this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
495 points (97.1% liked)

Hacker News

1770 readers
1 users here now

This community serves to share top posts on Hacker News with the wider fediverse.

Rules0. Keep it legal

  1. Keep it civil and SFW
  2. Keep it safe for members of marginalised groups

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
495
In 2024, please switch to Firefox (roytanck.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
64 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] miridius 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

These are pretty terrible arguments.

  1. Google is a primarily advertising based company yes, but Apple and Microsoft aren't
  2. You can't compare chromium to IE - chromium is open source, and also it's actually good
[–] chocolatine 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The issue is the rendering engine monopoly. Apple and Microsoft browsers as well as chromium all use chrome rendering engine making them basically the same browser under the hood.

[–] miridius 0 points 11 months ago

That's not true - Apple's browsers use WebKit. I wish they used chromium though, Safari is basically the new IE.

Having all browsers use the same, open source, modern and powerful rendering engine has many benefits. It makes web development MUCH easier, improves user experience because websites work the same on all browsers (apart from any proprietary stuff the browser vendors might add on top of chromium, but that's not chromium's fault), and greatly speeds up adoption of new web standards.

I don't want there to be a Chrome browser monopoly for obvious reasons but I don't see the downside of every browser using the same rendering engine as long as it's not controlled by any one entity

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Chromium being open source actually means jack shit. It's controlled by Google, one singular entity whose only desire is to maximise their iron grip on the internet to squeeze as much ad revenue as they can.

This isn't hyperbole, look at the recent WEI stuff or manifest v3 crap. Time and again, these corporations have showed that they just don't give a shit about the free and open internet.

Which leads to the first point, (Microsoft does seem to be moving pretty heavily into advertising though with all the bs in windows 11), you absolutely can not in good conscience use a big tech product with the argument that they're not an ad company. It's not just the ads which is the issue here. And the problem is sooner or later they'll realise they've a trove of monetisable data, so might as well do something with it. And then we'll have no choice because there will be no free and open alternatives left