This point in the blog post saddens me. Chrome's market share is huge, but Chrome is not ubiquitous. There was public outcry when Google was suspected of making youtube have "bugs" on non-Chromium browsers - having them just straight up disable services for more than a third of users would result in an actual shitstorm, more than any of us could hope to drum up with an explanation of why this change is bad.
It would also drive the point home to the very same legislators that the author is deferring to.
If browsers now start pre-emptively folding, Google just straight up won. It's great that the Vivaldi team is against this change, but a blog post and hoping for regulation just won't cut it. You have actual leverage here, use it.
Working on chromium codebase maintaining minimal fork is very hard. It requires a very competent and quite a large team (because lots of work to resolve merge conflicts) to just regularily apply a custom set of patches to newly released chromium versions.
It's like staying on a dancing elephant. And it requires MONEY. Lots of.
I suspect this is the desired result of Google to protect chromium despite it's opensource.
It would also drive the point home to the very same legislators that the author is deferring to.
If browsers now start pre-emptively folding, Google just straight up won. It's great that the Vivaldi team is against this change, but a blog post and hoping for regulation just won't cut it. You have actual leverage here, use it.