The Illusion of Choice in the Modern Browser and App Ecosystem
Description
A vibrant and colorful parody of a cereal box, modeled after Cap'n Crunch's 'Oops! All Berries'. The box is bright blue with the brand 'Google's' and the product name in large yellow letters: 'Oops! All Chromium'. At the top, the Google 'G' logo replaces the usual brand mascot. The main visual is a bowl filled with colorful, spherical cereal pieces splashing in milk. Instead of berries, these cereal pieces are adorned with the logos of numerous popular web browsers and desktop applications, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Discord, Spotify, Slack, Microsoft Teams, GitHub Desktop, and Visual Studio Code. The entire image serves as a commentary on the tech industry's increasing reliance on Google's open-source Chromium project. The joke is that while users perceive a wide variety of choices in browsers and apps, a vast number of them are fundamentally built on the same core technology (Chromium or frameworks like Electron that use it), creating a technological monoculture under the illusion of diversity
Comments
36Comment deleted
My therapist asked why I have trust issues. I showed her my desktop, filled with a dozen different 'browsers' and apps. She didn't get it. They're all just Chromium in a different trench coat
I used to sweat fitting code into 64 KB; now my sticky-note app ships its own Chrome and calls itself “lightweight” - pass the Oops! All Chromium, I’m already carb-loading my RAM
The real tragedy isn't that everything's Chromium - it's that we're all maintaining separate forks of the same V8 engine bugs while pretending our 'unique' browsers offer meaningful differentiation beyond which telemetry endpoints they phone home to
When Google said they were going 'all in' on AI, they meant it literally - now every Chromium-based browser comes pre-loaded with more AI features than actual features you asked for. It's like finding out your favorite cereal replaced all the marshmallows with 'AI-optimized nutritional suggestions.' At least with this version, you can still disable JavaScript
ADR: native desktop vs web - approved “Oops! All Chromium”; PMs got one codebase, SREs got a 2GB baseline RSS per seat
Modern desktop strategy: choose which copy of Blink to bundle; Electron turned the browser engine into our new libc - with a 300MB hello world and one vendor owning your rendering pipeline
Cross-browser testing reduced to 'works in Chromium?' - until the monoculture blinks
Absolutely true Comment deleted
except firefox Comment deleted
And safari Comment deleted
and any browser on iOS :P Comment deleted
*any browser on iOS based OS Comment deleted
based OS Comment deleted
Well iPadOS, tvOS, VisionOS Comment deleted
*any browser downloaded from the iStore or what it's called. You can technically have chromium on iOS if you jailbreak it I think Comment deleted
They are arrogant they call is (the) App Store because they were the first Comment deleted
they weren't the first if you count linux package managers as the same thing. Which I do. Comment deleted
But linux is not locked down Comment deleted
neither is android (depending on vendor) Comment deleted
True I never said it would be fully open Comment deleted
Also thats true but who would port it if you cant even spread it and the built in one just does the job barely good enough Comment deleted
idunno, I'm just nitpicking here Comment deleted
*iDunno Comment deleted
They still on Webkit? That would technically be: Chromium (obsolete) Comment deleted
no, chromium stole webkit's design, but not any of their code. Comment deleted
They took most of the code as it was opensource in the first place as Apple took it from KDE. KHTML -> Webkit -> Blink Comment deleted
yeah but they did rewrite is so much that none of the original code is left Comment deleted
That's slightly different statement. :-) I remember there being a period of code sharing after the Google forked it, but it's quite feasible that current Apple Webkit has been since completely rewritten. Blink is pretty much from scratch rewrite too, as you have to do when you want to fix multithreading issues. Comment deleted
chromium is a plague Comment deleted
Nope, chromium is a solution. Even the solution. Comment deleted
EXPLAIN SELECT 'oops! all Chromium' FROM 'Google' Comment deleted
encountered LazyException: no i dont wanna Comment deleted
sudo !! 😝 Comment deleted
user @SamsonovAnton is not in sudoers file. this incident will be reported Comment deleted
All of these apps are build on top of chromium. Some of them are built on top of Electron, which uses chromium to render ui. You might think you're unique by choosing opera or vivaldi instead of google chrome, but your ass is still controlled by google Comment deleted
Firefox 4 Lyfe Comment deleted