This CL moves the base::Feature from content_features.h to
a generated feature from runtime_enabled_features.json5.
This means that the base::Feature can be default-enabled
while the web API is co...
Why would they? It’s FrEE maRKeT. Google can point to Edge and Safari as proof that they don’t have a monopoly on browsers, so no anti-trust issue there no sireee. The fact that Edge is based on Chromium does not factor into this (in fact the EU loves it, just look at what they did to “liberalize” the electricity market, aside from some extremely anecdotal stories, it’s all companies whose only job is to build a website and the fiscal “infrastructure” to buy energy from state-controlled producers to resell it at a markup using state-controlled energy distributors, but hey there is a private middleman so it’s liberal and the innovation/investment dividends will pay out any year now… any year…).
The concept of the WWW being supported by free, standard, interoperable protocols was never codified into law. Despite how much good it has done so many industries to have a common free interoperable tech stack, it doesn’t have to be this way; the French Minitel was a walled garden built by France Telecom, and that was 100% legal, because interoperability is not a legal requirement. The Apple Store and Game Consoles work under the same principle, you basically can’t sell anything on there without abiding by some asinine rules (Apple has had some issues but IIRC that has to do with them abusing their monopoly position to extract 30 % of all sales, not with the fact that they have an exclusive App Store to begin with).
Also this whole bullshit is not new and was never legally challenged because there is no case. For years you could not even browse instagram in your browser because they “only supported the mobile app”, which was a blatant way to force you into a walled garden where they can force you to watch as many ads as they want and where scraping is much harder.
Brave is built on Chromium. So, by default, no they are not safe from this. Without extra effort, Brave will have this feature. I don’t know if its feasible but there’s a chance the Brave devs can remove the code from their distribution, but that’s the best case scenario and just puts them in the same position as Firefox: they get locked out because they refuse to implement the spec.
No brave users don‘t care. Brave proved how untrustworthy they are and in any case their business model is unethical yet they still have a cult like following plus a group of crypto bros that are obsessed with getting digital pennies.
It may be dead to its users anyway depending on how forceful Google is with this. If Brave doesn’t work on 98.8% of all websites with advertising or indeed on 49.5% of all websites (approximately Google’s ad network’s reach), it becomes as niche as lynx.
Brave devs have stated that their fork of chromium is essentially degoogled, detracked,etc. Just the browser core and built from there… They don’t automatically add in new features into their fork just because chromium does.
Check out Kagi. It’s a subscription search service since they don’t show you ads, but that also means they don’t track you at all (no search history, for example). They also let you influence the priorities of the sites you see in the results or even completely block them, and the results are usually better than Google with less bullshit – or even at worst as good as Google. Some people seem to be skeptical about paying for a search engine, but everybody wanting shit for free is what got us into this fucking mess in the first place
I second this, was about to recommend Kagi, auto filters listicles, fantastic for actually finding information written by real people on blogs and things that aren’t SEO spam
Quick bangs alone almost make it worth it for me. The functionality exists in other browsers but it’s not synced, so being universal in the search engine itself is a giant usability improvement for me. Especially when using in conjunction with Orion.
The web sites that are interested in this tool never wanted to be actual web sites. They wanted to be closed client-server systems with proprietary, opaque protocols… HTTP was just a convenient implementation to leverage.
What WEI does is basically allow all of these wanna-be walled gardens to become actual walled gardens.
They never wanted to be interoperable in the first place, so what are we losing? Good riddance.
Maybe with this in place, we’ll be able to start rebuilding the interoperable web that we had before VC money took it over.
We just need a compelling business model for it. “Free” ad-supported is toxic for open discourse, and now it’s functionally deprecated on the open web. I think that’s a good thing, but good changes are not necessarily easy to endure.
I’m not sure how we’ll do it. Attention tokens and all that crypto stuff seems like garbage, but having a thousand different subscriptions to get past paywalls is not great either.
I’ll keep using Firefox and be extremely vocal about websites that won’t support it. I mean that’s all I can really do.
And hope the EU will oppose it.
Why would they? It’s FrEE maRKeT. Google can point to Edge and Safari as proof that they don’t have a monopoly on browsers, so no anti-trust issue there no sireee. The fact that Edge is based on Chromium does not factor into this (in fact the EU loves it, just look at what they did to “liberalize” the electricity market, aside from some extremely anecdotal stories, it’s all companies whose only job is to build a website and the fiscal “infrastructure” to buy energy from state-controlled producers to resell it at a markup using state-controlled energy distributors, but hey there is a private middleman so it’s liberal and the innovation/investment dividends will pay out any year now… any year…).
The concept of the WWW being supported by free, standard, interoperable protocols was never codified into law. Despite how much good it has done so many industries to have a common free interoperable tech stack, it doesn’t have to be this way; the French Minitel was a walled garden built by France Telecom, and that was 100% legal, because interoperability is not a legal requirement. The Apple Store and Game Consoles work under the same principle, you basically can’t sell anything on there without abiding by some asinine rules (Apple has had some issues but IIRC that has to do with them abusing their monopoly position to extract 30 % of all sales, not with the fact that they have an exclusive App Store to begin with).
Also this whole bullshit is not new and was never legally challenged because there is no case. For years you could not even browse instagram in your browser because they “only supported the mobile app”, which was a blatant way to force you into a walled garden where they can force you to watch as many ads as they want and where scraping is much harder.
Is Brave safe from these shenanigans? Asking for a friend.
Brave is built on Chromium. So, by default, no they are not safe from this. Without extra effort, Brave will have this feature. I don’t know if its feasible but there’s a chance the Brave devs can remove the code from their distribution, but that’s the best case scenario and just puts them in the same position as Firefox: they get locked out because they refuse to implement the spec.
I have to imagine they will strip it because if they don’t, it’ll be dead to all of their users.
No brave users don‘t care. Brave proved how untrustworthy they are and in any case their business model is unethical yet they still have a cult like following plus a group of crypto bros that are obsessed with getting digital pennies.
I’m a Brave user that certainly cares. They’re not untrustworthy.
It may be dead to its users anyway depending on how forceful Google is with this. If Brave doesn’t work on 98.8% of all websites with advertising or indeed on 49.5% of all websites (approximately Google’s ad network’s reach), it becomes as niche as lynx.
Yeah Brave would probably be fucked then. If you can’t have privacy anyway, might as well use Chrome.
Brave devs have stated that their fork of chromium is essentially degoogled, detracked,etc. Just the browser core and built from there… They don’t automatically add in new features into their fork just because chromium does.
I see, thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t sure about the specifics of how they produce their product from the upstream source.
I expect we’ll lose about 90% of the web within five years as this becomes normalized.
It will primarily be the seo driven AI crap driven ripoff regurgitated shitfest that’s arisen in the last 5 years tho.
I’ll be waiting for a search engine to arise that only shows user controllable presentation and will use that.
A way to filter out the corporate trash will make the human web better, not worse.
Check out Kagi. It’s a subscription search service since they don’t show you ads, but that also means they don’t track you at all (no search history, for example). They also let you influence the priorities of the sites you see in the results or even completely block them, and the results are usually better than Google with less bullshit – or even at worst as good as Google. Some people seem to be skeptical about paying for a search engine, but everybody wanting shit for free is what got us into this fucking mess in the first place
I second this, was about to recommend Kagi, auto filters listicles, fantastic for actually finding information written by real people on blogs and things that aren’t SEO spam
Quick bangs alone almost make it worth it for me. The functionality exists in other browsers but it’s not synced, so being universal in the search engine itself is a giant usability improvement for me. Especially when using in conjunction with Orion.
Yeah, this is pretty much my take.
The web sites that are interested in this tool never wanted to be actual web sites. They wanted to be closed client-server systems with proprietary, opaque protocols… HTTP was just a convenient implementation to leverage.
What WEI does is basically allow all of these wanna-be walled gardens to become actual walled gardens.
They never wanted to be interoperable in the first place, so what are we losing? Good riddance.
Maybe with this in place, we’ll be able to start rebuilding the interoperable web that we had before VC money took it over.
We just need a compelling business model for it. “Free” ad-supported is toxic for open discourse, and now it’s functionally deprecated on the open web. I think that’s a good thing, but good changes are not necessarily easy to endure.
I’m not sure how we’ll do it. Attention tokens and all that crypto stuff seems like garbage, but having a thousand different subscriptions to get past paywalls is not great either.