Comment by vulcan01
9 months ago
Cloudflare supporting Ladybird makes sense for the same reasons that Valve invests in Proton. Cloudflare's job is easier if everyone standardizes on a few approved browsers, but right now the three major browser engines are controlled by Google (IIRC most of Mozilla's funding comes from Google) and Apple, just as Valve's Steam is heavily dependent on Microsoft's Windows.
Both companies are basically hedging against future incentive misalignment with other (larger) companies, and reducing their dependencies on platforms they have ~zero influence over.
To add to this, Apple’s share of the control is minimal and precarious. A timeline where Google is the sole web engine authority could easily become reality and is even likely.
Hedging on a promising upstart makes a lot of sense.
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.
If/when Apple is forced to start allowing Blink on iOS globally, all it takes is a hearty marketing push from Google and devs putting “best viewed in Chrome” badges on their sites for Safari’s marketshare (and with it, Apple’s influence) to plummet.
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Is keeping up with "just security patches" on Chromium reasonable?
As sickening as thought as it is, the best hope there is Microsoft-- they can afford to hire the necessary army of developers, and their incentives are aligned just far enough away from Google's that they would have reasons to do it.
The problem is that they're also in the ad economy now, so their opportunity to play it for relevance is shot.
They had a window where they could have said "Edge: the Chromium-based browser that treats uBlock Origin as a first-class citizen" but instead they'd rather add weird popups to credit card fields asking if I want to use Klarna instead.
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.
If web devs get permission to start ignoring Safari (which currently sits at ~20% marketshare), there’s no way they’re going to care about Firefox which doesn’t have even a fifth as much. If Safari falls so does Firefox.
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> Apple isn't the only one standing in the way of a Google hegemony.
Who else would you consider?
Chromium-based browsers from companies other than Google are still contributing to Google’s hegemony. And Mozilla is funded by Google.
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> If they are, then the web is already fucked since neither corporation has a benevolent track record pertaining to Open Source.
Interesting take, since Google has both authored and supported hundreds of FLOSS projects over many years. They even sponsored summer "internships" for students to contribute to Open Source software as long as a maintainer bothered to register and promise to mentor the student via "Summer of Code"
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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.
> If they did something truly onerous
It would very unlikely be something which would affect Microsoft’s bottom line. They wouldn’t care.
> and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
Who’s “everyone”? Anyone who cares minimally about possible shenanigans in Chromium is already selectively merging changes.
Edge aggressively sets itself as the default browser and slurps information from Chrome without permission. Edge and Microsoft are not and will not be a saviour from Google and Chrome.
> Google doesn't have control of Chromium though.
They do. If they merge DRM into it tomorrow or something alike, it trickles down to all users of Chromium and Google Chrome.
You can build _a fork_ of it. But the enormous majority of the masses don’t use your fork — they use upstream.
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Anyone who tries to push changes to Chromium will quickly find Google does control it.
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> Microsoft would fork it within hours
I haven't trudged through Chromium's commit statistics but has Microsoft been upstreaming many contributions? I'm skeptical that they are ready to take on the full brunt of Chromium maintenance on a whim, it would take a decent while to build up the teams and expertise for it.
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>Google doesn't have control of Chromium though.
There's a tightly controlled pool of developers who make up the decision-making body about which commits get approved. That pool is dominated by Google employees so they effectively control whether something gets committed.
So it's not open in the sense that would be most people's first impression, which is that anyone can contribute code to the project and see it realized. You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.
>Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
I don't see how that follows. Google disproportionately invests in a browser, controls it and with it much of the destiny of the web. The fact that Google is leveraging their ad monopoly to create and maintain a dominant browser is the issue. At least, it's an issue. The ad monopoly powers their control over the web and vice versa.
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Even if that’s true, are we going to see Google’s dominance in the ad space meaningfully curbed? It seems highly unlikely at best, and it doesn’t matter how loud any of us are barking (at least until there’s a massive shift in political headwinds).
Until that’s addressed, Chrome being dominant is a problem, because Google has created an “open moat” with their resource expenditure. Microsoft sure as hell isn’t going to be able to justify that kind of spend on their Chromium fork, and so their influence will never be of note.
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Except they do. One just has to look at the inability to keep JPEG-XL mainlined in Chromium. Sure, some forks still have JPEG-XL, but it's effectively gone at this point.
Nobody worth mentioning to big corporations uses Chromium.
> Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
Why would people trust Microsoft more than Google, though? Even with really bad actions, switching browsers is very difficult (i.e. it requires making an active choice and change about an obscure topic) and I don't see normal people doing it, which is what would be required for this to happen.
Microsoft can't get any traction for Edge even with the pushiness on their OS and massive market share. I recently installed Windows 11 on a box and even searching for Chrome had the top portion of the screen show "You don't need a different browser!" at the top of Bing. Did that stop me? No. Not going to use a Microsoft browser, thanks.
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That response ignores the fact that Valve isn't in the business of preventing you from playing your games on niche operating systems but Cloudflare is in the business of blocking non-standard browsers. If Cloudflare truly wants to prevent a Google/Apple web duopoly the most effective thing they can do is to stop blocking alternatives or even just browser-configurations that are Google-hostile.
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.
surely they can be held responsible - they are the ones defining whatever heuristics cause traffic to be classed as malicious!
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> 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.
They at least still put out a native Linux client, even if there weren't that many native Linux games.
That at least demonstrated, to some extant, that Valve doesn't care where you run your games, as long as you buy them on Steam.
> Getting your Steam library to work on Linux before it got Valve's blessing with Proton wasn't a great experience.
There weren't any real roadblocks for that caused by Valve. And it definitely wasn't as hard as you're implying.
> 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.
They could have just like any software developer could but they didn't. They also didn't block the Steam for Linux client from running on unapproved distributions or even FreeBSD.
> Cloudflare supporting Ladybird makes sense for the same reasons that Valve invests in Proton.
Which Proton are you referring to?