Technology

People called me crazy when I told them that Google was leveraging open source to enact their version of an EEE strategy to kill the open internet. But here we are. They embraced open source, expanded Chromium with unethical practices, and now that they have the monopoly of the space and the main voting power on the W3C, they are ready to destroy all that is free and open about the internet.

Any website that implements this API is going to immediately lose me as a user. They can go fuck themselves.

That's good they won't be adopting WEI, but if my bank or some other critical site decides to enforce a desktop browser with it, I'm still in the same boat. I did think of a way to avoid a WEI browser on my desktop if it comes to that. I can probably substitute a phone app for any critical services, but that's still a drag. I don't like phone apps much, I use a desktop browser for everything.

I think Google's destruction of the Internet is most simply a matter of influence. If Chrome didn't have the huge market share they wouldn't be able to pull off this kind of thing, open source or not. Unfortunately people have a herd mentality with everything on the internet so we allowed it to happen by doing what we always do.

Wondered how to deactivate the auto update of Chromium in the setting. There is no checkbox to untick. You have to twiddle with the regedit to deactivate updates. WTF?

Guys, Firefox (or LibreWolf) all the way!

They have no leverage over the monopoly google has on the browsers marketshare. the only people who can change things are the end users by switching over to non-chromium browsers, but we all know this won't happen

The article refers to Vivaldi’s response as scathing, but I think it is fair and even and the best overall summary I have seen -> https://vivaldi.com/blog/googles-new-dangerous-web-environment-integrity-spec/

Brave and Vivaldi are both built on Chromium though…

Hopefully they prevail, I will be telling everyone I know to switch to firefox, and additionally changing my parents devices to they as well. Thankfully these days it's really easy to do so

Google has been so far very quiet on this issue. I wonder why.

What about Safari? Will Apple bend over to Googles will and use their new standard?

While I'm glad they are speaking up against it, I don't believe that it will change anything. If Google decides to implement it, it will just end up exactly like it did with WC3 EME, as summarized in this the 2014 article from if I'm not mistaken a Mozilla dev:

I know of people recommending Chrome (not Chromium) because it has Flash Player natively incorporated, so you no longer have to install it separately.

This serves to prove that the majority of users doesn’t know about either the technical or ethical differences in the software they are using.You may also think of the pirated software the are using,but this is a different matter. Ignoring this marketshare goes against Mozilla’s idea of a web available to everyone, not to mention that Firefox is no longer the most used browser as it used to be a a few years ago and it is therefore forced to comply with this kind of requests.

Good. WEI is a bad proposal for many reasons. I still can't fathom why so many browsers use Chromium as their base nowadays though.

On another note, what is up with the thumbnail image for this article? The article doesn't mention anything about Alabama's awful attorney general. Hmmm...

This is perfect. The more browsers refuse to implement this, the more the antitrust against Google is going to sting.

I haven't been following this. What's happening?

Shitty google doing shitty things. Just business as usual