14 ms·

Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

367 points by naktinis 7y ago

ishan1121 7y ago
Google is a clear monopoly, there's no doubt about it. It has a 70% browser market share, 70% market share in the search ecosystem. Even though their service is good and people are happy, I think they need to be broken down for the sake of keeping an open internet. Even Facebook for that matter. That's my opinion
- malms 7y ago
  Cute
- jayd16 7y ago
  Has this course of action ever actually worked? I can't say US telecoms are a great example of competition. I'm not anti-regulation but it seems like simply enforcing open standards might be more effective.
  - zaarn 7y ago
    I hope your joking because US Telcos are the result of a monopoly broken up (AT&T). And even then it's not the healthiest telco market due to the rise of local monopolies and market entrenchment.
    - jayd16 7y ago
      You should reread my post more carefully. That is my point exactly. Clearly, I'm aware of the history or I wouldn't have brought up telecos. My point is breaking up a monopoly is not a panacea as you can see.
- deleted 7y ago
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- dTal 7y ago
  Those 70% numbers undersell it. It's basically impossible to use the internet today without touching Google servers. Even if you, personally, completely eschew all Google services, almost everyone you want to communicate with will be on a Google service. Sending an email? Watching a video? Reading a blog? Chances are good that Google's involved.
  - fouc 7y ago
    Not sure why you were downvoted. I think you raise a good point, chrome + adwords + dns + etc + etc.. is concerning.
  - ishan1121 7y ago
    I agree...I am talking about the data releaed by Google to prove its not a Monopoly. The only reason Google is not considered a Monopoly in laws eyes is that people have the option but they are not shifting. Like chrome supports changing of Search engines. The only argument can be raised against is Google is on Chrome, that everyone is using Chrome and Google products are not working properly on non-Chrome based browsers
  - c0vfefe 7y ago
    Upvoted for ending with a rhyming couplet. > Watching a video? Reading a blog? > Chances are good that Google's involved.
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  Im surprised facebook was an afterthought for you. I immediately think of facebook whenever i think of bad things involving the internet. Google doesn't even really cross my mind, it's just the most prominent internet thing so of course it's bad in some ways, that's just entropy.
  - Kaiyou 7y ago
    Probably because it's trivial to cut facebook out of your Internet experience. Google,... not so much.
    - monetus 7y ago
      For a long time, I would have agreed... Until my family began to confuse fb messenger with text messaging itself.
      - Kaiyou 7y ago
        It's still easy to cut out of your life. I told my family if they want to reach me they have to use e-mail or the phone. This works surprisingly well.
        monetus 7y ago
        I've explained how the messenger app isn't the text messaging app (called messages), but the similarity still causes it to happen occasionally.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Just having dominant marketshare, especially in the presence of easily-accessible competitors (e.g. Safari, Mozilla, Opera, etc.), is definitively not a monopoly.
  - Illniyar 7y ago
    It more or less is, from a legal stand point, or atleast when referring to anti-trust laws. That doesn't mean that they are doing anti-competitive stuff and are viable for enforcement, being a monopoly in an open market is not illegal, it does mean that with that level of marketshare they have some legal limitations that their competitors don't have. Usually it's a limit on merges, acquisitions, price setting and bundling.
    - bduerst 7y ago
      No it is not. In the EU you don't even need market dominance to break anti-trust law, while in the US you do. In either case, Chrome is not committing anti-competitive behavior nor is it the only option on the market, hence it is not a monopoly. Being a popular product in a market full of consumer options is not a monopoly. If Chrome prevented you from downloading other browsers, then that would be monopolistic behavior, but Chrome is not doing that.
  - krageon 7y ago
    Your argument would be easier to receive if you enlightened your reader with what you think a monopoly is, rather than just framing it as something it is not.
    - bduerst 7y ago
      I just explained it - monopoly is not a complex economic principle. When consumers have easy access to multiple competing products or services in a market supply, there is not a monopoly by the definition of the word monopoly. This is semantics, not an argument: https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Amonopoly https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Amonopoly It's not well received because, as GP said, people have the opinion that Chrome is a monopoly because they lack the empathy to understand that consumers are choosing something they don't like, and they would prefer it was a monopoly because they want a reason to break it up.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  I don't know what you can do about browsers besides use Firefox. But as far as other stuff, I hope people will give distributed p2p possibilities some consideration in terms of usage or development. For example YaCy works pretty well as a p2p search engine. There are some others that I haven't tried. Back to the browser stuff. The problem is the browser has a full operating system in it at this point. There are too many APIs to compete. What could make competing browsers viable might be something like the following. Imagine a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Instead it emphasize fast rendering, has a state of the art web assembly implementation, and some kind of ABI/API for things like UI, UDP, etc. such as OpenGL (or a simpler UI system). It only allows a subset of CSS and HTML, maybe only Flexbox or something. It it could be just restricted to old-fashioned HTML rendering. But anyway it won't be able to have the scope of Firefox and Chrome. I guess the biggest problem is if you don't support the whole ginourmous HTML5 featureset (starting with JavaScript) then most websites will not work at all. They either will not load or will be totally scrambled. Maybe some kind of p2p content-centric web could become popular and have it's own streamlined and simplified browser. Or maybe there could be a new browser tailored for augmented reality that could become popular and compete with Chrome.
  - zaarn 7y ago
    YaCy works and in my experience that's pretty much the extend of it. I never (not a single time) found what I was looking for, vital sites like StackOverflow and Wikipedia aren't properly indexed, the pages that are, are wildly out of date. That plus it's incredibly slow.
  - dosy 7y ago
    Your proposal for an alternate browser universe sounds sort of like a project I'm working on. It makes use of a regular browser (Chrome, Firefox) in the backend but provides a customized experience to the user and over the final hop to the user. It supports a plugin development where you can use plugins to change the page before it is sent over the final hop to the user, and the JavaScript on the page is never executed on the user's machine, but only run in the cloud backend. I actually built it for webcasting and scraping, and then needed a lower bandwidth access over my 4G connection while oversees so added a plugin to remove everything except for the essential HTML. I'm actually looking for feedback right now on what to improve next, as I've got 50 issues I found myself but not sure what's most important to others. You can try it on https://staging.litewait.io https://staging.litewait.io and use a stripe test card number. Mail me for issues and I'll try to help you. In profile.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  AdWords and other Google platforms have more reach than that, even Microsoft serves up Adsense ads on MSN. Analytics is so heavily tied to AdWords, it's practically impossible to run an effective campaign without it. I'm more concerned about the advertising market Google has a strangle on. Analytics is everywhere, they have so much behavioral data that everyone pales in comparison, and no one can give as much insight into the ad market.
deleted 7y ago
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kmlx 7y ago
as a software dev, not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing. countless hours wasted on debugging various browsers gets massively reduced. second point, moving the conversation from "<browser x> hasn't caught up" to "everyone's caught up" helps the web focus on technologies more so than before. discussions should now concentrate almost exclusively around the next web technologies, no more competition regarding web engines, more competition regarding web technologies. clear win imo. as a biz dev, it's a bit saddening to see a lot of browser competitors go down the drain. but this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?
- Causality1 7y ago
  >not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing. So you just ignore the 30 percent of the market that isn't Chrome? Internet Explorer had 70+ percent of the market share until 2010. Was it good for consumers and the internet as a whole for devs to ignore non-IE browsers in 2009?
  - kmlx 7y ago
    it’s much easier to deal with the current 30% than it has been at any point in history with IE.
- bad_user 7y ago
  As a software dev you probably don't remember, or haven't lived the days of Internet Explorer. Diversity and browser standards is what made the web a good platform to develop for. Just to give a recent example, if Google would dictate what gets implemented, instead of WebAssembly, the standard, you would have gotten PNaCl. > this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well? I fail to see how the creation of a monopoly can be a win for business. For Google's business, for sure.
  - kmlx 7y ago
    IE was by far the worst browser. i was working as a front end dev durinh those days and got excited when google finally launched chrome, more-so than firefox. the hours and the energy spent on debugging IE is something we will never get back. on your second point, monopolies create the setting for massive disruption.
bad_user 7y ago
In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular. However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important. Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open source nature, is the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser. At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari. I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.
- writepub 7y ago
  I do not trust Google, but I do not trust Mozilla either. An overwhelming majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google, Microsoft, and other giants it directly competes with. Added to that, many of it's battles (at the W3C and like) prioritize philosophy over customer satisfaction and ease of use. 99.9% of browser users don't care or don't even know if their browser is open source - what they want is convenience and ease of use. I hope Mozilla prioritizes the ones that actually matter - the users, over whatever philosophy it claims to live by, that often times isn't rooted in customer centricity.
  - TAForObvReasons 7y ago
    Mozilla really hasn't helped their cause with various privacy-related issues over the last few years, like the Booking.com ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800360). The obfuscatory language around it are arguably more insulting than the ads themselves. As John Gruber so eloquently wrote: > If you want to sell ads, sell ads. Own it. Don’t try to coat it with a layer of frosting and tell me it’s a fucking cupcake. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/02/16/mozilla https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/02/16/mozilla
    - r3bl 7y ago
gfosco 7y ago
I really don't like how browser vendors have become extension gatekeepers, strongly discouraging any integration they disapprove of. I like what Gab has done with the Dissenter Browser (fork of Brave) after being removed from the Google/Firefox stores.
- stephenr 7y ago
  Imagine being so convinced that nazis and white supremacists are "right" that literally fork your own browser.
  - jakeogh 7y ago
    How convenient that free speech platforms get flooded with this stuff. It's almost like you might actually be the target audience and the goal isn't to convert you.
  - collyw 7y ago
    Can you explain your comment, as it sounds like hyperbole to me.
    - stephenr 7y ago
      GAB is a social media site that is "friendly" and "a safe haven" for neo-nazis, white supremacists and "the alt-right". It was created because they were too extreme even for Twitter's ridiculously ineffective controls on hate speech. They apparently believe so strongly that they are "right", that they literally forked a browser to allow their extension to be used, so that like-minded nazis and white supremacists can discuss.... how bad jews are I guess, on any site they wish. What exactly is hyperbolic? The first sentence is almost exactly the description of GAB from wikipedia btw.
      - collyw 7y ago
        I understood that it was created because twitter was far too heavy handed with their censorship. (See Tim Pool's discussion on Joe Rogan if you don't think that is the case). But the white supremacist bogeyman is everywhere, isn't it.
scarejunba 7y ago
What's the steelman argument for Google withholding Widevine from Samuel Maddock? Electron packaging with Widevine is a thing so this seems unusual. If you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this?
- martin_a 7y ago
  > If you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this? What if you aren't actually the good guy?
  - ovi256 7y ago
    He's basically asking if there's any reasonable theory fitting the fact that Google withheld Widevine and the hypothesis that Google is a good guy. The jump to the null hypothesis that you've stated is made too soon without doing this first.
    - martin_a 7y ago
      Maybe I've translated it wrong but to me it read like it was based on the assumption that Google is being perceived or actively trying to be the good guy. I don't think this is how they do anything anymore. They are not "the good ones" and they will probably do anything that fits into their business model or ideas without any hesitations.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- onli 7y ago
  With that decision they aimed a very big gun straight at their foot and pulled the trigger. They proved: 1. That they are in a monopoly-like position where they have the power to decide over other web tech projects 2. That they have a very hostile process, not getting properly back to the developer for months. That alone is sabotaging of other projects. 3. That they make the wrong decision, seemingly only protecting their own position, without providing a proper reasoning. Hear that? That was the antitrust investigator laughing. You can do that if it's about some random tech. You can't do that if the tech is linked to a browser controlling how 60% of internet users access the web, and worse, getting full access to popular stuff/success qualifying content like Netflix for all browser. They wanted that monopoly position when they pushed for DRM, now they have to handle it. Big mistake.
dalbasal 7y ago
Antitrust law is, I suspect, hopelessly outdated... both the laws and the understanding of monopolies/trusts that are baked into them. These laws were based on 19th-century competition. The problems att were price fixing, predatory pricing (eg price low to kill competition then raise prices), supply chain bottlenecking (how you gonna sell your ore without my trains) ... industrial era trust stuff. The precedents and laws are hair-splitting and specific. It's just not the kind of system that can "think" high level and apply abstract principles to totally new problems. Google & Facebook mostly have no prices to fix. The ad markets where they make their money are competitive bid-based, ostensibly the opposite of a "monopolistic pricing" structure. The economic/theory just doesn't match the pratices anymore. For example: Facebooks' revenue. Imagine that tomorrow morning BMW's revenues are cut in half. BMW would need to produce fewer cars. Cars cost X to produce. Cut X in half, and you can expect half the volume. What would happen if we did the same to FB. My guess is that they'd still make the same FB. If you take path dependency^ out of the mix (that it's hard to fire people and adjust downward), It's scary to think how big a company is required to make FB. Doesn't seem like a stretch to speculate that it can be done on a $5-$10bn budget... 1/10th of their current revenue. After all, Facebook was Facebook on that budget not long ago. ^By path dependency I mean imagine that FB's revenue had just never gotten to $80bn in the first place, the sahare price had never gotten so high. Etc. IDK what exactly that implies about what antitrust laws should be, but it does mean that the theoretical foundation for the current ruleset is totally off. The way monopolistic power conerts to money in 2019 is fundamentally different from 1891... I mean genuinely fundamental, I'm not using it as a superlative. The definition of monopoly, benefits of owning one, the reasons why they're bad (or not).
- chii 7y ago
  Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society, and it's adverse effects can't be fixed via markets due to reasons like size and reach. Monopoly in its own is neither good nor bad. Facebook has a monopoly in social network. Is that bad? What is the effect of the monopoly? Is Facebook's monopoly having an adverse effect, or is the adverse effect inherent in the way social networks work (and breaking the monopoly won't help). Simply being a monopoly is an unreasonable reason to break it up.
masswerk 7y ago
Anecdotal observation: A few years ago, I made a video game for an early 1960s computer, the PDP-1, running in an homegrown emulator in web technology. [1] Amazingly, the game runs at 60 frames per second (yes, you could do this with early 1960s tech), and, amazingly, browsers were able to render the emulation, including a rather complex simulation of the dual-phosphor screen, at 60 fps (you could do this in 2016). Admittedly, Chrome wasn't the fastest browser then, skipping a frame now and then, but caught up with others browsers over the next year. That is, until a few revisions ago, when something inside Chrome went terribly wrong, causing the browser to grind over the emulation in single-digits frame rates. Other browsers, like Firefox and Safari, are still running the emulation (which is as of 2012) happily at 60 fps, but these combine just about 15% of the intended desktop audiences. So for all measure and market concentration, the project is dead by now, due to a bug in the dominant browser. More importantly, it fails to deliver the proof it was intended to provide, namely that you could do a video game at 60 fps around 1960, because you randomly can't do so today. [1] https://www.masswerk.at/icss/ https://www.masswerk.at/icss/
- masswerk 7y ago
  P.S.: For details on the project, see the blog at https://www.masswerk.at/rc2016/10/ https://www.masswerk.at/rc2016/10/ (And for a description of Computer Space, see https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html)
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  Thanks for that, I have just been thoroughly massacred by aliens.
- dTal 7y ago
  Well that just cries out for some snarky user-agent-sniffing "upgrade your browser" overlay.
  - reitanqild 7y ago
    Would love that: some really funny message that would make people stop and think.
mothsonasloth 7y ago
To those who don't see an issue here, go an read up about ActiveX and NPAPI.
lprd 7y ago
I installed Firefox as my daily driver last year and have been completely happy with it. Great dev tools, good performance, and I agree with Mozilla's stance on privacy. All wins for me. I'll still occasionally open up Chrome for dev purposes -- but for the sake of browser diversity and maintaining an open internet, I encourage all my friends to give Firefox a try.
- huy-nguyen 7y ago
  The main problem with Firefox is high memory usage.
  - joaobeno 7y ago
    Did you mean "Chrome"?
  - holtalanm 7y ago
    i had a opposite experience. memory usage was great in firefox, but it pegged my CPU.
  - lprd 7y ago
    Energy usage would be my only complaint with Firefox. When I'm on my MBP, it does drain a bit faster (not horribly) when I have a few FF browser tabs open. I suppose I should just use Safari when I'm not plugged in.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Just wanted to add a +1. I use FF with strict content blocking enabled which means that things like YouTube videos and captchas are often randomly missing from pages, as are images hotlinked from third-party servers. I see this as a feature rather than a bug and it's easily temporarily disabled if it causes an issue. Of course, I use uBlock Origin as well. Performance-wise I have no complaints and the sync across devices works just as well as it does in Chrome.
b-3-n 7y ago
The real problem is that regardless how much we trust Google and Chrome nobody can make guarantees about future government or corporate politics so it should be really important to us to keep the browser market competitive.
majkinetor 7y ago
Great time for Microsoft to open source its Edge engine. It sure seems like it works great and has no Google related problems so it can form base for future foss adventures.
- javagram 7y ago
  Considering Edge is just an evolved Trident engine, open sourcing it would probably be very difficult. A 24-year-old proprietary software project may have commercially licensed parts inside it that aren't subject to open sourcing; MS has certainly made such deals in the past like the ZIP support in Windows Explorer being licensed from a third party.
  - majkinetor 7y ago
    I think they could manage, given that they open sourced bunch of stuff that probably had the same problems. What is shame is for such valuable effort to die. Tech dying is a shame and you can see it everywhere, from folks experimenting with TempleOs to 8bit game emulators...
  - snazz 7y ago
    As well as the spellchecker in Word, if I remember correctly.
cletus 7y ago
It's hard to believe what a behemoth Chrome has become when it was only announced in 2008. What makes this even more amazing is it did this when IE/Edge ships as standard on Windows (which seems to be ~80% marketshare) and Safari ships as standard on OSX/iOS. It wasn't until Android 4.1 (2012) that Chrome even shipped on Android. Chrome did several things really well out of the gate: - Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want. - The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me. - N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar - This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance issues. This was huge at the time. - Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and everyone else. - Chrome was standards compliant. - Chrome ran across multiple platforms - (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient. - (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking. Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can disappear or cease to be relevant. I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been unable or unwilling to replicate. Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support). All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes people numb.
- notlukesky 7y ago
  Chrome was and unbelievably still is the most developer friendly. Our Opera extension has been languishing for 7 months for approval or a response to our emails (we gave up) and snooty FireFox put us through the ringer to get our extension (they call it an add-on) approved and more than 2 months. Chrome is amazing for developers. Maybe unless you are an adblocker. That might be the opportunity for MS Edge Chromium.
deleted 7y ago
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Theodores 7y ago
My problem with Chrome extends to Google's general stewardship of the web, including search. I wish to qualify my complaint by acknowledging that Google have done tonnes of brilliant stuff, Chrome included. However, one can be over-awed by the brilliance and not see what is being missed. A few years ago HTML5 came along with better elements than the humble div to describe content in a page. These new elements, e.g. section, aside, article, main, header, footer and nav, are what web pages should be written with. But Google are okay not really caring about HTML elements. They can sift through tag soup for search and therefore how well a page is written is of no consequence for them. Chrome does support the new elements absolutely fine but the dev tools that we use and the things like Lighthouse are about metrics that matter to Google and don't concern quality HTML. This enforces a cargo cult mentality and we have 99% of the web bloated by markup that is quite hard to write and to debug. If Lighthouse audit reminded you that the div element was 'element of last resort' according to the spec and knocked a few percentage points off your score for accessibility if your page only used divs then that would encourage people to write decent HTML using the full element vocabulary.
woranl 7y ago
Firefox made a lot of strategic error mostly because they were arrogant. Not implementing the Filesystem API is one of many. The world will simply move on without you. It’s very unfortunate how bad decisions screwed up the web. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-firefox/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-f...

367 points by naktinis 7y ago

Google is a clear monopoly, there's no doubt about it. It has a 70% browser market share, 70% market share in the search ecosystem. Even though their service is good and people are happy, I think they need to be broken down for the sake of keeping an open internet. Even Facebook for that matter. That's my opinion

malms 7y ago
Cute
jayd16 7y ago
Has this course of action ever actually worked? I can't say US telecoms are a great example of competition. I'm not anti-regulation but it seems like simply enforcing open standards might be more effective.
- zaarn 7y ago
  I hope your joking because US Telcos are the result of a monopoly broken up (AT&T). And even then it's not the healthiest telco market due to the rise of local monopolies and market entrenchment.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    You should reread my post more carefully. That is my point exactly. Clearly, I'm aware of the history or I wouldn't have brought up telecos. My point is breaking up a monopoly is not a panacea as you can see.
deleted 7y ago
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dTal 7y ago
Those 70% numbers undersell it. It's basically impossible to use the internet today without touching Google servers. Even if you, personally, completely eschew all Google services, almost everyone you want to communicate with will be on a Google service. Sending an email? Watching a video? Reading a blog? Chances are good that Google's involved.
- fouc 7y ago
  Not sure why you were downvoted. I think you raise a good point, chrome + adwords + dns + etc + etc.. is concerning.
- ishan1121 7y ago
  I agree...I am talking about the data releaed by Google to prove its not a Monopoly. The only reason Google is not considered a Monopoly in laws eyes is that people have the option but they are not shifting. Like chrome supports changing of Search engines. The only argument can be raised against is Google is on Chrome, that everyone is using Chrome and Google products are not working properly on non-Chrome based browsers
- c0vfefe 7y ago
  Upvoted for ending with a rhyming couplet. > Watching a video? Reading a blog? > Chances are good that Google's involved.
WilliamEdward 7y ago
Im surprised facebook was an afterthought for you. I immediately think of facebook whenever i think of bad things involving the internet. Google doesn't even really cross my mind, it's just the most prominent internet thing so of course it's bad in some ways, that's just entropy.
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  Probably because it's trivial to cut facebook out of your Internet experience. Google,... not so much.
  - monetus 7y ago
    For a long time, I would have agreed... Until my family began to confuse fb messenger with text messaging itself.
    - Kaiyou 7y ago
      It's still easy to cut out of your life. I told my family if they want to reach me they have to use e-mail or the phone. This works surprisingly well.
      - monetus 7y ago
        I've explained how the messenger app isn't the text messaging app (called messages), but the similarity still causes it to happen occasionally.
bduerst 7y ago
Just having dominant marketshare, especially in the presence of easily-accessible competitors (e.g. Safari, Mozilla, Opera, etc.), is definitively not a monopoly.
- Illniyar 7y ago
  It more or less is, from a legal stand point, or atleast when referring to anti-trust laws. That doesn't mean that they are doing anti-competitive stuff and are viable for enforcement, being a monopoly in an open market is not illegal, it does mean that with that level of marketshare they have some legal limitations that their competitors don't have. Usually it's a limit on merges, acquisitions, price setting and bundling.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    No it is not. In the EU you don't even need market dominance to break anti-trust law, while in the US you do. In either case, Chrome is not committing anti-competitive behavior nor is it the only option on the market, hence it is not a monopoly. Being a popular product in a market full of consumer options is not a monopoly. If Chrome prevented you from downloading other browsers, then that would be monopolistic behavior, but Chrome is not doing that.
- krageon 7y ago
  Your argument would be easier to receive if you enlightened your reader with what you think a monopoly is, rather than just framing it as something it is not.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    I just explained it - monopoly is not a complex economic principle. When consumers have easy access to multiple competing products or services in a market supply, there is not a monopoly by the definition of the word monopoly. This is semantics, not an argument: https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Amonopoly https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Amonopoly It's not well received because, as GP said, people have the opinion that Chrome is a monopoly because they lack the empathy to understand that consumers are choosing something they don't like, and they would prefer it was a monopoly because they want a reason to break it up.
ilaksh 7y ago
I don't know what you can do about browsers besides use Firefox. But as far as other stuff, I hope people will give distributed p2p possibilities some consideration in terms of usage or development. For example YaCy works pretty well as a p2p search engine. There are some others that I haven't tried. Back to the browser stuff. The problem is the browser has a full operating system in it at this point. There are too many APIs to compete. What could make competing browsers viable might be something like the following. Imagine a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Instead it emphasize fast rendering, has a state of the art web assembly implementation, and some kind of ABI/API for things like UI, UDP, etc. such as OpenGL (or a simpler UI system). It only allows a subset of CSS and HTML, maybe only Flexbox or something. It it could be just restricted to old-fashioned HTML rendering. But anyway it won't be able to have the scope of Firefox and Chrome. I guess the biggest problem is if you don't support the whole ginourmous HTML5 featureset (starting with JavaScript) then most websites will not work at all. They either will not load or will be totally scrambled. Maybe some kind of p2p content-centric web could become popular and have it's own streamlined and simplified browser. Or maybe there could be a new browser tailored for augmented reality that could become popular and compete with Chrome.
- zaarn 7y ago
  YaCy works and in my experience that's pretty much the extend of it. I never (not a single time) found what I was looking for, vital sites like StackOverflow and Wikipedia aren't properly indexed, the pages that are, are wildly out of date. That plus it's incredibly slow.
- dosy 7y ago
  Your proposal for an alternate browser universe sounds sort of like a project I'm working on. It makes use of a regular browser (Chrome, Firefox) in the backend but provides a customized experience to the user and over the final hop to the user. It supports a plugin development where you can use plugins to change the page before it is sent over the final hop to the user, and the JavaScript on the page is never executed on the user's machine, but only run in the cloud backend. I actually built it for webcasting and scraping, and then needed a lower bandwidth access over my 4G connection while oversees so added a plugin to remove everything except for the essential HTML. I'm actually looking for feedback right now on what to improve next, as I've got 50 issues I found myself but not sure what's most important to others. You can try it on https://staging.litewait.io https://staging.litewait.io and use a stripe test card number. Mail me for issues and I'll try to help you. In profile.
partiallypro 7y ago
AdWords and other Google platforms have more reach than that, even Microsoft serves up Adsense ads on MSN. Analytics is so heavily tied to AdWords, it's practically impossible to run an effective campaign without it. I'm more concerned about the advertising market Google has a strangle on. Analytics is everywhere, they have so much behavioral data that everyone pales in comparison, and no one can give as much insight into the ad market.

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kmlx 7y ago

as a software dev, not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing. countless hours wasted on debugging various browsers gets massively reduced. second point, moving the conversation from "<browser x> hasn't caught up" to "everyone's caught up" helps the web focus on technologies more so than before. discussions should now concentrate almost exclusively around the next web technologies, no more competition regarding web engines, more competition regarding web technologies. clear win imo. as a biz dev, it's a bit saddening to see a lot of browser competitors go down the drain. but this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?

Causality1 7y ago
>not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing. So you just ignore the 30 percent of the market that isn't Chrome? Internet Explorer had 70+ percent of the market share until 2010. Was it good for consumers and the internet as a whole for devs to ignore non-IE browsers in 2009?
- kmlx 7y ago
  it’s much easier to deal with the current 30% than it has been at any point in history with IE.
bad_user 7y ago
As a software dev you probably don't remember, or haven't lived the days of Internet Explorer. Diversity and browser standards is what made the web a good platform to develop for. Just to give a recent example, if Google would dictate what gets implemented, instead of WebAssembly, the standard, you would have gotten PNaCl. > this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well? I fail to see how the creation of a monopoly can be a win for business. For Google's business, for sure.
- kmlx 7y ago
  IE was by far the worst browser. i was working as a front end dev durinh those days and got excited when google finally launched chrome, more-so than firefox. the hours and the energy spent on debugging IE is something we will never get back. on your second point, monopolies create the setting for massive disruption.

bad_user 7y ago

In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular. However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important. Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open source nature, is the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser. At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari. I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.

writepub 7y ago
I do not trust Google, but I do not trust Mozilla either. An overwhelming majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google, Microsoft, and other giants it directly competes with. Added to that, many of it's battles (at the W3C and like) prioritize philosophy over customer satisfaction and ease of use. 99.9% of browser users don't care or don't even know if their browser is open source - what they want is convenience and ease of use. I hope Mozilla prioritizes the ones that actually matter - the users, over whatever philosophy it claims to live by, that often times isn't rooted in customer centricity.
- TAForObvReasons 7y ago
  Mozilla really hasn't helped their cause with various privacy-related issues over the last few years, like the Booking.com ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800360). The obfuscatory language around it are arguably more insulting than the ads themselves. As John Gruber so eloquently wrote: > If you want to sell ads, sell ads. Own it. Don’t try to coat it with a layer of frosting and tell me it’s a fucking cupcake. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/02/16/mozilla https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/02/16/mozilla
  - r3bl 7y ago

gfosco 7y ago

I really don't like how browser vendors have become extension gatekeepers, strongly discouraging any integration they disapprove of. I like what Gab has done with the Dissenter Browser (fork of Brave) after being removed from the Google/Firefox stores.

stephenr 7y ago
Imagine being so convinced that nazis and white supremacists are "right" that literally fork your own browser.
- jakeogh 7y ago
  How convenient that free speech platforms get flooded with this stuff. It's almost like you might actually be the target audience and the goal isn't to convert you.
- collyw 7y ago
  Can you explain your comment, as it sounds like hyperbole to me.
  - stephenr 7y ago
    GAB is a social media site that is "friendly" and "a safe haven" for neo-nazis, white supremacists and "the alt-right". It was created because they were too extreme even for Twitter's ridiculously ineffective controls on hate speech. They apparently believe so strongly that they are "right", that they literally forked a browser to allow their extension to be used, so that like-minded nazis and white supremacists can discuss.... how bad jews are I guess, on any site they wish. What exactly is hyperbolic? The first sentence is almost exactly the description of GAB from wikipedia btw.
    - collyw 7y ago
      I understood that it was created because twitter was far too heavy handed with their censorship. (See Tim Pool's discussion on Joe Rogan if you don't think that is the case). But the white supremacist bogeyman is everywhere, isn't it.

scarejunba 7y ago

What's the steelman argument for Google withholding Widevine from Samuel Maddock? Electron packaging with Widevine is a thing so this seems unusual. If you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this?

martin_a 7y ago
> If you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this? What if you aren't actually the good guy?
- ovi256 7y ago
  He's basically asking if there's any reasonable theory fitting the fact that Google withheld Widevine and the hypothesis that Google is a good guy. The jump to the null hypothesis that you've stated is made too soon without doing this first.
  - martin_a 7y ago
    Maybe I've translated it wrong but to me it read like it was based on the assumption that Google is being perceived or actively trying to be the good guy. I don't think this is how they do anything anymore. They are not "the good ones" and they will probably do anything that fits into their business model or ideas without any hesitations.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
onli 7y ago
With that decision they aimed a very big gun straight at their foot and pulled the trigger. They proved: 1. That they are in a monopoly-like position where they have the power to decide over other web tech projects 2. That they have a very hostile process, not getting properly back to the developer for months. That alone is sabotaging of other projects. 3. That they make the wrong decision, seemingly only protecting their own position, without providing a proper reasoning. Hear that? That was the antitrust investigator laughing. You can do that if it's about some random tech. You can't do that if the tech is linked to a browser controlling how 60% of internet users access the web, and worse, getting full access to popular stuff/success qualifying content like Netflix for all browser. They wanted that monopoly position when they pushed for DRM, now they have to handle it. Big mistake.

dalbasal 7y ago

Antitrust law is, I suspect, hopelessly outdated... both the laws and the understanding of monopolies/trusts that are baked into them. These laws were based on 19th-century competition. The problems att were price fixing, predatory pricing (eg price low to kill competition then raise prices), supply chain bottlenecking (how you gonna sell your ore without my trains) ... industrial era trust stuff. The precedents and laws are hair-splitting and specific. It's just not the kind of system that can "think" high level and apply abstract principles to totally new problems. Google & Facebook mostly have no prices to fix. The ad markets where they make their money are competitive bid-based, ostensibly the opposite of a "monopolistic pricing" structure. The economic/theory just doesn't match the pratices anymore. For example: Facebooks' revenue. Imagine that tomorrow morning BMW's revenues are cut in half. BMW would need to produce fewer cars. Cars cost X to produce. Cut X in half, and you can expect half the volume. What would happen if we did the same to FB. My guess is that they'd still make the same FB. If you take path dependency^ out of the mix (that it's hard to fire people and adjust downward), It's scary to think how big a company is required to make FB. Doesn't seem like a stretch to speculate that it can be done on a $5-$10bn budget... 1/10th of their current revenue. After all, Facebook was Facebook on that budget not long ago. ^By path dependency I mean imagine that FB's revenue had just never gotten to $80bn in the first place, the sahare price had never gotten so high. Etc. IDK what exactly that implies about what antitrust laws should be, but it does mean that the theoretical foundation for the current ruleset is totally off. The way monopolistic power conerts to money in 2019 is fundamentally different from 1891... I mean genuinely fundamental, I'm not using it as a superlative. The definition of monopoly, benefits of owning one, the reasons why they're bad (or not).

chii 7y ago
Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society, and it's adverse effects can't be fixed via markets due to reasons like size and reach. Monopoly in its own is neither good nor bad. Facebook has a monopoly in social network. Is that bad? What is the effect of the monopoly? Is Facebook's monopoly having an adverse effect, or is the adverse effect inherent in the way social networks work (and breaking the monopoly won't help). Simply being a monopoly is an unreasonable reason to break it up.

masswerk 7y ago

Anecdotal observation: A few years ago, I made a video game for an early 1960s computer, the PDP-1, running in an homegrown emulator in web technology. [1] Amazingly, the game runs at 60 frames per second (yes, you could do this with early 1960s tech), and, amazingly, browsers were able to render the emulation, including a rather complex simulation of the dual-phosphor screen, at 60 fps (you could do this in 2016). Admittedly, Chrome wasn't the fastest browser then, skipping a frame now and then, but caught up with others browsers over the next year. That is, until a few revisions ago, when something inside Chrome went terribly wrong, causing the browser to grind over the emulation in single-digits frame rates. Other browsers, like Firefox and Safari, are still running the emulation (which is as of 2012) happily at 60 fps, but these combine just about 15% of the intended desktop audiences. So for all measure and market concentration, the project is dead by now, due to a bug in the dominant browser. More importantly, it fails to deliver the proof it was intended to provide, namely that you could do a video game at 60 fps around 1960, because you randomly can't do so today. [1] https://www.masswerk.at/icss/ https://www.masswerk.at/icss/

masswerk 7y ago
P.S.: For details on the project, see the blog at https://www.masswerk.at/rc2016/10/ https://www.masswerk.at/rc2016/10/ (And for a description of Computer Space, see https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html)
inflatableDodo 7y ago
Thanks for that, I have just been thoroughly massacred by aliens.
dTal 7y ago
Well that just cries out for some snarky user-agent-sniffing "upgrade your browser" overlay.
- reitanqild 7y ago
  Would love that: some really funny message that would make people stop and think.

mothsonasloth 7y ago

To those who don't see an issue here, go an read up about ActiveX and NPAPI.

lprd 7y ago

I installed Firefox as my daily driver last year and have been completely happy with it. Great dev tools, good performance, and I agree with Mozilla's stance on privacy. All wins for me. I'll still occasionally open up Chrome for dev purposes -- but for the sake of browser diversity and maintaining an open internet, I encourage all my friends to give Firefox a try.

huy-nguyen 7y ago
The main problem with Firefox is high memory usage.
- joaobeno 7y ago
  Did you mean "Chrome"?
- holtalanm 7y ago
  i had a opposite experience. memory usage was great in firefox, but it pegged my CPU.
- lprd 7y ago
  Energy usage would be my only complaint with Firefox. When I'm on my MBP, it does drain a bit faster (not horribly) when I have a few FF browser tabs open. I suppose I should just use Safari when I'm not plugged in.
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
Just wanted to add a +1. I use FF with strict content blocking enabled which means that things like YouTube videos and captchas are often randomly missing from pages, as are images hotlinked from third-party servers. I see this as a feature rather than a bug and it's easily temporarily disabled if it causes an issue. Of course, I use uBlock Origin as well. Performance-wise I have no complaints and the sync across devices works just as well as it does in Chrome.

b-3-n 7y ago

The real problem is that regardless how much we trust Google and Chrome nobody can make guarantees about future government or corporate politics so it should be really important to us to keep the browser market competitive.

majkinetor 7y ago

Great time for Microsoft to open source its Edge engine. It sure seems like it works great and has no Google related problems so it can form base for future foss adventures.

javagram 7y ago
Considering Edge is just an evolved Trident engine, open sourcing it would probably be very difficult. A 24-year-old proprietary software project may have commercially licensed parts inside it that aren't subject to open sourcing; MS has certainly made such deals in the past like the ZIP support in Windows Explorer being licensed from a third party.
- majkinetor 7y ago
  I think they could manage, given that they open sourced bunch of stuff that probably had the same problems. What is shame is for such valuable effort to die. Tech dying is a shame and you can see it everywhere, from folks experimenting with TempleOs to 8bit game emulators...
- snazz 7y ago
  As well as the spellchecker in Word, if I remember correctly.

cletus 7y ago

It's hard to believe what a behemoth Chrome has become when it was only announced in 2008. What makes this even more amazing is it did this when IE/Edge ships as standard on Windows (which seems to be ~80% marketshare) and Safari ships as standard on OSX/iOS. It wasn't until Android 4.1 (2012) that Chrome even shipped on Android. Chrome did several things really well out of the gate: - Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want. - The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me. - N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar - This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance issues. This was huge at the time. - Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and everyone else. - Chrome was standards compliant. - Chrome ran across multiple platforms - (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient. - (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking. Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can disappear or cease to be relevant. I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been unable or unwilling to replicate. Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support). All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes people numb.

notlukesky 7y ago
Chrome was and unbelievably still is the most developer friendly. Our Opera extension has been languishing for 7 months for approval or a response to our emails (we gave up) and snooty FireFox put us through the ringer to get our extension (they call it an add-on) approved and more than 2 months. Chrome is amazing for developers. Maybe unless you are an adblocker. That might be the opportunity for MS Edge Chromium.

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Theodores 7y ago

My problem with Chrome extends to Google's general stewardship of the web, including search. I wish to qualify my complaint by acknowledging that Google have done tonnes of brilliant stuff, Chrome included. However, one can be over-awed by the brilliance and not see what is being missed. A few years ago HTML5 came along with better elements than the humble div to describe content in a page. These new elements, e.g. section, aside, article, main, header, footer and nav, are what web pages should be written with. But Google are okay not really caring about HTML elements. They can sift through tag soup for search and therefore how well a page is written is of no consequence for them. Chrome does support the new elements absolutely fine but the dev tools that we use and the things like Lighthouse are about metrics that matter to Google and don't concern quality HTML. This enforces a cargo cult mentality and we have 99% of the web bloated by markup that is quite hard to write and to debug. If Lighthouse audit reminded you that the div element was 'element of last resort' according to the spec and knocked a few percentage points off your score for accessibility if your page only used divs then that would encourage people to write decent HTML using the full element vocabulary.

woranl 7y ago

Firefox made a lot of strategic error mostly because they were arrogant. Not implementing the Filesystem API is one of many. The world will simply move on without you. It’s very unfortunate how bad decisions screwed up the web. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-firefox/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-f...