting security issues (both technical and social) pile up.
Exactly. So what if Google controls the internet experience through Chromium. The user will have to pay someone eventually. Firefox is not a free magic bullet.
On the other hand, much bigger problems in the world, so we go build something else instead of reinventing what Google has already built.
KDE relies heavily on the Qt libraries and Qt is using Blink in their QtWebEngine[1]. There's even a web browser called Falkon (The KDE browser, kind of) that uses this library[2].
Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink.
The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8.
In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork of Webkit. So, does that mean Apple controls everything?? But Webkit actually came from KDE's KHTML, didn't it.. Linux wins...
The kicker for me is: Blink and V8 are open source, and anyone can fork them at any time. Because of this, Microsoft, Oracle, Brave - every "Chromium" based browser vendor is contributing code. So does Google really control us that much? Blink and V8 make a rock solid browser core and are being worked on by a lot of companies, not just Google. It's like the Linux kernel - kind of a marvel of open source. Not something we need to fight against so viciously, in my opinion.
(Edit: "rock solid" might sound extreme to some... The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0. There's a lot of bloat in modern web, no doubt. But if you're really worried about crazy JS features cluttering your browsing experience, you can go clone the Chromium source and pull out the crap you don't like.)