Before you downvote check the community and maybe read my argument.
In recent times on Lemmy or really in any tech affine corner its become the norm to trash Chrome and ALL other Chromium based browsers. However I’d argue thats complete nonsense and maybe even counter productive. Really Safari and GOOGLE Chrome should be enemy #1. Not smaller Chromium browsers. The fact that two 100% big tech controlled browsers have such a dominating position is the real cause for concern. And lets not pretend that Firefox’s further development is also heavily predicated upon Google writing them a check.
Because really the issue right now is that the if both Google and Apple come together to start enshittifying their browsers by for example adding invasive DRM that allows websites to deny you service if you run adblockers, rooted or jailbroken devices (like Google tried) with their combined market share of > 90% they could just push through. Since many websites would loose very little in terms of potential users if they outright denied service to any browser (Chromium or not) without that DRM in place.
However if Google Chrome and Safari had lets say less than 40% market share another 50% was controlled by a dozen or so smaller based Chromium browsers, these browsers could simply first off not merge in these anti features into their codebase and maybe even deny merging any new Chromium changes in protest until Google or Apple give up on it. Because what use is there for Chrome to add new features if only a third of the browsers support it? No website can really use them
Also I’m still in full support of Chromium’s idea of giving webapps more capabilities. In my opinion giving webapps the ways to access System stuff like Bluetooth, USB Devices, … through a robust permission system and making them a even more viable type of Application is a great cause. The Applications are still sandboxed, they are multiplatform by nature and the web is a very democratic and user-friendly way to distribute them (way more so than the big tech owned Appstores). Or let me put it this way : If i have to run a closed source Application, I at least feel better doing so if its in a sandboxed environment like a browser and without supporting the iron grip the Appstore or Playstore have on their respective platforms.
My approval for Chromium however does not extend to electron and other “Website packaged as a ‘native’ App” frameworks. Fuck that crap. Especially since 90% could just be a regular Webapp or PWA but yet decide to ship and entire browser along with 1MB of JavaScript code that uses maybe 1% of the Browsers features.
With their combined single digit market share? I don’t think it would have changed much.
And sure they control Chromium but their control only has power if websites use these features on a large scale. And if the Softforks had a large enough market share and removed antifeature xyz websites can’t really on it without annihilating large chunks of their userbase, thus it won’t get used and the feature is meaningless and might as well not exist.
For example in Internet Explorer you could use Visual Basic Script instead of JS for client side scripts. But no other browser ever supported it, it never got adopted by any website and so it became nothing more than a footnote and nobody ever noticed that feature not being in other browsers.
Thing is, we’re not in that hypothetical world, we’re in a world where Google has a near monopoly on the browser space, and controls and steers the very project most of the others use as a base. In this context, I don’t think it’s particularly hard to see how the Chromium hegemony is hurting the browser landscape.
The view on “just don’t use it” is a bit more nuanced than that. For example, Manifest V3. Deciding not to use it means those browsers would have decided to completely break Chrome extension support in their browsers. Keeping it would also have meant literally re-implementing V2 support in their browser as it would be gone from the mainline. So what can browsers realistically do other than fold and adopt V3?
The mainstream usage of features can come from Google themselves. I’m thinking for example of the old YouTube Angular redesign, which used a pre-standards V0 Shadow DOM API that was only ever implemented in Chromium and relied on a very slow polyfill everywhere else, which resulted in majorly degraded performance on one of the most visited websites on the internet for anything that was not their own browsers.
“This site was optimized for Chrome” is only gonna get worse.
Google can steer Chromium all they want, if others refuse to update at all and make up a big enough userbase no website can use these features rendering them useless and giving Google no power. You just gave a perfect example with Shadow DOM and Manifest V3.
Lets say Google in Chromium 140 they add Manifest V3 and in Chromium 141 Shadow DOM V2. If lots of non Google Chromium browsers with lets say a combined 30% market share refuse to update to Chromium 140 because of what a terrible antifeature manifest V3 is and thus never implement Shadow DOM how many websites are ever going to use Shadow DOM V2? Probably almost non. And thus the feature is already doa making your experience not a percent worse if you use a older chromium base. Basically I don’t see why the resistance to Google can’t come from within the Chromium browser space - given enough market share.
Google was only able to pull this shit on YouTube because on iOS 99% of people are accessing YouTube through the YT App anyway and on the Desktop the loss of annihilating the 5% of Firefox users was worth it.