Back in July, Google's work on a Web Integrity API emerged and many equated it to DRM. The company announced today it's not proceeding...
The Chrome team says they're not going to pursue Web Integrity but...
it is piloting a new Android WebView Media Integrity API that’s “narrowly scoped, and only targets WebViews embedded in apps.”
They say its because the team "heard your feedback." I'm sure that's true, and I can wildly speculate that all the current anti-trust attention was a factor too.
I'd like to believe that enough of us actually stopped using chrome and switched to Firefox the day they made that announcement that swayed them... But in reality I'm sure it was just the bad press and they're going to try to find a different more sneaky way to do the same shit.
What shall I say? The first browser I ever used was called "Arena" and it ran on a UNIX system because Windows back then didn't even have (native) networking - you had to purchase TCP/IP for it from third parties back then.
And one of the first websites I visited was "the original one" on Tim Barners-Lee's NEXT cube in CERN.
And guess what - there was a network way before the Web. We had chat, "social media" before it was called that, and played online multiplayer games. All without any spam or advertising.
you had to purchase TCP/IP for it from third parties back then.
LOL WAT?!! The precursor to the WinRAR subscription, huh...
And one of the first websites I visited was "the original one" on Tim Barners-Lee's NEXT cube in CERN.
Wow, this is kinda like witnessing the moon landing live, right? That's amazing!
And guess what - there was a network way before the Web. We had chat, "social media" before it was called that, and played online multiplayer games. All without any spam or advertising.
Interesting... Which chat server was this? And what year approximately?
Well, the TCP/IP stack we had was not at all like WinRar. You bought a box with a bunch of disks (5.25in) and some thick paperback manuals. The price was about 150$, and installation was tricky. It only worked with a certain set of network cards. But it did work together with the other network stack back then: Novell Netware, which did the majority of work in corporate networks back then.
The chat had a bit different structure back then. Messages went from client to client, and the "TALK" server only did coordination. There was a system, IIRC it was called NICKSERV or something where you globally registered your nickname.
I was not only watching things back then. I wrote a number of tools that made the rounds back then, a client for such a multiplayer online game that worked both in a text terminal and with a GUI, and a non-interactive NNTP (USENET) client that allowed access to our equivalent of the fediverse remotely. And I even wrote our companies first SMTP (email) gateway to the internet back then. Not "installed" or "configured" - wrote.
Dunno if this is what you mean, but you can definitely set another browser as default. Any context menus will change too: "Open with Firefox", or w/e you're using.
No, I'm not talking about default browser but the WebView app. For example I'm using Voyager for Lemmy, and if I click on this post's link it will open the website in the WebView, then I can click to Open with firefox.
It's even crazier than that. On some versions of Android there is no webview, only chrome! I think that was around Android 8 or so they dropped webview then re-added webview in the next version
Yeah there is a setting and now when I click links it opens in Firefox. But if you use the Google search widget it still opens in chrome, which is to be expected I guess.
That's not only a problem for google search, most apps uses webview to handle web links. They can do like Voyager and have a option to open the default browser instead, but most of them don't bother with that.
Actually right now Congress is writing new laws for the Internet, and the EU is looking pretty hard as well, so they might be backing off just so they can get the new laws being written minimized.
To be fair I still think Google services, Microsoft, etc and all that jazz is great, I'm no corporate shill or some free software nutter, but the issue however is the consistent anticompetitive strategies and vendor lock-in used to compensate for a lack of innovation.
Imagine if you could, for about a month, up to a year long period, where you just use a de-googled phone, a live USB and a portable hard drive, you'll actually have a different perspective and appreciation for what works with computers, printers, etc and our use of technology as a whole