• dustyData@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • EnglishMobster@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Let’s not forget Android as well!

      Google’s been slowly killing the open-source part of Android for a while now…

    • danielton@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • tabular@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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?]

        • Mikina@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Unruffled [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            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.

        • tabular@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          If the site is more complex than displaying raw text and links (to download files, and other pages), yes.

  • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninja
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    1 year ago

    Any website that implements this API is going to immediately lose me as a user. They can go fuck themselves.

    • notatoad@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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
      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • 4z01235@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago
        1. Website requires user to visit using particular browser
        2. User refuses to use said browser
        3. ???
        4. No profit
        • Unruffled [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninja
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            1 year ago

            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.

  • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Aopen
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      1 year ago

      or Fennec for F-Droid on Android (Firefox fork)

  • mtchristo@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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

      • mtchristo@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        They lost because they were challenged by a company with more money and bigger interest in dominating the ads market.

        • DosDude👾@retrolemmy.com
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          1 year ago

          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

  • Metriximor@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • ojmcelderry@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • spiderman@ani.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • NightOwl@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        For sites that fully embrace the new web environment integrity procedure would that break chromium browsers like Brave too?

          • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            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)

          • NightOwl@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            That’s was what I meant. Websites not functioning properly and informing users to use approved ones like Chrome or Edge.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        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’.

        • TheEntity@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • Mikina@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Chickenstalker@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Which is why we have government bodies. As usual, it will probably be the EU to castrate g**gle in the future.

    • Desistance@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • keet@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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…

    • stankmut@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • aggelalex@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is perfect. The more browsers refuse to implement this, the more the antitrust against Google is going to sting.