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Comment by formula1 | Hacker News Reader

Im really happy microsoft is investing such energy, pride and desire in their web browser. Its almost a fairy tale, a company infamously creating their own standards, lagging way behind and creating whole new browsers to go along with the real product (operating system) into the bleeding edge of speed and hopefully standards.

That being said, I still wonder whats behind it. Whether its so artists and proffessionals view microsoft as a standard, so that more servers run on chakra) or an attempt to gain control of market share so they can also be a part of the info selling market. Regardless, Im happy they are on board

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Google controlling a huge amount of the browser market share is a big threat to Microsoft.

Chrome defaulting to Google for searching is is huge defensive play for search in the long term. And probably a huge money maker to boot.

Google is also able to leverage the web platform for their own benefit. Witness the recent announcement about Instant Android Apps; they are selling a future where ordinary links and URLs actually lead to a proprietary native Android experience. This is only possible because they own the browser and the OS. They're kneecapping the web to compete with iOS.

How does this differ from any other file hosted on the web? I could make an address that just serves a .exe file, but people wouldn't say that Microsoft is kneecapping the web because of it.

A browser doesn't download, install and execute that file though. Check out the GIFs on their announcement[1]. They show a Google search result page linking to a URL that seemlessly takes the user to a platform specific binary.

I expect that they'll give Instant Apps higher ranking. It's what they did with Google+ profiles and AMP pages. If Google gives people better SEO by converting their pages to native apps then that's a huge carrot for businesses to move their development to this platform. And the web is going to be made a second class citizen, even in the browser.

Google wins because they have companies and consumers locked into their ecosystem. Apple and Microsoft lose because they can't run Instant Apps like they can with web apps. Consumers lose because they're locked into Android.

If Microsoft were doing this it would be viewed with skepticism and labeled "Embrace, extend, extinguish". I think that eventually we're going to realize that having a single company control the world's most popular OS, most popular browser and most popular entry point to the web is a not a good place to be in.

1. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-insta...

Microsoft had this since .NET Framework 2. It was called ClickOnce. It went nowhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickOnce

It is a common deployment solution in most enterprise shops that deploy internal software.

At least the ones I worked on.

Click once sucked and was anything but.

I use Papercut as a little SMTP server for local dev on windows which uses ClickOnce, the install + update processes are painful, even worse than Adobe Flash Builder.

I just ran it, it updated needing 2 clicks and over 4 different popups shown.

It's an invasive, noisy, ugly, tech that was put to shame by Chrome's update tech.

So it's not worth comparing.

I think you are been a little uncharitable to poor Clickonce. Clickonce came out a number of years before Chrome and at the time its simple publish model, automatic update detection, and incremental updates were light years ahead of the other clunky Window installers of the time.

Apple could fix this any time they wanted to by charging less ridiculous prices for their phones. This is what you get when your market share is so low you can no longer dictate platform trends.

I too am happy that they are doing it, but they are perpetuating the notion that its rare and special for them by promoting updates as news instead of just quietly doing it 2x a month like firefox and chrome.

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