Comment by oefrha

I haven’t seen any signs that Apple will abandon Safari, have you? Also, a browser that uses Chromium could put a halt to Google’s plans if they wanted. The easiest way would be to stop upgrading and just port over security patches. (Sure, it brings progress to a halt, but this is unlikely to matter to web developers in the short run and it would get people’s attention.)

They aren’t going to do this, though, so long as new releases of Chromium are reasonable.

Apple isn't the only one standing in the way of a Google hegemony. If they are, then the web is already fucked since neither corporation has a benevolent track record pertaining to Open Source. Apple just can't compete without steering privileges that are equally harmful to the open web.

Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. The source is available and it is permissively licensed. If they did something truly onerous, Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.

The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because of their ad monopoly. Same with search, Gmail, Translate, Maps. None of those things can exist without the ad monopoly funding it all.

Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.

I have never seen credible evidence that this is what Cloudflare sees as their business. They fundamentally don't care what browser the user is using. What they care about are the traffic patterns of users and preventing their customers from getting hit by bots, spam, and other malicious traffic. The fact that some browsers that look like malicious traffic is not something they can control or reasonably be held responsible for.

> Valve isn't in the business of preventing you from playing your games on niche operating systems

Getting your Steam library to work on Linux before it got Valve's blessing with Proton wasn't a great experience. If they wanted to, they could have easily decided to block games from running on Linux and gave some statement about preventing piracy and protecting users from malware.

I'm optimistic that this investment means we'll see more open standards and large browser makers being forced to collaborate and create simpler standards without compromising security.

> This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.

You can't even do that honestly. Look at Boeing. It got taken over by know-nothing managers that followed that religion of shareholder value, and what did it do? Destroy shareholder value!

I think we should instead say "we can't rely on any institution to be stable over time". That's a much more sane statement imo.

> you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.

I would like to understand where this breaks down. Would a for-profit individual be more reliable? Would a non-profit? At which point does quality deteriorate?

> This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.

This is like saying that history bears out that you can't rely on governments to do anything but prepare for war and then send you out to die in one.

I use firefox and I almost never see cloudflare captchas. I don't think it's the browser that is causing the problem.

I recently saw https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/ on the front-page but then I gave up as that's my daily reality with cloudflare and friends already. I use 3 browsers on linux with Thai IP address because at least one of them is always blocked by cloudflare. Especially if I go work on public wifi I often actually have to hotspot myself to 4g to even get stuff to load.

I've started taking more extreme stance these days of ctrl+w instantly and maybe email the admins if I'm particularly angry that I will not buy whatever they're selling because I simply can't be bothered with their spyware blocking me. Maybe some day people will wisen up on the damage cloudflare is doing to their business.

Anecdotally, I'm not. I always use Firefox (or Zen) and get almost no Captchas. Neither at home, nor at work. Not on Windows, not on Linux, not on macOS.

I'm not going to say that Cloadflare isn't doing anything fishy, but if they are, it's probably more complicated.

Same experience here. Debian Linux with Firefox or especially using BrowSH, is a depressing experience.

You're bombarded with Cloudflare captchas because bots are heavily scraping the websites you're browsing and they are struggling to stay online by putting in place heavy-handed bot-fighting tactics. Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing.

If you're on a Residential IP, and your IP gets refreshed, like, every day, it's possible that one of the IP has been flagged.

Cannot blame CloudFlare for that; they have an obligation to try protect the users of their CDN.

I do not understand your position at all.

And what are the rules? Don’t use AI to steal training content across the internet, spread nuclear grade spam and propaganda at scale, hack servers with automated agents? Seems fine.

It loads fine for me. Maybe you have some other problem?

It is baffling and concerning that anyone disagrees with you. The blind faith of so many that companies will magically and selflessly act in the best interest of anyone but their shareholders is, perhaps, the most damaging social ill we face (exacerbated by Citizens United).

You're severely misinformed and parotting misinformed meme interpretations of fiduciary duty.

Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication.

Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available.

Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.

I'm sorry you see the world that way.

I think this is why things like the mdl ID standard are important. It allows for a privacy preserving and open approach not controlled by big companies. It's not perfect, it's controlled by government. But I'd like government to at least challenge the power of Google and Apple.

I haven't notice too many captchas from Linux myself... maybe about 50% more than Windows or Mac, but in general it hasn't been so bad. I do think that it could potentially get bad though.

I'm also not sure how this can/would shake out when you can just use tools like Playwright/Puppeteer to manage a real browser. Both Google and MS do this (not as much as bare crawlers) to handle SPA-like site content.

> Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point.

SafetyNet doesn't lock anything down, it just provides an API for applications to verify the app is running in a verifiable and untampered environment.

i'd be surprised if it was actually illegal. "operating system" isn't a protected characteristic in law

I read the article you referenced, though not very carefully due to lack of time, but I don't see anything like a list of supported browsers. They even mention Firefox as supported, which can be forked just like Ladybird.

people have hate boner for CF, you cant deny that

but replace CF with another provider and they would do the same shit