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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Apple don't have enough web properties to force this sort of change.

Google can turn around tomorrow and say that no browser without WEI can access GMail, GMaps, GSheets, Photos etc; people will have to comply, effectively killing any browser that does not support the feature.

This is the problem with the Chromium monoculture. "We", as generic IT people and developers on HN, definitely have a responsibility for not deprecating this monoculture earlier. If you use Brave, you're guilty; if you use Ungoogled Chromium, you're guilty; if you use Safari, you're guilty. It's high time people start taking responsibility.

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How are Safari users part of the Chromium monoculture problem?

It's part of the KHTML monoculture that has been harming our industry and holding us back from real progress.

If you want a browser engine it's either one of the KHTML descendants or Firefox. The problem is, both are ridiculously complex, only one family has the backing of three multi-billion dollar giants, and the other infamously suffers from "progressive disease" aka complete unwillingness to move fast and instead preferring to engineer the "perfect" solution.

That even Microsoft couldn't manage to keep up with progress only shows how utterly impossible it would be to kickstart a browser engine.

(The fact that Mozilla as an organization is embedded in constant infighting and utter incompetence doesn't help either)

That's kind of a stretch.

It's kinda hyperbole, to demonstrate how taut of a claim "Chrome monoculture" is.

We had a shot at open browser engine development with limited scope. Everyone said no, not just Chrome. Mozilla and Apple both have blood on their hands too, if we want to be reductive.

They support another monopolistic player that would do exactly the same thing.

... oh wait, they already did. They force a monoculture on all the platforms they can get away with, and even shipped this WEI crap already.

And everyone that ships an Electron app as well.

Sigh, no.

We would’ve gotten Electron any other way if it wasn’t Chromium, it’s the only endgame for UI given how native layers shat the bed.

Mozilla also no longer even supports embedding. ;P

Speaking as someone that has been doing native and Web for 30 years, it is the only game for developers that couldn't care, and in the process help Chrome to widen its market share and influence.

I've been doing this for 20, which is enough to say: rattling off years of experience isn't going to win me over on this point.

> it is the only game for developers that couldn't care

Yeah, dude. Most devs literally do not care, they just want to write and ship stuff. The native stack(s) are not cohesive enough and the numbers do not lie; devs do not want to rewrite the UI n times.

Signed, someone who also does native and web UI dev. ;P

Then don't complain about Chrome taking over the Web.

Google can also decide at any time to put those web properties behind forced logins, or paywalls or just shutter them altogether. If Google doesn't want them to be part of the open web they won't be, regardless of whether this particular set of things is implemented or not. If we're all dependent on them enough that that's a problem for us, then that dependency is the problem.

> If Google doesn't want [Gmail etc] to be part of the open web they won't be

The point is not that Google cares about those sites - they don't. Those services are leverage that they use to control web standards, in order to enable their real cash-cow: AdSense. They will use their web properties to shove down our throats anything that makes AdSense more profitable, from the anti-adblock measures in Chrome to this one.

> If we're all dependent on them enough that that's a problem for us, then that dependency is the problem

I don't disagree - and I use Firefox, keep my important mail outside of Gmail, etc etc. But I recognize that many, many people don't, so the technologically literal out there have an ethical responsibility to push back against corruption of the open web.

If they do that then otrer browsers will appear

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