People called me crazy when I told them that Google was leveraging open source to enact their version of an EEE strategy to kill the open internet. But here we are. They embraced open source, expanded Chromium with unethical practices, and now that they have the monopoly of the space and the main voting power on the W3C, they are ready to destroy all that is free and open about the internet.
Let’s not forget Android as well!
Google’s been slowly killing the open-source part of Android for a while now…
I’ve been warning about this for a long time, and people were like nah, it’s open source… I saw this coming miles away.
I will continue to use Firefox and Safari while I still can.
I am once again asking users to consider the eventual abandonment of web browsers. It is too big and complex for competition to actually create new ones, so this was inevitable.
[No offense intended to those working on important changes in forks, just saying proportionally it’s only a minor diff, no?]
In exchange for what?
Instead of using an extreme army knife to play a video, use a dedicated video player. Exchange some convenience for a healthier market.
Build a new internet on top of gemini? :D
I propose federated internet! Or Pied Piper (for you Silicon Valley fans).
Wait, what? What alternative do you suggest? Apps and App Stores?
I’m probably going to use this as a motivation to finally implement serious Digital Minimalism, and just stop using websites that force me to use it.
Banking will be the biggest problem, but other than that, I don’t really need to spend my time on the internet. And this kind of DRM infuriates me so much, that I might just get a life just out of spite.
You can always just go into a branch to do your banking. Less convenient, sure, but paying with cash is another way to avoid intrusive surveillance capitalism.
If the site is more complex than displaying raw text and links (to download files, and other pages), yes.
Any website that implements this API is going to immediately lose me as a user. They can go fuck themselves.
websites that will implement this API:
- your employer
- your bank
websites taht won’t implement this API:
- anything you can choose to quit without significant other consequences to your life
I hate that you’re probably right.
I wish you are right. The potential problem I see is if Chromium browsers implement this and smaller websites are able to get away by violating their user base privacy without significant losses.
Except you won’t have a realistic choice.
I like that sentiment, but how would you even know?
- Website requires user to visit using particular browser
- User refuses to use said browser
- ???
- No profit
But if said website is your bank’s website then you will also have to go change banks and refinance your mortgage, or give up on internet banking. And there could be lots of implications like that we haven’t thought about yet. Wanna buy something using Paypal? You are shit out of luck if they get on the Google DRM train. It’s looking bleak, but hopefully it’ll be seen as being monopolistic if Google is the only one who chooses to implement it, and are thus seen to be abusing their market power to block websites from working properly on other browsers. If Safari and Edge also decide to implement it then we are all probably all screwed though.
I’d honestly look for an alternative financial institution that either has an app that implements whatever security they think they need or doesn’t implement this DRM bullshit for their website.
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That’s good they won’t be adopting WEI, but if my bank or some other critical site decides to enforce a desktop browser with it, I’m still in the same boat. I did think of a way to avoid a WEI browser on my desktop if it comes to that. I can probably substitute a phone app for any critical services, but that’s still a drag. I don’t like phone apps much, I use a desktop browser for everything.
I think Google’s destruction of the Internet is most simply a matter of influence. If Chrome didn’t have the huge market share they wouldn’t be able to pull off this kind of thing, open source or not. Unfortunately people have a herd mentality with everything on the internet so we allowed it to happen by doing what we always do.
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I noticed that too and I dumped Chrome for FF on every machine I use as soon as I read about this
Wondered how to deactivate the auto update of Chromium in the setting. There is no checkbox to untick. You have to twiddle with the regedit to deactivate updates. WTF?
Guys, Firefox (or LibreWolf) all the way!
or Fennec for F-Droid on Android (Firefox fork)
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Brave and Vivaldi are both built on Chromium though…
They can still reject the proposal. Just because they’re built upon Chromium, doesn’t mean they need to utilise or retain every feature Google adds to it.
I think it’s not easy this time.
Any browser choosing not to implement this would not be trusted and any website choosing to use this API could therefore reject users from those browsers.
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For sites that fully embrace the new web environment integrity procedure would that break chromium browsers like Brave too?
That would break websites, not browsers.
That is semantics that wont help the users. They still need to change browser to access their banks website if their bank is enforcing WEI. There is nothing “broken” in the technical sense, the website and browser will be incompatible with oneanother. The blame is clearly on the bank but what’s a single user gonna do if this becomes industry standard for banks?
(I am using banks as an example of a service you cant easily avoid, this would also be true for other important stuff like digitialized government access etc ect)
That’s was what I meant. Websites not functioning properly and informing users to use approved ones like Chrome or Edge.
If only Google supports this, the rest can fork it together.
Forking would be insane because of how much code is in Chromium and how much work goes into maintaining it. The realistic thing to do is to keep doing what they’ve been doing: maintain a modified branch. WEI would just be one of many changes between Google’s version and other vendors’.
maintain a modified branch
So: a fork. It’s not unusual for a fork to regularly merge back the upstream changes while maintaining its own set of changes.
They have no leverage over the monopoly google has on the browsers marketshare. the only people who can change things are the end users by switching over to non-chromium browsers, but we all know this won’t happen
People said that about internet explorer in the old days
They lost because they were challenged by a company with more money and bigger interest in dominating the ads market.
Google didn’t have more money than Microsoft. Google those days just had a better product, and still a shitton of money. These were still the days of “don’t be evil” for Google
IE sucked though. Chrome doesn’t.
The article refers to Vivaldi’s response as scathing, but I think it is fair and even and the best overall summary I have seen -> https://vivaldi.com/blog/googles-new-dangerous-web-environment-integrity-spec/
Google has been so far very quiet on this issue. I wonder why.
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Seriously, why though?
Hopefully they prevail, I will be telling everyone I know to switch to firefox, and additionally changing my parents devices to they as well. Thankfully these days it’s really easy to do so
What about Safari? Will Apple bend over to Googles will and use their new standard?
They already shipped something very similar last year…
https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
Apple strips any freedom its users might have. Disgusting and forever perplexing how this evil company is not getting the shit it deserves.
I was not aware of this. Thanks!
Woah …even safari uses chromium ?
No, safari is based on WebKit (which itself is based on KHTML from KDE). Chrome once upon a time was based on WebKit, but it’s now based on a fork called blink.
In any case, this is more of a “will Apple implementation what Google wants implemented?” question. Same with Mozilla being in that list, they use a completely independent engine for Firefox that shares no lineage with Chrome.
Thanks
It uses webkit, which Blink, Google’s browser engine is a fork of.
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While I’m glad they are speaking up against it, I don’t believe that it will change anything. If Google decides to implement it, it will just end up exactly like it did with WC3 EME, as summarized in this the 2014 article from if I’m not mistaken a Mozilla dev:
I know of people recommending Chrome (not Chromium) because it has Flash Player natively incorporated, so you no longer have to install it separately.
This serves to prove that the majority of users doesn’t know about either the technical or ethical differences in the software they are using.You may also think of the pirated software the are using,but this is a different matter. Ignoring this marketshare goes against Mozilla’s idea of a web available to everyone, not to mention that Firefox is no longer the most used browser as it used to be a a few years ago and it is therefore forced to comply with this kind of requests.
Which is why we have government bodies. As usual, it will probably be the EU to castrate g**gle in the future.
EME was a bit different. Hollywood media was already encrypted. Even on DVD. They required encryption for streaming. To this day it’s the only sector that really uses EME. Other streaming media doesn’t even bother.
Good. WEI is a bad proposal for many reasons. I still can’t fathom why so many browsers use Chromium as their base nowadays though.
On another note, what is up with the thumbnail image for this article? The article doesn’t mention anything about Alabama’s awful attorney general. Hmmm…
There aren’t a lot of options for browser engines if you don’t want to spend forever playing catch up while writing your own. My understanding is that Gecko, which Firefox uses, isn’t as easy to build on top of. The idea with using chromium is that you can focus on building a custom ui or fancy new features without worrying about web pages rendering incorrectly.
This is perfect. The more browsers refuse to implement this, the more the antitrust against Google is going to sting.
