Chromium should become a vendor neutral project controlled by a foundation like LLVM. I'm hopeful that Microsoft's increasing involvement in the project leads to this. I view Google limiting usage of their proprietary services like Sync to Chrome as progress rather than negative.
Conversation
The services in Chromium should be open standards with documentation. Proprietary services belong downstream whether or not the client code is open.
Chrome can configure the build to use Google services and Edge can configure it to use Microsoft ones. Level the playing field.
1
2
18
Ideally, most services would become standards with the Google implementation as one possible option. If they only want Chrome users using their instance of it, no problem.
If it's a proprietary service with no intention of letting others host their own, then move it to Chrome.
1
1
12
And it should not require applying patches to Chrome in order to disable using Google services. The provider of each service should be configurable via build configuration options.
Chromium is still treated as the open source code for Chrome when it's a lot more than that now.
1
1
11
Replying to
I agree.
I think it would be nice if Google remove things like Translate and other Google things and if they still want the option of browsers wanting it make it a optional component.
Though, I think safebrowsing should be an opt out (ie default enabled in build) as it is great.
1
Replying to
Safe Browsing is one of the components that's already optional to include at build time and has a documented API. It's hard-wired to point at Google servers at the moment.
On Android, they implemented it as depending on the Play services Safe Browsing API though.

