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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Chrome also had the advantage of being advertised on Google.com.

anywhere i go without an adblocker begs me to install chrome and stop using whatever horrible outdated browser im using (according to the google ad), and how youtube, etc work best with chrome anyway

thats quite a lot of powerful advertisement, on the sites people browse every day. its not too different than being part of the default install IMO ;-)

and of course - chrome is a pretty good browser (though edge is actually quite good and firefox is pretty much ok as well despite not yet doing sandboxing)

And the thing is it's sadly not a lie. YouTube and such do work best with Chrome. Google's effective web vertical integration means they control every stage of the pipeline. They control the sites and the browser. They can deploy experimental tech in Chrome which nobody knows about and which only Google sites use.

It's terrifying.

One example of "google only APIs" that I ran into recently is the chrome extension browserAction.openPopup API. This API is whitelisted (in stable) for use by the Google Cast extension. Extensions authored outside of Google cannot use it. This is creates an uneven playing field.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=436489

So when are they going to get hit by lawsuits like the ones Microsoft got in the '90s?

They've already been hit with that in the EU. And, I imagine the first thing after this current election cycle in the US ends will be newly minted (or newly defrocked, as the case may be) politicians attempting to take a cheap shot at Google -- especially since Popular Luddism is circling the political backwaters these days.

As already stated, they were already happening, and Alphabet is in large part an initiative to head that off.

It seems it's not necessarily malicious. From https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399859:

"The popup is anchored to the extension icon, which might be in overflow or not even exist, in which case it is anchored to the Wrench menu. That kind of anchoring would make the message in the popup to appear to be from the Chrome browser (since it points to the chrome UI) and would present a vector for tricking users into thinking the message is from a trusted source.

Since this is not safe to allow all extensions to do we'd need a lot better reasoning than "I'd like to use this in my extension" before allowing widespread use of this API."

I agree, I would guess extensions also probably don't have access to chrome's password store. Trusted code can be handled differently.

I agree that the API limitation is most likely not malicious and I did not intend to imply otherwise. Still, lack of malice does not change the fact that the Google Cast extension has a competitive advantage over other non-Google extensions (which can't use all of the same APIs).

This seems remarkably similar to Philips:

"While the Philips Hue system is based on open technologies we are not able to ensure all products from other brands are tested and fully interoperable with all of our software updates. For guaranteed compatibility you need to use Philips Hue or certified Friends of Hue products."

After all, it'd just be downright unthinkable that any non-Philips lightbulb should be compatible with our light sockets, that any brand of plug should fit into our wall sockets, or that non-Google-branded plug-in should be able to use a web browser's APIs... I mean, goodness, next we'll be thinking that the term "plug-in API" suggests its supposed to allow things that other people created to interoperate...

That's nothing. One of the biggest injustices with Google Cast is that capturing system audio on Android is a whitelisted system-only permission and only Google Cast (and a couple system apps) are allowed access to this. Somehow screen video capture isn't a system-only permission.

Nobody other than Google (or your OEM) is allowed to build complete screen casting apps on Android. All third party solutions require you to output your audio through your speaker and capture it with your microphone, which is much worse quality, single-channel, and makes sound (I want to hear my device audio through the speakers of the device I'm casting it to).

It makes no sense, especially when any device on your network can emulate being a Miracast receiver and get access to the same audio data that you aren't allowed to access on your own device. In fact, Windows 10 insider preview currently includes a Miracast emulator just for this purpose of Android screen sharing.

At some point, YouTube worked better with Safari than with Chrome or Firefox. YouTube would serve VP9 to browsers that supported it, but it was not hardware accelerated, so it used much more CPU.

This is most likely still true. Safari only supports h.264 which has better hardware support than VP9 just now.

Exactly. They used shady advertising technics to get Chrome installs, but now that they have them they paint themselves as the anti-spam warriors. Yet, every time I point out on hacker news how big hypocrites they are for saying their moto is "don't do evil", I get downvoted. It's frustrating to see a shady company having such a bullet proof brand. I hope this will change some day.

Reminds me of the Microsoft OEM deals and IE. Shows just how much like their opponent Google really is. :)

Microsoft's only interest in IE was to protect the Windows monopoly by suffocating Netscape and its Java Applets.

And they told OEMs they wouldn't sell them Windows at all if they preinstalled Netscape or uninstalled IE.

Which is why they got sued by the government and lost the trial.

Kind of different if you ask me.

Much worse version of monopolistic tactics I agree.

As a matter of fact, Microsoft won the browser case 2-1 on appeal.

It was found guilty in the larger anti-trust case, but not in the browser case.

See Microsoft Wins In Appeals Court -- It Gets OK To Require Use Of Its Internet Browser; Special Master Booted http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...

Microsoft Wins Key Ruling An Appeals Court Said The Company's Browser Can Be Integrated Into Windows 95. The U.s. Had Sued To Stop It. http://articles.philly.com/1998-06-24/news/25728049_1_window...

etc

It also had an advantage of being a friggin' fast browser. I switched in 2009 and never looked back beside occasionally trying out FF and nope'ing back to Chrome.

Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already. Not sure what you were measuring.

UI Responsiveness probably, any perception of speed is lost if loading a website freezes the entire browser for several msecs.

This. I love FF and use it wherever I can, but there are small tricks in Chrome that make it seem much faster in normal use. No matter what you do, action feedback is instant. Firefox should really imitate this.

Yep. A bit part of the perception of speed isn't "always be fast", it's "never be slow".

When talking about a piece of software as complicated as a modern browser, “became faster” is too broad to have any meaning at all — you can find specific features where almost any browser is faster.

In the case of Chrome and Firefox, they're competitive enough that you really need to say both what you're measuring and how you measured it. People tend to say one is faster than the other when they most commonly mean “the set of extensions I installed in A slowed it down more than B”.

No, we are talking about the architecture of the browsers in areas where there is significant impact (ie. UI Responsiveness), this has nothing to do with extensions.

In Chrome when you load a JS-intensive website (ex. Facebook) you can switch to a different tab while the website finishes doing that JS-intensive task (ex. loading), but in Firefox the opposite happens, the entire browser freezes so you are forced to wait until the browser becomes responsive again.

We are talking in the order of magnitude of milliseconds, but unfortunately it is enough to be perceptible (and annoying).

Fortunately for FF, e10s[1] is almost baked, it still doesn't feel as responsive as Chrome BUT it feels significantly better so you can easily neglect the difference until it matures or something better (Servo[2]) gets baked.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

[2] https://servo.org/

That may be what you thought we're talking about but the comment I replied to was simply “Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already”.

My point was simply that without providing more detail, those comments are so vague to be useless.

I have a policy of keeping personal browsing on chrome and work based browsing on FF. Every now and then FF will inexplicably hang for over 5 seconds on a page that is probably already cached. I never notice this on chrome, and my connection speed is over 100MBps..

Other times, FF is lightning quick - near instantaneous loads - only other thing I can think of is that I'm running FF on Fedora?

On Linux until full Wayland switch will happen, performance won't be optimal.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1038800

Honestly I just like Chrome's UI better... I have to use IE/Edge, Chrome, Safari and Firefox regularly to test things... I keep coming back.

I had higher hopes for FF android, as it allows plugins (adblock), but the browser is so horrible on the platform, I wound up switching back... I also tried dolphin for a while. Neither was satisfactory.

I just like chrome better...

My experience in Android is a different one, I'm using a FF fork (Adblock Browser) and my mobile life has never been better.

Unfortunately outside America the mobile web is a malvertising minefield, and the malvertisers target the carriers directly, so there is no way to expect ad networks (ex. AdSense) to proactively hunt for them.

A browser with integrated AdBlock is the most sensible option you can have in a non-rooted device, and the easiest one you can recommend to friends and colleagues.

Do you happen to use lastpass? Is there an integration there either with the android app, or with the browser itself that works? I'm just curious as the chrome app can tell what url is in the browser, and peak into the page... This detail doesn't work in ff, dolphin and others I've tried so far.

I know that is a separate issue... would really like my password manager & adblock & the app window/tabs where each "tab" is a separate window instead of integrated tab-bar, which isn't very nice at all on a phone.

And still does! It's obnoxious that Google shows more ads to non-Chrome browsers.

It was the only browser that I ever saw an ad in TV prime time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFE4rkSaKOY

> Chrome also had the advantage of being advertised on Google.com.

The most valuable advertising space in the world?

IE and Edge have the advantage of being advertised on nearly every PC in the universe.

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