Google's New Web Environment Integrity Proposal Dismissed by Brave, Mozilla, and Vivaldi

People called me crazy when I told them that Google was leveraging open source to enact their version of an EEE strategy to kill the open internet. But here we are. They embraced open source, expanded Chromium with unethical practices, and now that they have the monopoly of the space and the main voting power on the W3C, they are ready to destroy all that is free and open about the internet.

Let's not forget Android as well!

Google's been slowly killing the open-source part of Android for a while now...
I've been warning about this for a long time, and people were like nah, it's open source... I saw this coming miles away.

I will continue to use Firefox and Safari while I still can.
I am once again asking users to consider the eventual abandonment of web browsers. It is too big and complex for competition to actually create new ones, so this was inevitable.

[No offense intended to those working on important changes in forks, just saying proportionally it's only a minor diff, no?]
- In exchange for what?
- Wait, what? What alternative do you suggest? Apps and App Stores?

Any website that implements this API is going to immediately lose me as a user. They can go fuck themselves.

websites that will implement this API:

your employer

your bank

websites taht won't implement this API:

anything you can choose to quit without significant other consequences to your life
- I hate that you're probably right.
- I wish you are right. The potential problem I see is if Chromium browsers implement this and smaller websites are able to get away by violating their user base privacy without significant losses.
Except you won't have a realistic choice.
I like that sentiment, but how would you even know?
- Website requires user to visit using particular browser
  
  User refuses to use said browser
  
  ???
  
  No profit

That's good they won't be adopting WEI, but if my bank or some other critical site decides to enforce a desktop browser with it, I'm still in the same boat. I did think of a way to avoid a WEI browser on my desktop if it comes to that. I can probably substitute a phone app for any critical services, but that's still a drag. I don't like phone apps much, I use a desktop browser for everything.

I think Google's destruction of the Internet is most simply a matter of influence. If Chrome didn't have the huge market share they wouldn't be able to pull off this kind of thing, open source or not. Unfortunately people have a herd mentality with everything on the internet so we allowed it to happen by doing what we always do.

Permanently Deleted

It's not really a "proposal" when they've already pushed this into Chromium, they've bypassed the discussion topic and already implemented it in the code.

Sure, other browsers can either remove the code if they're Chromium based or never implement it in the case of Firefox... But if Chrome, with it's ~64% market share implemented it, it's already going to be a thing unfortunately.

I noticed that too and I dumped Chrome for FF on every machine I use as soon as I read about this

Wondered how to deactivate the auto update of Chromium in the setting. There is no checkbox to untick. You have to twiddle with the regedit to deactivate updates. WTF?

Guys, Firefox (or LibreWolf) all the way!

or Fennec for F-Droid on Android (Firefox fork)

They have no leverage over the monopoly google has on the browsers marketshare. the only people who can change things are the end users by switching over to non-chromium browsers, but we all know this won't happen

People said that about internet explorer in the old days
- They lost because they were challenged by a company with more money and bigger interest in dominating the ads market.
- IE sucked though. Chrome doesn't.

The article refers to Vivaldi’s response as scathing, but I think it is fair and even and the best overall summary I have seen -> https://vivaldi.com/blog/googles-new-dangerous-web-environment-integrity-spec/

Brave and Vivaldi are both built on Chromium though…

They can still reject the proposal. Just because they're built upon Chromium, doesn't mean they need to utilise or retain every feature Google adds to it.
- I think it's not easy this time.
  
  Any browser choosing not to implement this would not be trusted and any website choosing to use this API could therefore reject users from those browsers.
- For sites that fully embrace the new web environment integrity procedure would that break chromium browsers like Brave too?
If only Google supports this, the rest can fork it together.
- Forking would be insane because of how much code is in Chromium and how much work goes into maintaining it. The realistic thing to do is to keep doing what they've been doing: maintain a modified branch. WEI would just be one of many changes between Google's version and other vendors'.

Hopefully they prevail, I will be telling everyone I know to switch to firefox, and additionally changing my parents devices to they as well. Thankfully these days it's really easy to do so

Google has been so far very quiet on this issue. I wonder why.

Seriously, why though?
because they really don't give a shit what anybody thinks about this issue. they're not the ones who are going to be denying access based on this API. they don't need device attestation.

it's something some of their customers want, so they built it.

What about Safari? Will Apple bend over to Googles will and use their new standard?

They already shipped something very similar last year…

https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
- I was not aware of this. Thanks!
- Apple strips any freedom its users might have. Disgusting and forever perplexing how this evil company is not getting the shit it deserves.
Woah ..even safari uses chromium ?
- No, safari is based on WebKit (which itself is based on KHTML from KDE). Chrome once upon a time was based on WebKit, but it's now based on a fork called blink.
  
  In any case, this is more of a "will Apple implementation what Google wants implemented?" question. Same with Mozilla being in that list, they use a completely independent engine for Firefox that shares no lineage with Chrome.
- It uses webkit, which Blink, Google's browser engine is a fork of.
- No, it doesn't. Google forked WebKit from Safari (which was a fork of KHTML) so they would have control of the rendering engine, Blink.

While I'm glad they are speaking up against it, I don't believe that it will change anything. If Google decides to implement it, it will just end up exactly like it did with WC3 EME, as summarized in this the 2014 article from if I'm not mistaken a Mozilla dev:

I know of people recommending Chrome (not Chromium) because it has Flash Player natively incorporated, so you no longer have to install it separately.

This serves to prove that the majority of users doesn’t know about either the technical or ethical differences in the software they are using.You may also think of the pirated software the are using,but this is a different matter. Ignoring this marketshare goes against Mozilla’s idea of a web available to everyone, not to mention that Firefox is no longer the most used browser as it used to be a a few years ago and it is therefore forced to comply with this kind of requests.

Which is why we have government bodies. As usual, it will probably be the EU to castrate g**gle in the future.
EME was a bit different. Hollywood media was already encrypted. Even on DVD. They required encryption for streaming. To this day it's the only sector that really uses EME. Other streaming media doesn't even bother.

Good. WEI is a bad proposal for many reasons. I still can't fathom why so many browsers use Chromium as their base nowadays though.

On another note, what is up with the thumbnail image for this article? The article doesn't mention anything about Alabama's awful attorney general. Hmmm...

There aren't a lot of options for browser engines if you don't want to spend forever playing catch up while writing your own. My understanding is that Gecko, which Firefox uses, isn't as easy to build on top of. The idea with using chromium is that you can focus on building a custom ui or fancy new features without worrying about web pages rendering incorrectly.

This is perfect. The more browsers refuse to implement this, the more the antitrust against Google is going to sting.

I haven't been following this. What's happening?

google is introducing an API for websites to request a cryptographic attestation that your browser is the official version that it claims to be - that is, not some other browser pretending to be chrome, or a modified version of chrome. apple has had an API to do this for years, and nobody seemed to mind that, but google is pushing it as a standard that any browser could implement and that's made a lot of people very angry.

the main concern seems to be that it will squeeze smaller browsers that don't implement it out of the market. in response, smaller browsers are apparently choosing not to implement it.
Google is trying to add code to it's chromium software that would functionally allow for DRM between you and a website. It would be a huge blow to your ability to control ads and what software runs on your PC when you connect to a site.

Shitty google doing shitty things. Just business as usual