(Regardless of motivation, they’re lending more support than most other companies, so it’s applaudable nonetheless.)
Both companies are basically hedging against future incentive misalignment with other (larger) companies, and reducing their dependencies on platforms they have ~zero influence over.
Hedging on a promising upstart makes a lot of sense.
They aren’t going to do this, though, so long as new releases of Chromium are reasonable.
Also, I don’t see any sign that Google even wants to do it? This is not really evidence-based reasoning, it’s just “I can imagine something evil that Google might do.”
Google markets Chrome relentlessly, with popups in search and YouTube if you're using other browsers, browser choice dialogs in Google iOS apps (despite iOS having a default browser setting for 5 years now), Chrome getting bundled into random Windows software installers, etc.
Many devs actively desire single-engine development and testing and many aren't shy about using Chrome only features already. If they had the capability to tell users to go install Chrome instead of targeting broadly supported features, they would do so in a heartbeat.
Please read Mozilla's story on how Google sabotaged them: https://archive.is/tgIH9
Oh. And they very literally killed Internet Explorer: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
Oh. And Google's mobile apps always conveniently forget the setting of "always use system browser and never ask me", and will keep asking you to open with "chrome", "google", or "system browser".
Oh and...
I disagree with this. Firstly, in this article they talk about how they "killed" IE6 in favour of later versions of IE, but MS ultimately killed IE with neglect until it was far too late.
Never having to use polyfills or CanIUse tables, plus testing on the same environment they develop on.
This is a problem of Apple's own making.
My work sent over some old MacBook for when we need to test something unique to Safari, so it's not even the hardware aspect. It's the "I need to find another place to stash a machine, and then wire up KVM switches to use my highly opinionated I/O device choices, on a finite sized desk" factor.
The moment iPhones aren't allowed to force browsers to use Webkit (the EU is already pushing for this), the open web dies. There will no longer be any draw for web developers to develop for standards instead of developing for Chrome.
As sickening as thought as it is, the best hope there is Microsoft-- they can afford to hire the necessary army of developers, and their incentives are aligned just far enough away from Google's that they would have reasons to do it.
The problem is that they're also in the ad economy now, so their opportunity to play it for relevance is shot.
They had a window where they could have said "Edge: the Chromium-based browser that treats uBlock Origin as a first-class citizen" but instead they'd rather add weird popups to credit card fields asking if I want to use Klarna instead.
Who else would you consider?
Chromium-based browsers from companies other than Google are still contributing to Google’s hegemony. And Mozilla is funded by Google.
Interesting take, since Google has both authored and supported hundreds of FLOSS projects over many years. They even sponsored summer "internships" for students to contribute to Open Source software as long as a maintainer bothered to register and promise to mentor the student via "Summer of Code"
The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because of their ad monopoly. Same with search, Gmail, Translate, Maps. None of those things can exist without the ad monopoly funding it all.
Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
It would very unlikely be something which would affect Microsoft’s bottom line. They wouldn’t care.
> and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
Who’s “everyone”? Anyone who cares minimally about possible shenanigans in Chromium is already selectively merging changes.
Edge aggressively sets itself as the default browser and slurps information from Chrome without permission. Edge and Microsoft are not and will not be a saviour from Google and Chrome.
The real difficulty is that you need someone with large pockets to fund any forks if those forks are going to be viable. And that is due to the complexity of the web as a platform.
As you noted, I don't think forking and maintaining a Google sized code base is a realistic alternative. But by the same token, I don't think that the possibility of forking said code base is what people typically mean by not having control.
“Each other”? Google forked from Apple; Apple forked from KDE, not Google.
They do. If they merge DRM into it tomorrow or something alike, it trickles down to all users of Chromium and Google Chrome.
You can build _a fork_ of it. But the enormous majority of the masses don’t use your fork — they use upstream.
However, Google Chrome is so ubiquitous that any changes Google makes to it are expected to be available in all other browsers and its a kind of defacto control even if it isn't technically control of the upstream Chromium project.
If we're discussing someone else forking Chromium because hypothetically Google decided to once again Be Evil it is important to understand, from a technical standpoint, that the fork comes from code before Google does their stuff and not after. Ripping all of google's tendrils out would be a monumental undertaking. Building a similar browser from before Google bakes in their telemetry is infinitely easier and more trustworthy in my opinion.
It is correct that Google can and does decide that some features should remain private before they are developed. However, there are significant logistic and cultural hurdles to keeping something private, and as a result it's really only possible in certain parts of the codebase. Sometimes things that have been developed in private are eventually made public, and Chrome devs will often call that "upstreaming", but I think that's not really the same thing as what most people are talking about when they use the words upstream and downstream. And these instances are fairly uncommon in the history of the project.
Otherwise, IMO it is not really correct to say that changes flow from Chrome into Chromium. Nearly all development is done in the public repos and so they would be available simultaneously for either build. There aren't really official releases of Chromium per se, but a full build of Chromium containing a given change is basically always available before the corresponding full build of Chrome. There may be very rare exceptions for security fixes that are shipped before they are made public, but it would actually pretty hard to land such a change so I doubt it's happened more than a few times.
So, more generally speaking, in my opinion it's not really useful to talk about "upstream" and "downstream" for Chrome and Chromium, definitely not in the day-to-day sense. Chrome and Chromium are multi-repo projects, and there is only ever a single copy of a particular repo that is used for either. The same branches in a given repo are used for both Chrome and Chromium at any point in time. There is a main branch and release branches, and most of the time (but not always) a change will land in the main branch before a release branch. But I don't think most people would call "main" upstream of "release" in that sense.
[ There are rare situations where Google will develop experiments on a private branch of a repo, but those don't usually end up getting shipped to anyone. ]
This is different from how (most of?) the other Chromium-based browsers operate, where my understanding is that they usually do have true forks of (some of) the repos and changes flow downstream from the Google-maintained ones to ones under their control in the normal sense of the word.
They do have technical control over the upstrean Chromium project. There's an invite only pool of developers who decide what gets committed to Chromium and they are Google employees.
I haven't trudged through Chromium's commit statistics but has Microsoft been upstreaming many contributions? I'm skeptical that they are ready to take on the full brunt of Chromium maintenance on a whim, it would take a decent while to build up the teams and expertise for it.
When Microsoft beat Netscape with IE, it was by building a far better browser. Google is a stronger competitor than Netscape ever was though. Without Google dropping the ball (like Netscape), Microsoft would never exceed Chrome's performance by enough to be the fastest, most compatible (with Chrome), etc.
It is also just classic Microsoft when they are hungry. Like making Word use WordPerfect files and keyboard shortcuts. Only today it is that their browser is mostly Google, Linux is built into Windows 11, SQL Server ships on Linux, and their most popular IDE is open-source built on open tech (Electron) they didn't create.
When they get threatened, nothing is too sacred for Microsoft to kill or adopt.
Microsoft firing on all cylinders, when they want to, is a terrifying force.
Just like management doesn't a F about the state of UWP, WinUI and anything related to it.
Microsoft lands many changes in Chromium first before they show up in Edge (logistically it's easier to do things this way for merging reasons), but they do also upstream changes to Chromium that show up in Edge first.
There's a tightly controlled pool of developers who make up the decision-making body about which commits get approved. That pool is dominated by Google employees so they effectively control whether something gets committed.
So it's not open in the sense that would be most people's first impression, which is that anyone can contribute code to the project and see it realized. You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.
>Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
I don't see how that follows. Google disproportionately invests in a browser, controls it and with it much of the destiny of the web. The fact that Google is leveraging their ad monopoly to create and maintain a dominant browser is the issue. At least, it's an issue. The ad monopoly powers their control over the web and vice versa.
As opposed to maintaining an alternate google size code base of a non-chromium browser?
Until that’s addressed, Chrome being dominant is a problem, because Google has created an “open moat” with their resource expenditure. Microsoft sure as hell isn’t going to be able to justify that kind of spend on their Chromium fork, and so their influence will never be of note.
> (at least until there’s a massive shift in political headwinds)
It did look like it for a while with the US its antitrust action and the EU also taking aggressive action. But then Google kissed the ring and the DoJ pulled back it's recommendation of Google divesting DoubleClick, and the EU lost the staredown with Trump and made their measures toothless too.
Who knows what will happen in the 2030s though. If the Democrats get into power again, I'm sure they'll remember how big tech switched up on them and there will be a serious reckoning.
Why would people trust Microsoft more than Google, though? Even with really bad actions, switching browsers is very difficult (i.e. it requires making an active choice and change about an obscure topic) and I don't see normal people doing it, which is what would be required for this to happen.
Microsoft can't get any traction for Edge even with the pushiness on their OS and massive market share. I recently installed Windows 11 on a box and even searching for Chrome had the top portion of the screen show "You don't need a different browser!" at the top of Bing. Did that stop me? No. Not going to use a Microsoft browser, thanks.
My 70 year old mother doesn't want the faff of installing Firefox so Edge fits the bill. It provides for her, her needs. I've installed Firefox and it sits untouched.
Microsoft doesn't care if people use it or not. It's easier and cheaper for them to integrate as Chromium does than it is to upkeep Trident. It's not their business too.
My take to why they chose Chromium is that Firefox (Netscape) has always been seen as an independent rebel.
Microsoft is corporate as is Google. I'm sure some backhand deals too.
I don't have any more insight than any other commenter, but in my estimation a major factor is how practical the browser is to fork. By the time Microsoft switched to a Chromium base for edge, creating and maintaining a Chromium fork with meaningfully different UI was fairly well-trodden ground because it had been done several times already, whereas almost nobody had forked Firefox (except for toggle some flags or keep the UI frozen in time). The one countervailing example, Brave, also switched to Chromium for similar reasons.
Additionally, this was the beginning of the arc of working overtime to court web developers that it's still in the midst of. By shuttering Chakra (the old Edge rendering engine) and switching to Blink, Microsoft improved its reputation with web devs.
Getting your Steam library to work on Linux before it got Valve's blessing with Proton wasn't a great experience. If they wanted to, they could have easily decided to block games from running on Linux and gave some statement about preventing piracy and protecting users from malware.
I'm optimistic that this investment means we'll see more open standards and large browser makers being forced to collaborate and create simpler standards without compromising security.
There weren't any real roadblocks for that caused by Valve. And it definitely wasn't as hard as you're implying.
> If they wanted to, they could have easily decided to block games from running on Linux and gave some statement about preventing piracy and protecting users from malware.
They could have just like any software developer could but they didn't. They also didn't block the Steam for Linux client from running on unapproved distributions or even FreeBSD.
That at least demonstrated, to some extant, that Valve doesn't care where you run your games, as long as you buy them on Steam.
As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
When VC money is flowing, you see things that look like (or even can be) altruism - but when the belts tighten and waste is eliminated these endeavors need to align with the company's goals.
Therefore, look for what Cloudflare is "buying" in this transaction. I suggest they probably want the PR win as it distracts from their objective of locking down the web, and it's worth the expenditure to them.
You can't even do that honestly. Look at Boeing. It got taken over by know-nothing managers that followed that religion of shareholder value, and what did it do? Destroy shareholder value!
I think we should instead say "we can't rely on any institution to be stable over time". That's a much more sane statement imo.
For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the prophet stream. That's definitionally why they exist, and we have enough evidence from the history of everything ever to assume that they will for the most part act that way.
You are saying something different. You are pointing out that the people making decisions aren't necessarily good at making those decisions. Or maybe the incentive structure is set up such that the people making the decisions do not share the goal of profit with the company, and so decide according to what's best for them, which might or might not be what's best for the profit objective.
The instability of institutions in general is yet a third characteristic.
But they won't. This statement is a declaration of faith/religion, not a statement of fact. It's a common belief, but that doesn't make it true.
There are exceptions all over the place where businesses don't act like robber barons, sure. Take for example Market Basket up here in New England, where the CEO for years and years resisted raising prices and tried to treat workers well, in the interest of maintaining a long-term positive image and being a sustainable element of the region's economy. But guess what: he was just forced out for not being greedy enough. Lots of people seem to be expecting a private equity takeover soon.
!!!
Startups nominally care more about the long view, as they need to convince investors that they high long-term value and have to act accordingly. As companies grow from VC-funded, to fast-growing public, then to well-established public company, the culture shifts to match dominant shareholder expectations.
I would like to understand where this breaks down. Would a for-profit individual be more reliable? Would a non-profit? At which point does quality deteriorate?
I recently switched to Kagi and their Orion browser, and that's when I learned about PBCs.
A PBC legally takes a triple mandate, the first is just as any for-profit corp, to maximize shareholder value, the second is to the benefit of the stakeholders, and the last can be anything they write down when they register as a PBC. The Delaware law says:
> The board of directors shall manage or direct the business and affairs of the public benefit corporation in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the specific public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.
If they fail at any of these mandates, you can sue them.
That means they are still for-profit, but also can't decide to favor profit over their other mandate or change their mind. Their other mandate being stakeholders interests, like users, as well as the explicitly stated benefit. For Kagi, that benefit is:
> Kagi is committed to creating a more human-centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities, and society as a whole, with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved.
Now it's not all roses, Anthropic I learned is another PBC. Their benefit is:
> the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity
Which is quite vague, and can be taken in many directions.
But overall, it's much better than normal corporations, because here they are legally obligated to care about stockholder, stakeholder, and some additionally specific "public benefit".
where are you getting this? PBC has no actual legal aspect to it at all - its all self reporting and self adherence. PBC is more marketing/signalling than legal requirements
But IANAL. I am just learning about this, so I'm curious, if you know more than I do, please share.
1) Legally Enforceable: periodic self reporting of public benefit related activities 2) Not legally enforceable: the detailed scope and actual delivery/implementation of said benefits. Third party auditing
i.e. if you try going and suing OpenAI, Anthropic etc. on their stated public benefit contradicting the severe impact datacenters are having to water/electricity in some areas, im quite certain that you would lose.
This is like saying that history bears out that you can't rely on governments to do anything but prepare for war and then send you out to die in one.
I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.
I've started taking more extreme stance these days of ctrl+w instantly and maybe email the admins if I'm particularly angry that I will not buy whatever they're selling because I simply can't be bothered with their spyware blocking me. Maybe some day people will wisen up on the damage cloudflare is doing to their business.
I compare Cloudflare to border control. Open up your bag. Answer the questions. Present your papers.
I'm not going to say that Cloadflare isn't doing anything fishy, but if they are, it's probably more complicated.
Cloudflare can't determine who you are? No website for you.
This doesn't resonate with me generally. How are you trying to browse anonymously?
Cannot blame CloudFlare for that; they have an obligation to try protect the users of their CDN.
What ridiculous statement.
I think general distrust with any major company these days is warranted, especially one with so much control over the internet. But I agree with your points, too.
This should be relevant to the Cloudflare discussion, posted today:
A New Internet Business Model?
If the CIA wanted to MITM all web traffic, and why wouldn't they, a company like Cloudflare is probably exactly how they'd do it.
They're a gatekeeper to a large chunk of Internet already. If they decide that your IP range stinks? Hope you enjoy your ration of 22 captcha pages a day!
Now, they're making some very transparent moves to leverage what they have to get even more control. And once they get even more control? It's not an "if" they start choking you with it to get more revenue. It's a "when".
People used to say "I wish more companies were like Google". They don't say that anymore.
1) like 1 cent or fraction of cent to get access to page
2) scrawlers will just cache this data on their server or just train on it so will pay just once
3) small content creators will get just make like few dollars our of it
4) CF will get some 10-30% cut from their content semaphore.
5) in the end you small content creator trading their whole content for few dollars but because CF has mass of scale they will make multi millions or more.
Because they all seem to eventually "screw" us. Google seemed (and maybe actually was) altruistic at some point, and even Apple seemed to be (when the only way they could make money was to do right by the users).
Lacking lived experience re: discrimination is something that's pretty common. I hate to compare my entirely optional 'software veganism' struggles with real discrmination issues, but just because you don't experience discrimination doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I go to online stores, government services, even places of recreation and I get denied service because I have to tunnel to avoid my ISP's unethical practices and I don't use a cloudflare approved browser. It feels bad.
Browsing through a proxy does not need to change your User-Agent. I do this all the time.
Xfinity is not MITMing HTTPS sites! You control your trusted CA list.
You don't need to allow JavaScript to run on all sites.
(The site that was "deplatformed" was fine and still exists, much to the chagrin of the minorities it directs hate towards and the people literally stalked there.)
For-profit companies care about profits for their shareholders, that's it. Heck, even non-profit often tend to value more profit than their integrity or cause but that's a topic for another day.
I wish this wasn't the case but even good-willed individuals at the helm of for-profits are forced to pursue profit and avoid anything clearly leading to losses, else they are sacked.
Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication.
Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available.
Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.
Examples of things which don't count:
- Supporting an open source competitor to avoid getting hammered by antitrust
- Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing
- Giving money to a foundation ran by a friend/family member
- Doing an activity to try to fix an evil thing they did before and backfired
- Doing something good for obvious PR reason (e.g. By being heavily advertised) but then do something even worse in the same area later on
I'm genuinely interested in a healthy conversation about this. But I honestly cannot think of anything which either is generally free for the company or that will help them getting (or not losing) more money. Happy to be wrong.
You are arguing from a prejudiced position.
What evidence would be required for you to believe that a donation to an environmental cause wasn't greenwashing?
Your list of exceptions seems fairly obviously aimed at making the task impossible because it's all based on interpretation of motives. You're essentially discounting all actions that have positive societal effects as long as doing so is motivated by money which is counter to the point I was making.
Giving money away to charity, by the meme interpretation of fiduciary duty, would be illegal. Instead, companies do it all the time because it makes them look better which might improve their business outlook in the future. That satisfies fiduciary dury despite it being a red line in the accounting books.
Wouldn't you like to live in a world where people care enough about doing good things that they'd prefer to patronize companies that do good things? That seems like an incredibly positive effect, regardless of the business' motives.
Now, it's in Cali, where it's not as strong a statement as in some other states, but it's still got a lot of precedent behind it.
> The big new game for them is AI crawler metering. Don’t think browser matters much anymore from their perspective.
Truly open browsers are easy to spoof. Approved browsers with whatever attestation features they champion builtin are hard to spoof. So browsers do matter.
Edit: authentication => attestation for accuracy.
Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point.
Hell, Apple device users already get to go in the internet "approved" fast lane because of attestation. iDevices and M-series Macbooks can send out a special response that bypasses all captchas.
Windows 11 has a requirement for TPM2, which features hardware attestation too.
Linux of course cannot be locked down in a similar manner, thus cannot attest and will have to suffer for it.
It would probably be illegal for CloudFlare + Google to outright block you from accessing the internet, but they can just drown you in a sea of captchas until you give up and join the attested crowd. Hell, YouTube outright forces you to sign in if they detect a VPN, they won't even offer a captcha.
Like 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' points out, it isn't a 1984-esque brutal fascist control that will erode our freedoms, but rather a Brave New World-esque situation where people will sign away all (digital) control because the dopamine must flow.
I'm also not sure how this can/would shake out when you can just use tools like Playwright/Puppeteer to manage a real browser. Both Google and MS do this (not as much as bare crawlers) to handle SPA-like site content.
SafetyNet doesn't lock anything down, it just provides an API for applications to verify the app is running in a verifiable and untampered environment.
FTFY
CloudFlare is in the CDN business.
If CloudFlare gatekeeps who can access their CDN, then people will move to a different CDN. Because people want their websites to be accessed by as many people as possible.
Your statement does not compute.
It seems your confusion stems from this premise. Is it possible this is not a correct assumption?
so I doubt they want that
a murky world where you "need" a guardian middle-man is what they want to preserve
there are a alternative on the market like akamai and fastly
people free to use their favorite cdn over CF lol
> whether that’s the least bad practical solution on offer for website owners
> I don’t want to make a judgement on that
I explicitly said I don't want to debate that. Take a deep breath, no one is taking away your favorite CDN.
but replace CF with another provider and they would do the same shit
It is not an installer script (anymore), so instead you have to download a 7GB ISO file (in the name of 'good UX') that ships with Zoom, Spotify, Hey, Basecamp, Steam, Minecraft (??), etc. but you still end up using the same package mirrors (arch's). If it was an install script, like LARBS or many others (before and after omarchy), I'd (almost) get it. If it was a derivative distro, like endeavour or manjaro, I'd (almost) get it. But this just makes no sense. I'm all for making Linux more accessible, but this ain't it, chief.
It is definitely making Linux more accessible. Yet still new comers to Linux will struggle when they want to do sightly more than what Omarchy offers. In that sense, the current Omarchy may not be _accessible_. But I think with this amount of users coming in, they will be able to find ways for almost anything.
It’s been having a great side effect. Hyprland is having a lot of support. I hope that many other pieces will have supports for better Linux experience. Who knows most of major software applications will have official Linux support in a few years.
I am not in it either, I think arch has great defaults and archinstall is enough. On top of that it's incredibly well documented. But some people just want to hop in as quickly as possible and get to something working.
It's not just a few libs (anymore), so instead you have to download hundreds of gems (in the game of 'good dev ex') that ships with activsupport, and ORM, ERB and even pushes an app architecture on you but you still end up using ruby. If it was just a few things like sinatra and sequel I'd (almost) get it. If it was a fork of another project like Merb I'd (almost get it) but this just make no sense. I'm all for making web development more accessible but this aint it, chief.
> Arch Linux is intentionally minimal, and is meant to be configured by the user during installation so they may add only what they require.
They should have been like DHH, opinonated, convention over configuration and ship with minecraft pre installed
When a distro with a default configuration close to what some group of users is looking for shows up, that's exciting to that group because it's that much less fiddling they need to think about, and perhaps most importantly it's not going to randomly break on them one day because it's represented in the distribution's testing.
[0] https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/96/manual-insta...
You mean the one where the commenter was respectful and helpful and had a productive conversation, just like HN encourages?
Every time you mention that comment in a bad light, you worsen dang’s day.
This is literally from Omarchy's release notes. How is it a problem if I make a comparison but it's ok when DHH does it :) Anyhow, you do you.
If Windows came with all that crap preinstalled we'd call it bloatware.
Very very weird finding choice. There must be hundreds of better strategic investments that could be made. Thousands even.
But other people need an ISO and yes all those things are kinda considered standard at this point.
People like you and I aren't the target audience, but for the people who are, this is what they have been asking for.
If I was conspiratorially minded I would say Omarchy exists and get support just so LARBS users have someone to spit at while feeling like the underdog. Props to the Omarchy creator for being so unabashedly opinionated in their rice despite the years of hate on soy devs. Unused RAM is wasted ram!
Maybe it's more about the willingness to include software other distros see critically and would not include by default, like docker.
this. they try to be un-opinionated.
The difference is of taste.
Hyprland is a great WM that has garbage default settings and requires wading through tons of documentation, as well as a lot of effort to set up.
Omarchy is a distribution that ships Arch + Hyprland with sane defaults. The whole thing installs in minutes, and is overall very easy to get going with. This has lead to a lot of people who were previously turned off by all the sharp edges of both Arch and Hyprland to give Arch and Hyprland a shot. Since both of these things are pretty great once you get them going, a lot of people are enthusiastic.
Apart from Spotify, it ships with a few app launchers for PWAs for some of 37signals' stuff. These launchers are easily removed, and basically just launch chrome windows.
It does not ship with steam or minecraft, though it has a menu where you can install it (along with various popular software, mainly development tools).
The killer feature of Omarchy is how accessible and streamlined it is. You can set up your own arch+hypr environment in a weekend of tweaking and fiddling assuming basic Linux competency, or you can use Omarchy and get where you want to be in 10 minutes with no tweaking or fiddling.
If you want is the outcome of the fiddling, then Omarchy is a great choice. If you want is fun of the fiddling process, then it's not for you.
I've had publicly installable dotfiles with a "1 command and ~5 minutes later" you have your development environment set up for a few years now. It is command line focused since my main box is running WSL 2 with Arch Linux. The script works for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and macOS since I use a work laptop that's running a MBP.
It was a lot of fun building things up and learning about the process as I went.
When I got a laptop to install native Linux a little while back, Omarchy was just coming out and I figured ok since I will want a solution to trick out a window manager / DE I'll want more than command line tools so I took a look.
I ended up avoiding it for a few reasons but the main one was I don't want to ask for permission or maintain a fork to deviate from the Omarchy defaults that cannot be customized without a fork.
I love Rails and the philosophy behind it but I don't think the same model applies to something as intimate and personal as your OS. Your OS is more like a custom application made for you, especially if you're going down the Arch (or Linux in general) route.
I don't think Omarchy is or needs to be for everyone. Its recipe for success is likely that it's catering to a fairly particular archetype that's generally overlooked by most distributions and OS vendors, and not trying to be or do anything else.
I think it's popular because DHH turned dotfiles into a product and it's being marketed as a distro. Arch + (Hyprland, Waybar, Walker and Mako) are all really popular and standlone tools that make up a reasonable looking desktop environment which Omarchy happens to use too.
I have nothing against it. If it gets more people using Linux, that is a huge win. I just find it fasinating to see it from the outside.
The bundled software aspect is also kinda exaggerated. It almost entirely consists of app launchers for a few chrome-based PWAs. There's like no software to speak off, it's just a .desktop-file you can remove if you don't want it (there's even a menu for that).
It's arguably more of a demo of Omarchy's excellent PWA tooling than anything else, where you can create your own PWAs with a simple TUI that blend seamlessly into the rest of the system.
This is the supposed bloatware looks like
$ cat ~/.local/user/applications/HEY.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=HEY
Comment=HEY
Exec=omarchy-launch-webapp "https://app.hey.com"
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/user/.local/share/applications/icons/HEY.png
StartupNotify=trueThere's:
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar...
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar...
There's around 180 packages being installed, most of which are considered base packages.
1password and tons upon tons of other apps and tools.
A lot of "other people's dotfiles" have issues, and often just a few too many anime waifus bundled. That's fine I guess, but it's not what I'm looking for in a WM.
The fact that DHH's managed to rally a community to participate and maintain Omarchy is also a big part of it. If you have an issue, other people will have that issue, and quickly work together to find a fix. There's also a discord full of people running your exact setup you can exchange experiences with.
There's a LUKS setup, PAM setup, ufw setup, yay/aur setup.
every single arch user thought of making a distro with opinionated defaults, but then they realize the just have to edit the wiki to provide the community the same benefit.
some rich dude lack the self awareness for such.
he's both ignoring advanced users would rather have option open and defaults documented, and new users would just use manjaro.
I think it's in many ways a project that caters to professional programmers. It's definitely not for beginners, neither for enthusiasts.
I respect there are people who would rather do all the fiddling themselves, but that's not what I'm looking for, and neither am I looking for a windows- or mac-a-like desktop environment like the ones you get with most distros. What I want in a desktop is exactly what Omarchy is offering.
I personally just pacman install the kde metapackage, and I'm done.
It's not magic, but damn it's nice.
They always do something custom-made and not adopted by anyone else, only to completely backpedal and go with what everyone else has already been doing. So, even if you like their custom-made solution you'll eventually end up being disappointed. After that, it becomes like a relic that only some frustrated sysadmins like me will have to deal with whenever we interact with some legacy systems, which definitely doesn't help with Ubuntu's overall reputation.
I think the beauty of this is to get to understand all components in your system, which is quite simple actually.
What reasons? I've been using tilling window managers for years now, and I feel like it's 1995 whenever I need to deal with dragging and maximizing windows.
The main pain points for me were
1) I often end up with two windows each taking a side of the screen leaving basically nothing of interest in the centre. So I end up jumping through some tetris-like hoops to make a window be centered.
2) If I close any window all the others move, often causing a repeat of problem 1
3) apps not supporting it properly causing weird graphical glitches
4) some apps should never be small windows, others never large.
Basically I ended up spending more time managing windows with a tiling vm than I ever did before, which eventually outweighed the benefits.
Hyprland is like half the point of Omarchy (the other half being Arch)
Or Kali Linux
Sure, there's no innovation in it. But not everything has to be innovative. Useful things can be important too.
I've been a desktop linux user since the 90's and entirely since 2003 (excluding gaming) so I'm not the target user.
Cute in the video on the omarchy page that they use Edward Hopper's - Nighthawks painting (~11m) - that was my default wallpaper for about 15 years on Linux.
Think of it as "Ubuntu, but explicitly marketed for devs" Plus hype because DHH is a well-known figure.
Linux fandom really doesn't understand the power of defaults and the power of user experience. I mean, in the first versions of Omarchy installer you had to type in some CLI commands just to select and connect to wifi. This comes from Arch, a " a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple" [1] What's more simple than connecting to one of the most ubiquitous connection types via iwctl [2] during OS installation.
So DHH decided to make an opinionated config that mostly just works and provide you with a few conveniences out of the box.
[1] Yes, those capital letters are on their website https://archlinux.org
Sounds a lot like Rails when you put it that way, which is no coincidence given the figure behind it.
1/ (biggest group by far) People who are new to Linux on the desktop and, to a lesser extent, want to get out of the macOS ecosystem
2/ Power users who run Arch btw, and have probably installed, configured, partitioned, and encrypted Arch without the installer script at least a few times and now want a sane default Arch + Hyprland install with sane defaults and a production-grade environment in just a few minutes
[1]: I don't agree with all of them, e.g. the chatbot shortcuts. But they're trivial to disable and/or redirect and, indeed, the project does a good job of trying not to mess with your changes.
This is not like DHH selling dogshit to you. It's a high quality package / product or whatever you want to call it..
Now everyone is thinking why nobody did this un-innovative thing before DHH did.
I use every possible opportunity to say "Fuck Ubuntu Snaps"
archinstall. You can even select a DE in it
Also, it has sane, sensible and appealing defaults. It's installable in a few minutes, so it saves time. I'm a happy Omakub user, even if I first used Linux back in 2005.
And it's getting a lot of attention because of DHH. Doesn't look half bad either which helps.
Maybe I'm boring but I'm sticking to Debian/Gnome...
I'd argue there's a fairly big niche of people who want a tiling WM but also don't want to have to start from scratch, figure out what accompanying utilities and programs they want to satisfy things like runner/menu, status bar, etc.
Other dots aren't as opinionated, or don't come with such a detailed user guide that Omarchy does, nor a set up script.
I'd even argue that Omarchy isn't really for other Linux users looking to distro hop, but like Omakub, it's for mac users curious about Linux, wanting an equally opinionated set up.
More eyes on it, DHH has a big following.
IOW, Ladybird has depth, Omarchy has breadth.
Ladybird didn't lose its initial speed. There is a leader with strong vision. There is no shenanigans from half-assed management. There is clear and responsible funding. It attracts similarly ambitious people. All of that ends up with visible and real progress.
Maybe that says it all, considering how much of a head start Servo had, but Servo also took a very long... break, as you said.
Instead of accepting the offers or even saying why they won't various Arch services were down for almost a month.
Then Arch published https://archlinux.org/news/recent-services-outages/ essentially saying that they are seeking ideologically pure service
> We are also evaluating DDoS protection providers while carefully considering factors including cost, security, and ethical standards.
How is that not reasonable?
Good luck trying to ddos their mirrors and mailing lists.
What does this even mean? And if it's an important part of a business model, how do you know that Omarchy isn't?
However, on the subject of the other meaning of “diversity,” and whether or not it is in the business models of either of these projects, I think we have pretty conclusive evidence that actually it is NOT a core value to either of them:
Citation for Ladybird: https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity...
Citation for DHH, the creator of Omarchy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600746
As someone directly affected by this sort of thing, I really want nothing to do with either project.
I also can’t help but notice that this “tech-right smell” is about the only thing that these two projects seem to have in common with one another, making me question Cloudflare’s intentions with this.
I run vanilla arch/i3, so not super interested in Omarchy itself - but am curious to know how polished of a distro they can come up with. I may give it a try soon.
One thing I think that would be nice to see would be self-oriented browser config syncing using one of a few different cloud file sync backends, even evil ones (google drive, one-drive, dropbox, etc).
So it turned out that my wifi adapter wasn't connected properly and I was giving a test and submission date was near and the wifi had died mid way and I couldn't connect to other wifi because I felt as if the terminal wasn't working and not the adapter...
Definitely give me a bit of a pain. really wish that they can use nm-applet as well... Optionally support terminal wifi too but definitely give atleast an option to get gui wifi.
Also I feel like omarchy focused quite much on bash and I used to use zsh with my custom dot filess which were really lovely. I had semi invented fish in zsh but it was my zsh and it was snappy.
Now I tried to have one ble.sh in bash and it stutters like it turned 80 lol. I definitely love zsh over bash and wish omarchy supported that too...
Luckily I have everything backed up so I will try to move away from bash I think,
One thing that I like is that omarchy has its own aur-ish thing where I found things like bun which isn't arch extra and aur definitely felt clunky. Using the omarchy repo to install bun was kinda nice actually.
I gave it a try because my system was bloated and I hadn't configured it properly in teh sense that my 100 gig was split into 40 40 and 8 swap and uh that 40 of home really got bloated somehow and I couldn't even update my pc using pacman and felt like a massive deal actually.
So I just actually picked my dotfiles and moved on. Might recommend it, it seems that omarchy also has backup support using btrfs by default which I didn't have in my ext4 arch
I currently recommend Bluefin... but this might be good for an _even_ easier (though less stable) setup, that has all the tiling bling.
Without this recognition, the engine could have been blocked by impassable CAPTCHAs, which for the end user would mean the project is dead at its roots.
A culture that encourages rewarding creators for their work.
This really is some orwellian language coming from Cloudflare.
Mozilla promised that decacdes ago and yet they are still stuck with Google's money.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...
That’s the underlying problem here: web sites are constantly getting suspicious traffic and if you do something like using Tor or a “free” VPN, the owners of those sites are probably going to ask companies like Cloudflare to validate or block you rather than try to tell whether you’re a bot.
Anyone concerned with privacy really needs to be focused on that problem because most site owners care more about not going broke than supporting browsers or privacy tools which few of their customers use. It’s destroying the open web.
I have seen it myself, from my own system. Firefox, almost impossible to use the web due to non-stop bot checks by CF. For the same session, same site(s), I give up and use Chrome, with all the same browser extensions, and I sail right in. Multiple times.
Suspicious traffic is using Firefox, because Chrome browsers are 90%+ of the traffic. And the rich mac users have a special mechanism for bypassing them as your article outlines.
Using Firefox is the internet equivalent of DWB.
This is very much not my experience. I don't know if you use a VPN or have a ton of extensions but if I was hitting that so hard I'd consider trying a clean profile with no extensions and adding things back in to see if you can find the trigger condition.
I see exactly the same amount of security checks, as far as I can tell.
I don't know the cause of what you're seeing, but it's not simply Firefox.
It may be possible for a scripting language with at least the same features as LuaJIT to be as fast as LuaJIT in less than 85K lines of code.
CSS is complicated but it's not as complex. It's just a matter of throwing enough sufficiently competent developers at the problem.
Ladybird doesn't even have a JIT right now. They used to, but it got taken out because as best as I can tell, nobody on the project knows how to write one.
And if you think that writing a JS interpreter is the only hard part of a browser engine, have I got news for you.
Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it.
Why would they work for free even given this? It's not something you hack on in an evening or two
"If you're curious about trying Linux, why not install this obscure mouseless tiling TUI distro to guarantee you'll never attempt to use Linux again!"
And I've used Macs since 2008 (and it's still my main work computer)
Granted, it does have a TUI focus
> 311 Omarchy
> 312 Adélie
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
311th is plenty obscure in my book.
Imagine a world where Chromium is the only browser engine. Standards wouldn’t matter and Google could just do whatever they wanted — we’re pretty close to that as it is.
Just to clarify: I'm in favor of Cloudflare donating to Ladybird, and I'm in favor of them building it! I just don't think that's the solution to combating Chrome dominance.
Ladybird is still a good few years away from being a serious competitor, but nonetheless it is the most viable candidate in the absence of a path for Firefox to become competitive.
Do you have any ideas on how to accomplish this in a better way than what Ladybird is trying to do? In other words, what should Ladybird be doing differently?
That makes Ladybird even more unique. It’s looking to do what even Apple and Google weren’t willing to do.
AFAIK they are using: https://skia.googlesource.com/skia
We pretty much live in that world right now. The only significant competition is Webkit.
I even mailed them back in June to confirm. They replied:
...
> When you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, your contribution goes directly toward advancing our mission to ensure the internet remains open and accessible for all. Our work focuses on issues like online privacy, open-source technologies, worthy AI and a digital world that puts people first. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking irresponsible tech companies to protect your privacy), Mozilla’s fellowship program, MozFest gatherings, Common Voice, Responsible Computing Challenge, and so much more.
> However, it’s important to note that donations to Mozilla Foundation do not support the development of Firefox or any other Mozilla products.
> While we are a public-benefit 501(c)(3) organization under US law and the parent organization for the corporate entities that own Firefox, donations do not fund the Firefox browser and revenue is completely generated from within the product itself.
...
I know Rust doesn't automatically make the software safe, but it does rule out a very large % of the exploitable vulnerabilities allowed by unsafe languages like C and C++.
> Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
> However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.
> We have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released.
[1] https://ladybird.org/#faq:~:text=Why%20build%20a%20new%20bro...?
This announcement is just cloudflare saying ‘we are the proverbial nazi bar’
Calling anyone who is conservative or with whom you happen to disagree with a "nazi" is disingenuous and in current times probably dangerous since there is a lot of crazy people preaching the "it's ok to punch a nazi".
... that you like Linux, Rails and despise Apple?
1. You are unaware of DHH’s more recent favoured topics 2. You don’t think there is a problem with DHH’s opinions
Either is fine, I don’t really care.
The issue for me is that Cloudflare’s PR team obviously are aware what DHH writes about. And they’re sponsoring his project anyway. Cloudflare knows that this is repellant to a lot of people, that some of us will begin removing them from our stacks in response. But they don’t care, because they think it’s more valuable to cosy up to a bunch of mid life crises who’ve spent too much time on twitter.
> 1. You are unaware of DHH’s more recent favoured topics
No, apparently I wasn't fully updated. Looks likes he's turned it up a notch or two.
> 2. You don’t think there is a problem with DHH’s opinions
Tech-related ones I agree with. Political ones, I mostly don't. Now should he be censored or 'canceled' for his opinions? I don't think so. Criticized? Absolutely.
His once wrote on his blog that politics should stay out of tech. I think he's beginning to break away from that, and even though he's not explicitly tying his views to his products as far as I can see, he risks undoing all the good work.
Gentoo already has all dev tools installed - they're an indispensable part of the package manager.
> Gentoo already has all dev tools installed
>Ladybird has since grown into a cross-platform browser supporting Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems
Cool, seems it will support BSD, hopefully that sticks with this new funding.
>We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment.
>We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
What's the user share again? 70% of desktop users?
Someday I hope Omarchu becomes the standard way to develop Ruby Rails on, just like how Ruby Rails was always on macOS and not Windows.
What are the sponsor tiers?
Platinum USD $100,000
Gold USD $50,000
Silver USD $10,000
Bronze USD $5,000
Copper USD $1,000 (no logo, text only)
Sponsorships run for one year, then you are welcome to renew.
The browser ecosystem is dangerously centralized and another independent rendering engine would be welcome. In contrast, I don't see the value in yet another flavor-of-the-week Linux distro. Even sponsoring Arch directly would make more sense here.
Everyone could, in theory, learn how to configure Arch and Hyprland, but most of us don’t have the time or interest to do it.
So Omarchy is to Arch something similar of what Ubuntu was to Debian 15 years ago.
Omarchy is mostly a custom configuration of the same OS, nothing more ...
I agree that they should have sponsored Arch directly instead but nepos gonna nepo.
---
And - maybe this is a stretch, but you also have to consider that the competing product (Servo) is written in Rust, while Ladybird is C++.
From what you read on hn, I think Rusts community being very liberal sort of resulted in memory safety being perceived as a culture war thing by some; ("authoritarian big compiler is forcing you to not free this memory" vs "the handmade c programmer with his artisanal allocations"). So Ladybird not being written in a safe language might be part of the appeal.
And I know that Ladybird is supposed to adopt Swift, but I don't think any single LOC has been written yet?
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/graphs/commit-activity
If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards projects with better governance and aren't helmed by a BFDL with a spotty record and are written in a more future-proof language than C++ [0]. (For example, Servo.)
[0]: In Kling's own words! https://web.archive.org/web/20250819053816/https://awesomekl...
He published free, open-source software. He's not obligated to work on a particular project forever. This is a particularly strange critique given that he shifted focus away from those projects to focus on other open-source work.
If anyone else wants to take over the work Andreas was doing on old projects, all his code is there for them to use.
Ladybird is now a legally established nonprofit, with a board of directors and several full-time employees. Not a hobby.
(I think that investment in Servo is also likely to be an excellent idea. Sponsoring Igalia's Servo work is an obvious starting place for any European institutions which are actually serious about "tech sovereignty", just to start with.)
Didn't care for the DHH controversies for a long time but if you start writing white national blog posts[1] I don't know what to say anymore.
Especially when the main reason for a lot of the problems with the country is rich white men, notably the Tories and their failed governance over the past 14 years.
DHH is (or should be) pretty close to a toxic brand right now, and for someone who published various edicts on "don't talk about politics at work", it would be lovely if he followed his own advice a little more.
edit: and also is a tool
Something like https://www.anduinos.com/ is far friendlier and more approachable for folks new to Linux. Why not sponsor that? I cannot imagine who the target audience is going from MacOS straight to TUIs on Arch.
Linux didn't need only polish and money, it needed an evangelist with a story of dumping and supposedly fighting against Apple. This might put off people that obviously never needed any help in using or customizing Linux, but not those looking to switch over.
If that kind of reductionism is too far, how about Alpine?
They are C, namely bringing something really significantly new: you could build a web engine with a simple C compiler.
It also kind of begs the question, how deep in the "supply chain" should support go. Maybe if the Hyprland folks got a bit more sponsorship the setup would be easy. The same goes for Arch itself (though I do think some of the "squirrel catchers" are there on purpose).
No offense to anyone really but browser engines are inhumane amount of talent and effort. Might as well just keep making Firefox better.
I held onto it as someone who didn't even like the politics of the people behind it (the beauty of open source), for the sake of browser engine diversity, but changing terms of service of use of personal data was the final blow
For now, a privacy preserving chromium fork will do, until hopefully the Ladybird project is mature enough to provide alternatives
Guess we'll have to keep waiting for someone with a 'clean' record to show up and promote Linux.
Just don't be a fascist. We're not asking for much here.