Thread

1. wps · 1789760710 · focus · HN ↗

   The amount of roadblocks Google is putting up for GrapheneOS is just ridiculous. None of their decisions make any sense, from the delayed source patches upstream, to the embargos, attestation issues, etc. Google simply regrets android being open source.

   1. godelski · 1789763541 · focus · HN ↗

      I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.

        > Google simply regrets android being open source.
      

      Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source. With all the work from outside Google. The same is true chrome.

      But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand

      1. StilesCrisis · 1789766362 · focus · HN ↗

         Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.

         If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.

         1. floxy · 1789781514 · focus · HN ↗

            >wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.

            It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.

            1. AnthonyMouse · 1789788797 · focus · HN ↗

               > Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway).

               The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.

               1. nottorp · 1789812496 · focus · HN ↗

                  Pretty sure wasm works on Safari since I've ran my own code like that...

                  1. AnthonyMouse · 1789961810 · focus · HN ↗

                     The premise is that you want to make something that competes with Safari, e.g. you want to provide a graphics API to third party developers.

                     Doing that in Safari doesn't work twice. First, if Safari doesn't already expose whatever GPU primitives you need to do things efficiently, you can't get them. And second, your API implementation (which is likely to be large) would then have to be distributed by anyone using it instead of being part of the browser they use for all sites, creating a >100MB dependency for a <50kB web page.

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