A list of recent hostile moves by #Google's #Chrome team; handy for sharing with your entourage, to explain why they should stop using #Chromium / #GoogleChrome and use #Firefox or #Epiphany as their main #web #browser :
* The "Manifest v3" sabotage of content blocking extensions: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/10/23131029/mozilla-ad-blocking-firefox-google-chrome-privacy-manifest-v3-web-request
* The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/chrome-banishes-jpeg-xl-photo-format-that-could-save-phone-space/
* #WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
@nekohayo Chrome and Android should be separated from Alphabet.
Something that doesn't produce their own profit doesn't sit well with capitalism.
Privatising them probably better.
@dozymoe @nekohayo That or just new companies. Make Android into a non profit a la many other open source projects. Have all those makers pay to use it commercially. Make it an OS that’s not wrapped up in Alphabets plans.
Or make it a stand alone company that have to fend for itself.
But them using those two to hold people’s access to the internet hostage, terrible thing.
@breadbin @dozymoe @nekohayo this is largely unnecessary. at this point, google develops the stock pixel os but AOSP, while still technically at the mercy of Google, is largely left untouched other than the bare minimum. the project is still licensed under Apache License 2.0 allowing others to fork and change as they wish.
@avrin @breadbin @dozymoe @nekohayo the license means nothing if they keep all phone makers hostage with other contracts. Ever wondered why no one sells AOSP phones outside of china? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/
@breadbin @dozymoe @nekohayo
But using them to hold people's access to the internet hostage is *exactly the point*. It's like Windows with IE back in the day. Alphabet, and Google, exist to produce money for their shareholders. They'd be *not doing their jobs* if they spent effort to be nice to the internet.
@nekohayo no 1Password support on iOS, alas
@nekohayo i think firefox is a little better then chrome
@nekohayo Don't forget all the built-in adtech stuff (still being shipped by Google now despite W3C reaction)
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/18/google_topics_api/
@nekohayo if Chrome blocks ad-blockers then I'm gone
The WEI proposal goes further than that. It's a way for websites to block people who are using any kind of modified browsers, including adblockers. So it'd not just be Chrome disabling adblockers but them making it so that websites will break for all non-WEI–browsers.
@nekohayo, thank you for mentioning Epiphany! Such a great browser
@Sandra @WeavingWithAI
Of course! #Epiphany / #GNOMEWeb is one of the very few non-Blink-engine FLOSS #browsers out there. For this reason, and since I'm a @gnome contributor, I've been helping Epiphany & @WebKitGTK with lots of bug reporting & testing in recent months, so that we don't just have "Firefox vs the world".
My performance tracker bug: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245783
My big UX wish: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/-/issues/1835
@nekohayo @Sandra @WeavingWithAI What’s the state of site isolation in WebKit2GTK? That’s the main thing holding me back.
I do like seeing JPEG-XL working in Canary.
@Seirdy @Sandra @nekohayo @WeavingWithAI these days isolation is per-origin, each site gets its own WebKitWebProcess... Almost. The main missing bit is iframe isolation, which is being worked on at the moment. It will come at some point, but right now I cannot give any ETA.
@aperezdc @Sandra @nekohayo @WeavingWithAI Wait, I thought sites are supposed to opt into origin-keyed clustering with COOP+COEP and/or Origin-Agent-Cluster headers, and remain keyed by site otherwise. Wouldn’t origin-keying by default break backward compatibility?
@nekohayo @Sandra @WeavingWithAI @WebKitGTK @gnome thanks for all the bug reporting and testing effort! We may not say it often but it's super appreciated, and has already helped to ship performance improvements 
Of course there is still work to do, and usually the main complication is figuring out where exactly the problems are—web engines are huge and complex! 
@nekohayo I was so enfuriated by all these news, listed in this post that i switched for personal use to Firefox today. May be will have to use chrome/edge for testing sites i work on, especially at work, but for personal use - Firefox now on. I also subscribed to donate a bit monthly to Mozilla Foundation. Not a big donation, because I am not a someone "rich". But what I can afford monthly. Next step will be de-googling of my mailboxes I have control over.
@koteisaev @nekohayo iirc, funds donated to Mozilla Foundation aren’t (can’t be?) used for Firefox development. Best to support Firefox by using a Mozilla Corporation product, like Mozilla VPN or Relay. The corporation is a subsidiary of the foundation. I’m using both, they work great.
@nekohayo i hope Brave is able to hold on and continue to fork Chromium and provide the right functionality.
@nekohayo don't forget AMP!
@nekohayo I keep hearing the counter argument that "Safari already shipped a version of WEI and no one made a fuss" but I can't tell if that's true or just missing a lot of nuance. Can someone explain?
@nekohayo This is an interesting read. I'm pretty simple when it comes to how browsers work on the backend; any idea on how this change would effect Brave?
@wwwiebe
Brave is using Blink, Chromium/Chrome's web engine controlled by Google. So does Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, etc. They're all mostly just a UI on top of the same engine.
Other than Mozilla Firefox's "Gecko"… the other engine that powers Safari & iOS is WebKit + @WebKitGTK (for Epiphany, a.k.a. "GNOME Web", and for embedded).
Google does (some) open source "products", but they are typically not FLOSS "projects". They feel read-only, not read+write for indie community contributors.
@nekohayo would love to but Firefox has such an nontransparent decision process on e.g. supporting bluetooth in the browser.
@nekohayo
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058#c84
As a fan of progressive loading and transparency, the JPEG-XL saga is a personal issue.
The only way to rebel is to USE IT ANYWAY; provide multiple image sources through <picture> tags, consider it for personal use-cases, and be a part of the wide-spread adoption that successors of JPEG have been working towards since JPEG-2000.
@nekohayo nerds get triggered by anything google does. bottom-feeder journos and startup ceos who have parlayed solemnly "standing up for the free web" into a whole cottage industry have to milk every possible opportunity to take a stand in order to stay relevant even when it makes no sense
nobody has even seen the proposal for wei or its privacy mitigations, so mozilla has to bluster about open web principles and pretend like they haven't shipped the widevine cdm for years
apple is shitting up everything with the heavily patent-encumbered heic while av1/avif are like alien technology good despite being royalty-free. so why do people lose their minds over chromium dropping jpeg xl, a format nobody else even supported? cause these headlines are chum in the water for obnoxious stallmanoids
you're not some holy warrior for christ when you buy into their grift, you're just helping that homophobic cryptobro in soma dump more brave tokens in order to buy a new maserati. this is all spectacle
@nekohayo more generally, none of this even really matters
my nightmares of runaway capitalist power are full of images of typhus-ridden hovels packed wall-to-wall with working families in 1843 england, death squads hacking union wives to pieces with hatchets in 1918 germany, policemen spraying kerosene on food to prop up prices amid famine in 1933 mississippi, cackling us marines bayoneting hogtied peasants in 1968 southeast asia, child prostitutes in 1992 russia, billions of sapients gutted in slaughterhouses. bombs tumbling, bellies rumbling, untreated illness, dirty drinking water, rivers of blood. and an escapee from the unrelenting grind of poverty swinging from the neck in the breeze
in contrast, "the right to read" reads like it was written by someone whose biggest worry was that a new fungus was changing the taste of his toenails. have some perspective, holy shit. I'm so sick of hearing about the importance of *software* freedom from techbros whose whole way of life is built on gun-to-the-head superexploitation of children knee-deep in muck at the bottom of elon's lithium mines
@nekohayo I thought Firefox was out of commission
@nekohayo I switched to LibreWolf and Brave some time ago. Never looked back.