Google can turn around tomorrow and say that no browser without WEI can access GMail, GMaps, GSheets, Photos etc; people will have to comply, effectively killing any browser that does not support the feature.
This is the problem with the Chromium monoculture. "We", as generic IT people and developers on HN, definitely have a responsibility for not deprecating this monoculture earlier. If you use Brave, you're guilty; if you use Ungoogled Chromium, you're guilty; if you use Safari, you're guilty. It's high time people start taking responsibility.
... oh wait, they already did. They force a monoculture on all the platforms they can get away with, and even shipped this WEI crap already.
That even Microsoft couldn't manage to keep up with progress only shows how utterly impossible it would be to kickstart a browser engine.
(The fact that Mozilla as an organization is embedded in constant infighting and utter incompetence doesn't help either)
The point is not that Google cares about those sites - they don't. Those services are leverage that they use to control web standards, in order to enable their real cash-cow: AdSense. They will use their web properties to shove down our throats anything that makes AdSense more profitable, from the anti-adblock measures in Chrome to this one.
> If we're all dependent on them enough that that's a problem for us, then that dependency is the problem
I don't disagree - and I use Firefox, keep my important mail outside of Gmail, etc etc. But I recognize that many, many people don't, so the technologically literal out there have an ethical responsibility to push back against corruption of the open web.
We had a shot at open browser engine development with limited scope. Everyone said no, not just Chrome. Mozilla and Apple both have blood on their hands too, if we want to be reductive.
We would’ve gotten Electron any other way if it wasn’t Chromium, it’s the only endgame for UI given how native layers shat the bed.
Mozilla also no longer even supports embedding. ;P
> it is the only game for developers that couldn't care
Yeah, dude. Most devs literally do not care, they just want to write and ship stuff. The native stack(s) are not cohesive enough and the numbers do not lie; devs do not want to rewrite the UI n times.
Signed, someone who also does native and web UI dev. ;P