If/when Apple is forced to start allowing Blink on iOS globally, all it takes is a hearty marketing push from Google and devs putting “best viewed in Chrome” badges on their sites for Safari’s marketshare (and with it, Apple’s influence) to plummet.

Is keeping up with "just security patches" on Chromium reasonable?

As sickening as thought as it is, the best hope there is Microsoft-- they can afford to hire the necessary army of developers, and their incentives are aligned just far enough away from Google's that they would have reasons to do it.

The problem is that they're also in the ad economy now, so their opportunity to play it for relevance is shot.

They had a window where they could have said "Edge: the Chromium-based browser that treats uBlock Origin as a first-class citizen" but instead they'd rather add weird popups to credit card fields asking if I want to use Klarna instead.

If web devs get permission to start ignoring Safari (which currently sits at ~20% marketshare), there’s no way they’re going to care about Firefox which doesn’t have even a fifth as much. If Safari falls so does Firefox.

> Apple isn't the only one standing in the way of a Google hegemony.

Who else would you consider?

Chromium-based browsers from companies other than Google are still contributing to Google’s hegemony. And Mozilla is funded by Google.

> If they are, then the web is already fucked since neither corporation has a benevolent track record pertaining to Open Source.

Interesting take, since Google has both authored and supported hundreds of FLOSS projects over many years. They even sponsored summer "internships" for students to contribute to Open Source software as long as a maintainer bothered to register and promise to mentor the student via "Summer of Code"

> If they did something truly onerous

It would very unlikely be something which would affect Microsoft’s bottom line. They wouldn’t care.

> and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.

Who’s “everyone”? Anyone who cares minimally about possible shenanigans in Chromium is already selectively merging changes.

Edge aggressively sets itself as the default browser and slurps information from Chrome without permission. Edge and Microsoft are not and will not be a saviour from Google and Chrome.

Anyone who tries to push changes to Chromium will quickly find Google does control it.

> Google doesn't have control of Chromium though.

They do. If they merge DRM into it tomorrow or something alike, it trickles down to all users of Chromium and Google Chrome.

You can build _a fork_ of it. But the enormous majority of the masses don’t use your fork — they use upstream.

> Microsoft would fork it within hours

I haven't trudged through Chromium's commit statistics but has Microsoft been upstreaming many contributions? I'm skeptical that they are ready to take on the full brunt of Chromium maintenance on a whim, it would take a decent while to build up the teams and expertise for it.

>Google doesn't have control of Chromium though.

There's a tightly controlled pool of developers who make up the decision-making body about which commits get approved. That pool is dominated by Google employees so they effectively control whether something gets committed.

So it's not open in the sense that would be most people's first impression, which is that anyone can contribute code to the project and see it realized. You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.

>Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.

I don't see how that follows. Google disproportionately invests in a browser, controls it and with it much of the destiny of the web. The fact that Google is leveraging their ad monopoly to create and maintain a dominant browser is the issue. At least, it's an issue. The ad monopoly powers their control over the web and vice versa.

Even if that’s true, are we going to see Google’s dominance in the ad space meaningfully curbed? It seems highly unlikely at best, and it doesn’t matter how loud any of us are barking (at least until there’s a massive shift in political headwinds).

Until that’s addressed, Chrome being dominant is a problem, because Google has created an “open moat” with their resource expenditure. Microsoft sure as hell isn’t going to be able to justify that kind of spend on their Chromium fork, and so their influence will never be of note.

Except they do. One just has to look at the inability to keep JPEG-XL mainlined in Chromium. Sure, some forks still have JPEG-XL, but it's effectively gone at this point.

Nobody worth mentioning to big corporations uses Chromium.

> Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.

Why would people trust Microsoft more than Google, though? Even with really bad actions, switching browsers is very difficult (i.e. it requires making an active choice and change about an obscure topic) and I don't see normal people doing it, which is what would be required for this to happen.

Microsoft can't get any traction for Edge even with the pushiness on their OS and massive market share. I recently installed Windows 11 on a box and even searching for Chrome had the top portion of the screen show "You don't need a different browser!" at the top of Bing. Did that stop me? No. Not going to use a Microsoft browser, thanks.