Being open source is really just a categorization. A fully for profit organization can make something valuable open source and then leverage that for commercial reasons (like building highly monetized additional code on top).

It is in Google's best interests for Chromium to dominate the web even if it is open source due to Chrome's broad reach and Google's heavy leverage of the web for revenue, like its ad services.

It is shortsighted to see what is happening and then go "well I don't see a problem".

[–] danielton@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly. So many browser developers adopted it because it's open-source and eliminated the work of having to build the rendering engine.

Meanwhile, Google is basically dictating the future of the Web because of this. Web developers are only testing on Chrome, and Google is about to kill ad blockers on every browser except Firefox and Safari because they control the rendering engine. What else are you gonna do?

"lol just download Chrome!"

[–] Laxaria@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

The extensive reach of Chromium is usually a bit understated too. For example, Chromium is what powers all Electron applications., and as much as we want to gripe about the nightmare Electron has enabled, it still has wide reach. Building for Electron means building for Chromium, and building for Chromium often entails leveraging what is available in Chrome/Electron/etc over what is standard. These frequently overlap, but when they don't, the blame is then placed on the browser rather than on the website (i.e. why doesn't XYZ work on Firefox, when the reason is the website developer chose not to test/ensure it does work).

This gets very funny in some situations where visiting a website in Firefox throws a "not supported" page but switching the user-string to Chrome/Chromium results in the same website working just fine.