KaiserKitty on Nostr: Why is chromium open source? This is what we call EEE. Embrace, extend, extinguish. ...

Why is chromium open source? This is what we call EEE. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Google spreads chromium like herpes everywhere. Everyone forks it as is comfy as its open source and any negative changes can just be forked away, right? The thing is any browser is way to complex to do from scratch or even 50% from scratch so any Chrome forks are inherently at the mercy of Google's changes. Brave, Vivaldi, etc are all going along with manifest V3 it's just that a few are maintaining some backwards compatibility, again chromium is so huge and google does all the heavy lifting so every fork is forced to be at its mercy.

Google has advertised so much that web browsers are Chrome and since everyone has a google account may as well use chrome. Like Edge is just straight up a more efficient chrome with the same functionality yet everyone immediately installs chrome because it's THE web browser like Google is THE search engine. This is why Firefox/Gecko and Safari/webkit will never win. Chrome can guzzle up 8 gb of ram for all anyone will care most computer users don't even understand the difference between memory and storage, all they know is Chrome is THE web browser.

TDLR: open sourcing allows big companies to spread around massive code bases only they can actually maintain like herpes.