Germany’s Ecosia, a nonprofit search engine, said on Thursday it has submitted a proposal to assume a 10-year stewardship of Alphabet’s Google Chrome web browser.
According to the proposal, Google would legally separate Chrome into a foundation, retaining ultimate ownership and intellectual property rights and give Ecosia operational responsibility for 10 years, Ecosia said.
More info from Reuters
They’re just jumping on the PR hype like everyone else.
Chrome is an extremely absurdly valuable asset to Google and even to the whole world, its users view well over a trillion pages a month using it not even counting the forks and is backed by an army of developers and engineers.
Why would Google give it to some tiny company or sell it for anything less than $500 billion?
Instead of trying to buy Chrome or force Google to sell chrome all these companies and governments should be promoting and funding alternatives like Firefox, Ladybird, and Servo.
Although all of that funding and development for alternative engines would go to waste. Google and other companies made web browsers far more complex and bloated than they should have been, so Ladybird and Servo have no chance of ever competing with Google. It’s hopeless. The web cannot handle multiple competing browser engines and no company or development team, no matter how large or experienced, can build a browser from scratch that’s compatible with today’s standards and reasonably secure. No company other than Google sadly.
I don’t mind Chrome being a foundation or even letting Google contribute to the browser, but if that were to happen, don’t leave them as the stewards of Chrome or in charge of the browser. Let them make security fixes and improvements but don’t put them in charge of the browser security because then we end up with crap like Manifest V3 which does as much harm as good.
Another thought, maybe Firefox, Chromium, and Safari should place a permanent moratorium on all new browser features unrelated to security, privacy, accessibility, and internationalization and perhaps deprecate crap like WebAssembly and possibly DRM. The web would be a (slightly) better place I think.
I’ve said it here and other places but Chromium should just become the standard browser.
Get rid of all the other browsers, let them build on top of it.
If Chromium ever became it’s own non-profit organization independent from Google, then I might be okay with it as long as forks are still allowed.
What we need is a fork of the Blink engine separate from the browser if possible so developers can create frontends to this forked engine (with all telemetry and Google services removed unless doing so would cause massive security issues), like QtWebEngine and the browsers which use it (like Falkon and Qutebrowser) for example, except it should remain up-to-date instead of freezing Chromium versions for a long time and backporting security fixes every few months. While I do appreciate browsers like Ungoogled Chromium, Vanadium, Cromite, and Trivalent mitigating the privacy issues of Chrome or hardening for security, they don’t do anything to improve the barebones browsing experience and that isn’t really possible for small forks anyways.
I just wish Pale Moon would take security seriously and start catching up to Firefox and Chrome security-wise while still retaining the ideals of the old web.
Yes, this! You worded it better, thanks.
Ladybird isn’t even available worldwide for all platforms. Firefox doesn’t support PWA and still have networking bugs for years (e.g. when you change your network Firefox simply crashes)
Servo I have no idea what that is, and it was definitely not on my company’s radar (which should give you an idea of how it is irrelevant)
New rendering engine in rust, originally started by mozilla now continued by free software Foundation Europe.
Its not in a state dor avarage users yet
I don’t think they necessarily want to convince Google but the court.
And ecoisa would be miles better than perplexity
This is literally never going to happen. It’s more likely that Google becomes a non-profit, considering Pale Moon doesn’t see the issue with their shit security at all. In fact, they seem to think they are on top of Firefox at the moment.