
Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem - whack
https://dev.to/kenbellows/chromium-and-the-browser-monoculture-problem-420n
======
roca
Some major problems with the "let's all use Chromium" approach:

Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting. All the companies
that use Chromium are using it _because_ they want Google to do the heavy
lifting, so that isn't going to change, even if Google decides to put an open
governance face on it, and there's no sign they're going to do even that.
Should Google really be ceded complete power over the Web?

A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To
the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs _are_ the standard and sites
will depend on them. Yes, this is already true to some extent, but it could
get much worse. So fixing bugs would get harder.

A single codebase makes radical implementation experiments more difficult.
Companies can patch Chromium but architectural divergence gets expensive fast.
Say you want to rewrite the Chromium style system for parallelism with Rust,
like Mozilla did with Firefox, and Google says no? Good luck maintaining that
long-term. (A good example was how JSC vs V8 caused endless friction between
Google and Apple in Webkit, leading up to the Blink fork.)

Another problem is that it would be very hard to block Web features that
Google implements in Chromium. (P)NaCl/Pepper is a good example. "It's a ton
of work to implement (especially if there's no spec)" is a helpful argument
for not implementing a feature that's bad for the Web, both in public and to
one's own product management. Hard to hold the line on something like
PNaCl/Pepper or WebSQL if it's just a matter of flipping a configuration flag
to increase Web compatibility. If the world was all-Chromium a few years ago
there's no doubt we'd have PNaCl/Pepper instead of WebAssembly --- and we'd be
stuck with the insane duplication of Pepper vs standard Web APIs, the bloat of
LLVM everywhere, etc.

~~~
lazyjones
> _A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To
> the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites
> will depend on them._

It's not the single browser codebase that hurts the web, any browser with
noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. The main issue is
that today, the web as a platform is garbage. It's full of cruft, mostly
useless features that cause browsers to be bloated, unmaintainable codebases
nobody except 9-figure-budget entities can hope to reimplement. It's an
unstable, far too complex platform that wastes billions in unnecessary
maintenance work for web developers.

Much of this could have been avoided by knocking some sense into the entities
that constantly propose new features and those who implement them as native
browser elements instead of JS libraries where possible. Then there's the
insanity of preserving unsafe behaviour as default and adding response headers
and extra HTML tag attributes to avoid it, so broken sites could stay broken
and everyone else had to do maintenance work. I'm not saying Google is the
driving force behind this, but it reeks of the same stuff that Microsoft was
doing to prevent Word, Excel file formats from becoming readable and writable
for the competition.

It's too late to freeze the web platform, it needs to be replaced with
something sane and stable, controlled by people with no ulterior motives.

~~~
roca
> any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems.

No. When Web devs test in multiple browsers and find that something doesn't
work in one of them, they will usually pick an alternative solution that does
work in all of them, avoiding the bug in the buggy browser, thus avoiding a
situation where their site depends on that bug continuing to exist. It doesn't
always work out as well as that, but it often does.

You can wish for something better than the Web platform, but it's a tall
order. You want a platform that's not controlled by a single vendor, that has
multiple open-source non-patent-encumbered implementations with significant
market share, that is available across just about every device, that has a
vibrant content/application ecosystem and developer community, that supports
everything from simple static content to extremely complex applications like
office suites and 3D games. Good luck with that.

~~~
tannhaeuser
> _extremely complex applications like office suites and 3D games_

Who really needs that in the browser? Native apps are consistently better in
every single aspect - more powerful, more privacy-respecting, more eco-
friendly, etc. Except native apps are vanishing - a month ago I wanted to
fire-up SketchUp on my old Mac, only to find out that the casual 3D scene is
now using 100% webapps. The reason we have these abominations is that they're
one of the only avenues left for financing app development (either ad-driven,
or in a fremium model) because nobody buys software anymore. And _that_ is
indeed a contradictory effect of making software a commodity through F/OSS
when the original motive was to empower users. Now I know folks chase browsers
and wasm and whatnot as the ultimate cross-platform app delivery platform
(coming from a 1990s MS and 2010s iOS app dominance experience) and make
browsers even more complex. However I whish they could stop and think about if
their work is actually helping the situation.

What I think would be helpful is to define a base web profile for content
delivery, and then additional profiles for webapps. The "march of progress"
argument against versioning and profiling HTML, CSS, devices, and JavaScript
we've heard from web standardization efforts isn't convincing at all, and only
helps the big guys (basically, only Chrome at this point).

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Who really needs that in the browser?

Enterprise IT departments, for one. IT people hate having to install,
maintain, update and troubleshoot desktop applications, for obvious reasons.
It’s orders of magnitude easier to simply install the app on a web server and
have users run it in their web browsers.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
As an IT guy, I disagree, because too many times I've seen things that use a
web interface break for esoteric reasons made possible by the ridiculous
number of layers involved. Applications people use for work are pretty easy to
deal with by comparison, we just bake them into the image and update them only
when we need to for a feature or fix. Even then it's usually just a matter of
overwriting the application install directory, which we can do remotely, or at
the worst running a silent MSI install, again remotely.

~~~
enraged_camel
I’m simply saying it as someone who has been selling software to enterprise
for 15 years. Whenever we tell them that our software has a full-featured web
client, it earns a lot of points over the competition.

------
yogthos
At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced.
A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today,
but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad
blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up.

However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards
that are independent of a single browser and vendor. If we end up abandoning
the standards entirely in favor of just using Chromium, then it’s game over
for open web.

Throwing in the towel and making everything Chromium based would be the worst
possible scenario because it gives Google an insane amount of control over the
future of the web. And the fact that Chromium is open source doesn’t really
make a bit of difference here.

The reality is that it takes a huge amount of effort to maintain it. It would
require an organization like Mozilla to fork it from Google and take it in a
new direction. Since we already have Mozilla and Firefox now, it’s much better
to make sure they continue to exist.

~~~
elagost
At that point, IE was so technically far behind that you could easily point to
reasons why Firefox was better: Add-ons, usable tabbed browsing, incredible
speed increases, more customization, and websites actually working.

Nowadays, we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser
that's not as technically advanced in some ways, with no clear merits and a
lot of changes to workflow. The choice today is between freedom and
convenience. The reason people flocked to Firefox in the first place was that
it was both freedom and convenience.

~~~
feanaro
The are definitely merits: fingerprinting protection, containers, less memory
usage, soon a state-of-the-art parallel rendering engine (Webrender), soon-to-
be better adblockers, etc. More novel things will trickle down from Servo in
the future.

It's unclear to me Chromium is still significantly faster in any meaningful
way. They certainly _feel_ roughly the same.

~~~
elagost
If I asked my dad what the technical merits of Chrome or Firefox were or why
he used what he used, he wouldn't have an answer for me. He'd say "I use
Chrome because you told me a few years ago to use it and it still works."

The reason we switched from IE was because IE just straight up did not work.
Sites were broken. Now it doesn't really matter but for these invisible things
that normal people don't see or care about. Most people are like my dad.

~~~
feanaro
Well, simply correct your mistake and tell him to switch. Or even better,
configure it for him. I've done so for all of my "like your dad" people.

Perhaps sites aren't as broken in Chrome _now_ as they were with IE, but you
can bet the web itself will change in ways you and I would consider broken if
Google is left to become the sole, unchecked steward and helmsman of the web.

------
danShumway
Ultimately, Google will still decide what goes into Chromium. As it stands,
Google decides what patches get merged, and Google decides how core features
are implemented. And they can be implemented in ways that are very hard to
toggle and very specific to Google's business model.

We need to get a version of Chromium that's not owned by Google -- but, I
don't see any motivation for Google to give up control of Chromium or move
Chrome over to use a different, community controlled fork.

So if you want a version of Chromium that really is community controlled,
you'll need to have a community fork of Chromium that we all agree to work on
and use as a browser base. Otherwise, we'll just be giving free labor to
Google, and they'll still filter contributions so that primarily their
interests are served.

Unfortunately, now that we've forked Chromium for all of our browsers, one of
two things is going to happen:

\- either the fork will need to be tightly constrained by Chromium, in which
case Google will still effectively control it, or

\- the fork will diverge from Chromium, in which case we'll be back to the
exact same position we are now. You'll have multiple competing browser
engines, one of which is used by the most dominant browser on the market.

The TLDR is if you're worried about Google controlling the browser engine, it
still seems to me that the only solution is to get a non-google controlled
browser engine used by a browser with market share comparative to Chrome.

The relative lack of user adoption for Vivaldi, Opera and Brave suggest to me
that standardizing on Chromium won't significantly help with that. Edge is now
moving over to Chromium -- if it sees a massive influx of new users, maybe
it'll be worth taking that strategy more seriously.

In the meantime, since it appears we are going to need a browser engine to
compete with Chromium anyway, what's the harm in having one company (Mozilla)
try to compete by building their own browser engine the way they want? Sure,
Firefox isn't doing great right now, but is it doing any _worse_ than Brave?

~~~
noir_lord
> Firefox isn't doing great right now, but is it doing any worse than Brave?

Maybe in terms of market share as a proxy for success that is true.

As a browser though Firefox has come on leaps and bounds (and has momentum to
keep improving), I never switched away from it but used Chrome for dev for the
last few years so I have a fair amount of time with both (dozens of hours a
week) and Firefox is as fast and reliable as Chrome.

Ironically the _one_ property that gives me issues with Firefox is youtube,
they don't fix bugs against Firefox (the white bar header on fullscreen has
been in firefox for over a month now and has been reported).

I ended up having to implement a ublock origin rule to remove the header.

EDIT: Mozilla are (to me) so much more than just a browser vendor, MDN
documentation is probably my 2nd most visited documentation/help site (behind
only stack overflow) because the quality is superb, concise and they quickly
mention at the bottom can do this on foo, bar but not fizz which is useful to
someone approach 40 because keeping that stuff in my head is well beyond me
these days.

~~~
danShumway
Yep, to be clear, I was talking specifically about browser market share.

Firefox is my daily driver, and it's great.

------
quicklime
> we're talking Chromium, the underlying browser engine. As it stands,
> Chromium is the basis for a variety of browsers, not just Google's flagship.
> From what I can tell (as a non-expert on Chromium's source, so please
> correct me), the Googley stuff that makes privacy advocates nervous is
> independent from the core Chromium browser engine

This might be just me being pedantic, but I thought it might be worth
mentioning...

Chromium is basically the same thing as Chrome, except that it's missing a few
proprietary blobs that Google is not legally allowed to put into Chromium:
some DRM stuff, a licensed H.264 codec, a Flash plugin, etc. But if you're
worried about privacy, Chromium still has all the Googley stuff. You can still
log into Chromium with your Google account, and it'll sync your bookmarks and
history and passwords just like Chrome. Chrome extensions are 100% compatible
with Chromium, and you can install them into Chromium via the Chrome Web
Store.

Some people might be familiar with "Blink", which is the browser engine (and
is a fork of WebKit). There's also V8, which is the JavaScript VM. These two
components aren't enough to form a usable browser though. So the Chromium
Project develops what is called the "Content module" (see
[https://www.chromium.org/developers/content-
module](https://www.chromium.org/developers/content-module)) which combines
Blink and V8, and some other pieces, to form a basic web browser. This is what
other browsers (like Opera, and I presume Edge as well) are built on top of,
and does not contain all the Google integrations that Chrome/Chromium have.

While Content is missing a lot of the Chrome features that make privacy
advocates nervous, it's still a problem because most Chromium/Content
developers are Googlers, and will probably not implement things like WebKit's
ITP or canvas fingerprinting prevention.

~~~
oldmanhorton
Edge basically takes the entire chromium product including the //chrome layer,
but we have removed or disabled most/all of the Google service integrations

~~~
Terretta
And “Edge” and “Chrome” both ship on iOS using WebKit.

------
iforgotpassword
Most of the post resonates well with me, but at that point

> Ideally, this codebase would not be controlled by any single company. I'd
> love to see a common browser engine controlled by an independent nonprofit
> foundation

I had a bit of a facepalm moment. This is exactly how Google started out:
Chrome(ium) was built based on webkit, so basically there was a mini
consortium where Google and Apple would work together. But that wasn't moving
fast enough for Google's taste so they forked off blink so they could
immediately do whatever they pleased.

~~~
SquareWheel
There's a lot you're glossing over there. For instance the split from WebKit
resulted in 4.5 million of lines of code that could be deleted, reducing
bloat. Apple could then do the same on their end.

It was a relationship which ended on good terms. Your comment makes it sound
like it was antagonistic.

~~~
iforgotpassword
I don't know anything about the relationship back then. But moving faster and
more flexibility was even among the reasons Google gave back then iirc.
Anyways, what I tried to say was that it didn't work, and you gave a good
example why the split was necessary. To me that just confirms that a "chromium
consortium" wouldn't work.

------
jefftk
The premise of Mozilla's Servo is that there are major performance and
security issues in all the current browsers that are very hard to fix without
a full rewrite. Because we have multiple competing browsers and solid
standards, instead of a single widely used reference implementation, it's
possible that Servo may succeed at this.

If we switch to an open source browser engine monoculture we lose competition
among rendering engines, and may never get something much better than what we
have now.

~~~
The_rationalist
If anything, Servo has shown that nobody needs to rewrite an entire engine for
improving the state of the art. Servo is modular and can integrate it's style
engine or it's layout engine or it's rendering engine into other engines. Btw
it use Firefox spidermonkey for js. If mozilla wanted to bring a new inovative
layout/anything module into chromium they just could, but they don't want to
improve chromium, sadly. Reinventing the wheel with totally redundant pieces
is not a goal. Mozilla should focus on reinventing the critical pieces of
chromium and only them. They fail to understand their real utility and
statistically become inexistant thus their funding too. If only there was
debuggers for brains of decision makers, the world would be in much better
shape.

~~~
bobajeff
That's actually a very good point. If Mozilla used Chromium as a base they
would be free to invest all their manpower into Servo development.

Then again they would have to work pretty closely with Google on integrating
Servo with Chromium. Otherwise they'll get into the situation that Google did
with apple over Webkit and then they be at square minus one with a foreign
codebase.

------
snek
This would be a fine idea if Google didn't control the Chromium source code.
The changes Google is making for webRequest v3 manifests will land in the
Chromium repo. The changes Google makes for adding non-standard features
happen in the Chromium repo. You can see them all here[1]. You can even sign
in with your Google account and comment/review any CL you wish, but that
doesn't mean Google listens.

[1]: [https://chromium-review.googlesource.com](https://chromium-
review.googlesource.com)

------
phaedryx
I am unconvinced. I am less worried about keeping up with the latest bleeding-
edge web stuff. I am more concerned about privacy, ad tracking, etc. I know
that Google's goals are different than mine, so I don't want 100% Chrome.

------
qwerty456127
The problem with browsers is they are so complex people can't build
alternative implementations and keep them perfectly compatible.

We need concise well-engineered and precisely-defined web standards a small
team can implement in reasonable time. Many people would build competing
browsers if there were yet we have what we have and no choice but to stick
with the Google engine.

~~~
icebraining
Sure. And then Google will start extending that standard, then sites will
start depending on those extensions, and any browser that refuses or is unable
to implement them will be extinguished/irrelevant.

~~~
vbezhenar
The only reason to extend the standard if you can't implement required
functionality with acceptable performance within this standard. That is the
weak point for web platform: JavaScript is too slow and does not have access
to drivers, you can't implement GPU-accelerated H.264 video codec within
browser, so you have to implement it with C++ in browser. That means that
proposed standard should be Turing-complete, provide C++ level of performance
and native access to required hardware, while keeping browser-level safety and
isolation. That is hard thing, but I believe, it could be solved using modern
virtualization techniques with some advancements from OS and hardware to
better virtualize GPU, USB, etc.

~~~
qwerty456127
I could never understand why does a browser even have to know what codec is
used in a video (let alone implement it) when there are ffmpeg, DirectShow and
whatever the Apple alternative is. Same thing with picture formats: if I were
developing a browser I would just support them all via ImageMagick or
something like that.

~~~
vbezhenar
AFAIK until recently there was no support for H.264 in DirectShow. So your
browser would not be very useful. Also you wouldn't be able to control video
from JavaScript (get current time, get current loaded amount, play, pause,
stop, etc).

~~~
qwerty456127
Then just stick to ffmpeg, libav, gstreamer or whatever such a library.

------
xvilka
This is why Microsoft should have used Firefox/Servo as a base for new Edge.
Using Rust to write your web engine will remove a lot of problems.

------
jpochtar
This is a good take. Standards were a weapon to fight Microsoft's closed
source IE— emphasis on closed source. Why? Competing browsers needed to be IE-
compatible to matter, and without standards spec-ing out what IE's doing, it's
hard for other vendors to know if they were 100% compliant.

Now that the major browser everyone's coding against is open source, and
competitors can freely borrow their engine, I'd say we don't really need the
W3C anymore.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Now that the major browser everyone's coding against is open source

Chrome isn't open source, it's open core.

~~~
jhanschoo
But Chromium is open source and that's what people refer to when they say
browser monoculture---not that Chrome is dominant (there will always be a
significant minority of Safari, Opera Mini, UC Browser, etc.) but that
Chromium-based engines are extremely dominant.

------
loudtieblahblah
If everyone who wrote posts and articles about browser monoculture just
started using Firefox, this would all be less a problem.

------
tambourine_man
Some random thoughts:

\- IE vs Chrome dominance is comparable but not equal. One was closed source
and stagnant, the other open and constantly evolving.

\- “What if we all contribute to the same code base” ignores that not all
priorities are aligned. Apple is a lot more focused on user experience and
battery life while Google is all about moving the platform forward, see Web
Worker conundrum for example.

\- Browser are a lot more complicated now than they used to be, so creating
anew from scratch is harder. But the Web is also a lot better documented (edge
cases specified) and with more open implementations to get inspiration from.

------
combatentropy
> I'm currently very frustrated that while CSS Subgrid has been implemented in
> Firefox Nightly, Chromium has yet to start working on it. Imagine if the
> Firefox devs' work contributed to Chrome as well! This problem would vanish!

I doubt the problem is too few developers. Google has over $100 billion, it
can hire as many people as it wants. And didn't you already say at the
beginning, "Google is huuuuuuuuge. They just have so many people working
there."

Rather I wonder if there are just only so many people who can collaborate on a
codebase, there are just only so many features you can push through at a time.
If all the Firefox developers moved to Google, I doubt we would see features
faster. I bet we would see features come out at the exact same pace. It is not
a matter of labor but of leadership, and each project will prioritize features
differently. Therefore this is an argument for more than one implementation.

Is this not the subject of the famous book _The Mythical Man Month_ , by Fred
Brooks? Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. I know that
Google is a massive company, but I wonder how many employees literally write
code for Chrome.

------
bsg75
Ignoring for a moment any technical or business considerations, it would have
been fascinating to see the long term effect if MS has based its new browser
on the Firefox base instead of Chromium.

Given history it is also personally interesting to consider Microsoft as a
company that could have furthered open web standards.

------
matz1
To fix this, someone simply need to build a _better_ browser. Chrome did this
when they taking over IE domination. I'm not taking about new privacy
conscious browser but something that me and many other people really care. Is
it hard ? yes but chrome did it before.

~~~
chemodax
Firefox did this when they taking over IE domination. Chrome come later.

------
legends2k
> From what I can tell (as a non-expert on Chromium's source, so please
> correct me), the Googley stuff that makes privacy advocates nervous is
> independent from the core Chromium browser engine.

You're wrong and sorry to be blunt. If you think Chromium is pure technical
code and no Google hooks, you're wrong.

1\. I've been working on it for over a year and it's rife with Google hooks.
2\. When we have a thriving project named _Ungoogled Chromium_ , you'd start
believing point 1.

[https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

------
OrgNet
If only there could be no traces of Google inside Chromium... I'll stick with
Firefox.

~~~
mda
Firefox uses Google services as well.

~~~
OrgNet
yes, for the default settings... but I disabled google search, Phishing and
Malware check, etc on mine ... I think I got everything (too bad it isn't the
default settings).

~~~
mda
Not a good idea to remove malware checks. Google is probably your best option
when it comes to security.

~~~
OrgNet
> Google is probably your best option when it comes to security

for me it isn't...

------
Yizahi
Author assumes that Chrome is for some reason different entity than Chromium.
He also assumes that Google stuff is separate from pure browser code. And he
assumes that 3rd party "modders" (let's be honest, chromium based browsers are
simply mods) would want to separate Google stuff from the pure browser even if
it is possible. None which I suspect is true. And privacy is not the only
concern with Google. I'm more concerned with anti-privacy enabling
"framework", in a way of inventing and pushing "standards" disregarding
everyone else.

------
smittywerben
This is probably silly, but I've been wondering if IE 11 tracks me the least
while providing clickable internet text. It just needs uBlock Origin and a
Linux port... maybe?

~~~
indalo
I'd imagine that with MSFT having similar products to Google. there exists an
incentive for similar behaviors to occur in terms of data collection.

I hadn't given it much of a thought since edge/ie are such a non starter
usually. Would be interesting to look into!

------
writepub
> Imagine if Apple decided they were tired of everyone moaning about Safari's
> missing features and decided to go the same way as Microsoft.

Not happening. It's likely that Apple spends an inordinate amount of
engineering on Safari to lock-out W3C web features that pose a competitive
threat to their lucrative Monopoly: the app store. Their strategy has always
appeared to be to purposefully cripple Safari to drive developers and users to
the app store, and monetize there, both on the $99 annual fee for the
developer's ability to publish apps, and that 30% cut on revenues from
publishers. Then there's the whole arbitrary bans on certain apps that somehow
undermine their control over the device and ecosystem.

If they didn't have a plan to cripple Safari to drive people to the store, why
else would they ban browser engines from competitors?

------
bfrog
The real question that should be asked is there something fundamentally better
than the browser and html. Things like flutter make me think there is a future
for native apps that are just as easy to create if not easier.

------
petjuh
The big difference is that IE6 was a PITA to develop against while Chrome is a
breeze. Developers wouldn't have hated the IE6 monoculture if it was as fast
as Chrome and had developer tools and features as nice as it.

~~~
resoluteteeth
I think you are looking at the later stage of IE's life when it was already
dominant.

When IE first caught on it was extremely fast and pleasant to use compared to
Netscape (also netscape wasn't originally free). If you only cared about IE it
was actually a complete breeze to develop for using proprietary stuff like
ActiveX (ignoring the fact that ActiveX was a bad idea for various reasons).

Lots of websites started showing banners saying that they were optimized IE,
because people were primary targeting IE when they made new websites, in part
because it was such a breeze to develop for. IE had lots of HTML/javascript
features that made things much easier than other browsers at the time.

It's important to realize that IE only became difficult to deal with once 1)
Microsoft essentially stopped trying to improve it after they won all the
market share and 2) people needed to make web pages that worked on other
browsers. At this point people wanted to use newer features that IE didn't
support, but needing to support IE 6 necessitated either abandoning more
modern features or using all sorts of hacks/polyfills to work around IE's
quirks.

------
geophertz
The thing is if we follow this idea, why don't we all use the same browser,
that is open source and "not controlled by any single company"?

------
szczepano
If we take into consideration that both firefox and chromium use skia graphics
library then there are only two companies apple and google.

~~~
Narishma
Does Firefox still use Skia with Webrender?

~~~
szczepano
[https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-
dev/commit/28fa74680f4a3d2c...](https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-
dev/commit/28fa74680f4a3d2cead6818000a0f6defae2804a)

I think they're using skia all the time since 2016.

------
qbaqbaqba
Funny to see this posted to dev.to.

------
la_fayette
Monopolies are just a different term for stalinism. The question is for how
long such a big moloch can control the internet in all domains. Ok they just
buy startups in competing subdomains, but i doubt that really anything can be
contolled by a single entity. Google is a company and thus a hierarchical
system. The distributed innovation on the internet is still possible, see e.g.
bitcoin mostl likely started by one person?

~~~
luckylion
Question is: how well would (the paranoid, control-seeking parts of) Stalinism
have worked with today's technology?

~~~
rightbyte
Probably so good that it would be unsustainable. The police, military,
government and public officers needs some privacy so they can be corrupt
without their superiors noticing and taking a cut. There would be too much
control.

We will see how North Korea turns out in the future?

~~~
luckylion
True, but on the other hand you'd probably need a lot less boots on the ground
if you can amplify their power by technology, I suppose. You can pay them more
than well to guarantee their support, feed the dogs well so nobody gets any
ideas about questioning pig supremacy.

------
sureaboutthis
I've been saying this about dev.io since it's beginning. It's the place for
frustrated redditors trying to make a name for themselves but only making
fools instead. Do not bother reading anything there. It's as worthless and
pointless as reading anything on reddit.

~~~
felbane
As soon as the author started wrapping words with emoji, I lost all interest
in hearing their viewpoint.

