It’s not about whether or not webkit is better. It’s about choice and ensuring we don’t end up with google or apple dominating browser standards. Sure webkit and blink may be open source and - lets say if there was some new codec we wanted in chromium - we could write the patches and apply them in our builds. However 99.99% of people won’t do this because they don’t know how, so if Apple and Google resist the code being put into mainline Webkit / Blink, it will be a useless feature about 5 people have and no web services will support it.
Personally I used chromium for a long time but have gone back to firefox. The main reason is just google’s 180 on web standards. It looked for a while that between Mozilla, Google and Opera; open standards would finally beat down crap like H264. However between the about face from Google and Opera throwing in the towl on being a real browser company, Firefox seems to stand alone supporting open standards. Mozilla have been nothing but a force for good in the world since the moment they forked the netscape code and I would hate for them to become irrelevant or go down completely.
Now that’s not fair. I’m as aggrieved about the DRM stuff as you (hence as days pass by — Mozilla add HTML5 DRM, sadly but inevitably) but Google have not done a “180 on web standards”. The Chrome team are out there building support for useful, good, cross-browser standards every day. DRM is bad but WebRTC is great. Native Client is bad but ServiceWorker is great. Chrome Platform Status has a nice big list of things, an awful lot of which are good things for the web as a whole, and built in cooperation with the Mozilla team and the MS Edge team and the WebKit team. If the things that Google have done with which you disagree are enough to turn you off their browser, that’s perfectly fine and I can understand it, but accusing the whole company of not supporting open standards is a step too far, I think.
Mmm, maybe “180” was a bit harsh. However I think most people who use android will tell you that Google is certainly not remotely as much of an ally to the community as the company they were 5 years ago. Id say its at least a 90 though
They might well be not an ally to Android, but we ain’t talking here about Android This is about the Web, and I think Google are pretty good although not perfect at that. On the Android front… I have much less of a dog in that fight, and I’m much less involved in that community, and I’m quite prepared to take your word for it that Google are not as much an ally to the Android community as once they were.
In a lot of ways there isn’t that much to do with open source anymore with android unfortunately. More a situation like the open source page on the Apple website, where there’s a dump of code out of sight and mind mostly to satisfy the wording of various licences. Most of the core apps are no longer open source because a lot of them are just windows in which google online services run. Lots of the code that is open is integrated so tightly to proprietary components as to be useless; for example there’s some work going on to implement some power management features in Android on Linux – where they have largely been forced to go for a completely different implementation, as the Google kernel patches are only so much junk without all the proprietary stuff they work with.
The main thing that bothers me is probably the Play store. Google do have policies on allowed apps and such but so frequently the main policy seems to be just blocking apps that could harm Google’s income without any real justification or statements about why. They aren’t Apple level or anything but I’d still rather run Cyanogenmod or something on my phone, specifically to try get some freedom from Google.
Now, hang on. Yes, Google blocking ad blockers, and I should have mentioned that I knew about that. Blocking other app stores from appearing in your app store is, I think, reasonable. The VLC rejections have, I think, stopped? Certainly http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-android.html happily points at the Play Store.
Yea plenty of times enough people bitching about it gets something approved, early bittorrent apps were the same.
There was the Amazon app suite + appstore about 6 months ago that got pulled, forced everyone to use amazon’s web UI for a while until they released small individual non-integrated apps for each of their services. All the cyanogenmod stuff got forced out of the play store, the full installer makes sense I guess but there were a bunch of other apps that did nothing more than give you things like useful debugging info that were forced out too. If we are talking more vaguely plenty of game emulators for, for example playstation roms and DOS emulators, have been pulled. Grooveshark the music streaming service was pulled, as have plenty of other music services and videos. Youtube downloaders are mown down like troops in world war 1 as well as alternate unoffical apps for using Google services or other services, Hula viewers come to mind. The spotify people had a good couple of blog posts a few years back about how Google kept messing them around with regards to getting their updates approved.
Anyway I’m not at all a phone person, perhaps someone else can be more enlightening on android’s problems – I use a cyanogenmod device for just maps, podcasts and ofc a phone. However just trawling around internet news sites over the years and the cyanogenmod forums etc there is never any shortage of people bitching about something Google are being awkward about, particularly about android.
Also plenty of people seem pretty annoyed about google’s habit of releasing a product in a market, getting a userbase and then pulling it. Not evil but its weird, annoying.
Note all this pales in comparison to Apple without any doubt, I’m just saying Google aren’t completely and absolutely great and onside anymore, we just need to tread a bit more carefully around Google stuff than we once did. The main point of my posts are Mozilla really is “the last line” or so it feels. They really are the only company who we really can count on to always try do the right thing no matter what and it really sucks they are having such hardship. Reminds me I should update my phone.
On a different topic which you may not want to answer: What’s your opinion on the Jonathan Riddel drama? I’ve always thought quite highly of him and the CC’s post wasn’t very substance rich.
I’m not entirely convinced Google’s blocking of apps in the Play Store is evidence of Google just being evil. Maybe there are instances of apps being blocked unjustly, but I think most of it is because Google are forced to do it to comply with 3rd party copyright/intellectual property claims. At least Google give you choice of installing non-Play Store apps on Android, which is more than can be said of Apple. For most smartphone users, I think a curated and monitored app store is a good thing by default as long as they also give the option to bypass it for advanced users. It provides a much more user friendly experience than just telling people to download an .exe file from a random website.
I jump in this discussion to explain 2-3 things about Mozilla and Firefox.
Firebird/Phoenix/Firefox was created because back then, Microsoft had the monopoly of the Web browsers and therefore, of the Web rendering engine. A lot of things were broken (compared to the W3C specifications), but Microsoft never bothered updating those because, hey! MONOPOLY!
Then Firefox arrived with the Gecko engine and changed this.
Now, if Gecko is abandoned and all the major Web browsers use WebKit, we come back to the original monopoly position where the main maintainer/developer of this engine decides what goes in or not for the future of the Open Web. Which is a very bad thing, globally.
Speaking as someone who currently has open three Chromium windows containing a total of 73 tabs and a Firefox window with 4 tabs, I am eager to see people working on ways to potentially help me manage that better, yes.
just logged in for the first time in a while, got a notifaction of this feed, and yeah, you have a point.
I find myself bookmarking firefox sessions quite often, which probably isn’t ideal. but then, firefox doesn’t seem to have solved it for me, in part because they didn’t do something open instead of pocket.
This is about the Web, and I think Google are pretty good although not perfect at that. On the Android front… I have much less of a dog in that fight, and I’m much less involved in that community, and I’m quite prepared to take your word for it that Google are not as much an ally to the Android community as once they were.