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. kjs3 · 1789782869 · focus · HN ↗

               Or go the other way and make web pages not programs at all, like they originally were. Unfortunately, just communicating information isn't cool, doesn't monetize, and certainly doesn't get clicks.

               1. miki123211 · 1789814580 · focus · HN ↗

                  Users want an app platform that 1) works on every device, 2) is 1-click (no app installation / management, click a link and go), and 3) has advanced capabilities which let them easily do the task at hand.

                  Think "an interactive visualisation for choosing a seat when buying a concert ticket." That's not a "traditional" webpage, should work on whatever device the user is currently on (so native is unsuitable), and shouldn't require the user to install anything.

                  People clearly want web pages to be exactly this; we're on iteration #3 of the idea now. Iterations 1 and 2 were Java Applets and Flash, not necessarily in that order, and they were massively popular despite their shortcomings. Clearly, if we somehow deprecated the web as it is now (which is an utterly ridiculous idea, which makes me really curious what comments like yours are exactly trying to achieve here), as long as we keep it an open standard, users will choose browsers which offer this capability in some form. We should appreciate that the current iteration is an open standard which anybody is free to implement, instead of some proprietary blob that you need to license from Oracle or Adobe.

                  1. za_creature · 1789822727 · focus · HN ↗

                     > Users want an app platform that...

                     So do hackers. A big chunk of the open standards revolve around sandboxing malicious code, and given the amount of tracking happening anyway, fail at it.

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