> smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork

Google can and does use DRM to block even this from happening: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...

Even Mozilla needed to license Widevine from Google to support modern video: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm

Based on the policy evidenced in Maddock's post, it seems impossible to develop an open-source browser in 2019 that supports video streaming.

Crack the DRM and do it in a country that does not care about DMCA and has lax copyright laws. You could create an "illegal browser", and judging by how effective all the other antipiracy efforts have been to date (i.e. not at all), I doubt you'll face too much opposition...

Or don't consume DRMed content?

So, all commercial video content on the web?

Sure... vote with your wallet, only in video space. When DRM'ed content becomes less popular, companies will have to reconsider.

Of course, I'm one of those who doesn't care much about mass media in general. Addictions could make this shift impossible.

Not all commercial content is DRMed. Example: Rifftraxx.

You can also enjoy lots of high-quality, DRM-free content on YouTube, Vimeo, peertube, fosdem and god knows where.

There’s more to internet video than Netflix, Hulu and Prime.

From the perspective of general population - which is where you need adoption to be even a mote of dust next to Chrome - no, there isn't.

Or go the "insert DeCSS here" route that some used back when that was a thing. "If you happen to have somehow acquired a WideVine lib, having hash [some string], stick it here if you want to watch Netflix."

> support modern video

There's nothing particularly modern about DRM.

In some sort of Stallman utopia maybe. In the real world...

Well maybe we don't really need DRM? I mean, there are other sources of entertainment which do not threaten the FOSS

Sure, people gonna use a browser where the only entertainment is a 240p stream of Stallmann chewing his toes.

These responses... Dont support amazon or netflix, twitch? Even FOSS needs to be realistic and see what is a solution and what is not.

A FOSS product needs to support the things people want to do. Otherwise it will not succeed. We should have learned this in the last twenty years.

Without Firefox and its compromises, Google would have 99% market share and FOSS people would browse wuth Lynx or wget

Yes, support direct torrent video streaming. Screw the fat cats. Long live Stallman, death to late stage capitalism computing!

Use an open-source DRM solution?

DRMs are integrated by websites owners.

If a website is using Proprietary DRM A, your browser needs to be licensed to use DRM A.

Such a thing doesn’t exist because then it could be trivially broken.

Is that true? IE was incumbent and Firefox unseated it. They had the legacy of Netscape, sure, but they didn’t throw the towel and reskin IE the same way other browsers of the time did.

Besides that, at which point does the dominant search and advertising company of the internet get an antitrust case for this? People think google is trustworthy yet they do nothing to earn that trust.

This kinda erases history. IE was riddled with security flaws and stagnant beyond belief when Firefox usurped it. There was a compelling reason to use an IE alternative back then - they actually offered something IE couldn't give.

Chrome doesn't have that problem.

Do these changes make Google less stagnant, as they disempower the discerning user who wants at least some control over their browsing experience?

Google's new security flaw is that they are going to moderate ad-blocking, become responsible for it, and then depend on their inhuman machine to ignore all of your complaints. No different to how you can't find a human connect when you get screwed out of Gmail or Google Wallet because of their mathematics.

As a total thought experiment on where I'm coming from with this: in Star Trek TNG, Data (the Android) spends seven years with us exploring the human equation. Strip out the narrative imbalance and do you think the current automation of help and support is anywhere near aligned to the ideals of that 30 year old TV show that didn't know better? Or is the algorithm an overfitting to Google's commercial needs?

It's tangential to this thread but for some reason it felt worth writing out.

Mozilla can (and does) offer putting the privacy concerns and an open web first.

Google has worked very hard over the years to make itself into an organization with deeply baked-in incentives to do the opposite. It'd take a decade of sustained effort working counter to powerful incentives to fix that.

This is distinct from making a capable well-performing browser, which Google has done. So has Mozilla.

Yeah, sure, privacy is good.

It's not a product-making sale point for the vast majority of people.

Ad blocking is at least a concrete point that can be clearly explained, and will continue to drive traffic to mozilla.

It's not a completely ethereal concept like privacy, democratic freedom, etc.

The web standards were also much simpler then. It was difficult but tractable for a small team of volunteers to implement and keep up with them.

That ship has sailed.

Standards often shift be a substantial reconsolidation, in which numerous side features are discarded.

HTML itself emerged from such a consolidation (from SGML) and went through this process a few times. There are numerous other examples of technical recapitulation.

HTML and the menagerie of related standards has never, as far as I'm aware, become simpler. And the old versions have never been removed from a browser.

XHTML was a step too far. It was rejected in favour of HTML4 & 5, ultimately.

xhtml seems to me quite a bit simpler to implement than HTML5.

XHTML is hard-structured, and among its negatives, requires being fully downloaded to be parsed and validated. HTML, including H5, has soft-fail modes.

At least that's the justification I generally see. See the Criticism section of the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML#Criticism

That makes HTML5 harder to implement, not simpler.

HTML5 != XHTML. (If that's what you're saying.)

HTML5 breaks soft. It's easier to write, which is what drives content. A parser for which there is no content becomes moot.

(I'd prefer far more rigorous document specification. That's not the Universe I inhabit.)

You're responding to a thread pointing out that browsers are too complicated to implement, which has forced everyone but Google and Mozilla to give up on providing browsers and web standards.

And Google is currently the funding source for Mozilla, giving them a more or less complete monopoly on the future of the web.

If ad blockers can't block ads in Chrome but can in FF that'll get a large chunk of people to switch without a second thought.

Well it will once it disallows ad blocking

Chrome might not have that many security holes, but if you browse without adblock you will quickly see just how festered the web is with horrible, horrible ads.

Chrome without adblock is essentially ie6, with tabs.

With this course of action it may be compelling enough to give consumer users a reason to ditch Chrome.

No significant number of users have ever ditched anything useful over invisible tracking.

We're talking about very visible ads, not invisible tracking.

Firefox never unseated IE as the dominant browser.

It managed to get to around 20% marketshare[1] before Chrome surpassed it[2] and then also surpassed IE.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#W3...

I'm not sure this analogy works, because internet explorer was pure garbage. It was worse than garbage, it was like the nasty water left over at the top of the industrial drain, and by just looking at it you risk losing your eye sight. IE was more ripe for disruption like few products ever are, it was so ripe we got not one, but two competitors (chrome)!

Pound for pound, chrome is ridiculously far ahead of internet explorer mid-2000's. IDK what the hell someone is going to have to do to upend chrome and its rendering components but is going to have to be great.

It's not what someone had to do to upend IE or that they will have to do to upend Chrome, it's what Microsoft didn't do to keep IE in power: they didn't do anything.

I agree with that completely, but personally, I seriously doubt Alphabet is going to let its flagship product's flag ship delivery vehicle falter like ie did.

I mean, who knows. Never say never, but they are going to be tough competition. Not to mention that browsers are becoming so advanced it will be tough for a small team to match the engineering prowess of a company like google.

Microsoft basically shut down the IE team after they beat Netscape, which gave Firefox a chance to produce a better product. Web browsing is so closely tied to Google's core business that they're unlikely to mothball Chrome development.

Apple is behind WebKit and has a lot to gain by going against Google.

They are competitors in the hardware space and Apple needs an 'enemy' to help target its pro-privacy agenda against.

Genuine question, will Apple leave all the tracking/advertising money on the table in order to best Google on privacy? Or, once they win enough market-share will they just sell out?

What do you mean "lack of accessibility of Gecko"? Did you mean "lack of embedability"?

Gecko's embedability sucks ... on desktop. But that's not inevitable, it's just a matter of priorities and resources. On Android it's getting a lot better and something like GeckoView on Android could be made to work on desktop too ... if there's demand and perceived benefit.

(Mozilla's in the middle of upgrading Gecko's multiprocess support for fine-grained "site isolation" so now might not be the ideal time to stabilize embedding APIs.)

What i've read is that Gecko is a bit more difficult to understand when it comes to the entire code base, compared wo WebKit or Blink.

That might be true. They're all incredibly complex beasts. I don't think it matters much for adoption in terms of embedding or forking to create a new browser; the engine internals can and should mostly be hidden behind an API.