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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

We cannot possibly be talking about the same Google. This is the Google of AMP et al. You think they won't do the exact same thing Microsoft did with IE when they find themselves in a similar dominant/monopolistic position in the market? You're sorely mistaken. We already find many examples of websites and Web apps that work only on chrome or the chrome "web store". This not to mention the surveillance and privacy nullifiying "features" they impose, which is even more important to me personally than standards compliance.

A world with Google owning a monopoly on web browsing isn't any less bad than if it were Microsoft.

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The only sites I've seen that only work on Chrome are generally due to the developers being lazy and only targeting the top platform. It's similar to many games only being available on iOS a few years ago, or many programs only being available on Windows.

Now with the web, it's much easier to make something work across all platforms, except at the bleeding edge, which is generally where you'll find those sites. Almost all the ones I've seen were tech demos of new browser tech that wasn't available everywhere yet.

WhatsApp Web was Chrome-only for a while. That was quite a big one for many people I know.

Google Inbox didn't work on Edge for the longest time. Claim was because edge didn't support some feature they needed, but when the agent was spoofed it worked fine.

Like Google Hangouts?

And Signal Private Messenger

And Discord.

Even though Firefox is now supporting the same WebExtentions API that powers Chrome extensions, Open Whisper Systems refuses to support Firefox, see https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop/pull/592#is....

>The only sites I've seen that only work on Chrome are generally due to the developers being lazy and only targeting the top platform.

That was the case with sites only working on IE 6. What did you expect?

And after some market share point, it's not about laziness either, it makes business sense to not waste time for a small percentage of users (100% reach is not always better than 90% reach -- there's this thing called "opportunity cost").

This is what we want to avoid.

> And after some market share point, it's not about laziness either, it makes business sense to not waste time for a small percentage of users (100% reach is not always better than 90% reach -- there's this thing called "opportunity cost").

A lot of companies that thought short term like that our paying through the nose for the decision now because they are still stuck on IE6. There is a business case for avoiding vendor lock in, but it's not quantifiable so it gets ignored.

That was for using special IE-only features, like Active-X and co, that were never part of the standards.

Not about not caring to test/optimize for other browsers, or using standard stuff some browser gets out faster -- which is what some companies do today with Chrome.

> A lot of companies that thought short term like that our paying through the nose for the decision now because they are still stuck on IE6.

How many of them will remember the lessons?

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Nah, it's different. Google's evil is directly on the opposite side of the coin from their generosity. Google essentially "wastes" money just to promote the web itself. This is because the web is a fairly terrible platform, but they must promote it because they've capitalized on its flaws.

If the internet exploded and we had to rebuild it from the ground up, there would be no html/web, and no 3rd party search engine which attempts to reconstruct the web by viewing it as a blackbox. We would build search into DNS, since that's basically what DNS is supposed to be for, and along with the monetization of search (register your site for x search keywords, pay the root DNS for additional keywords.) All of Google's revenue is but a hack of a patch on a chaotically formed system.

Google needs the web, but the web is terrible. It's made for showing static documents with hyperlinks to other static documents. But that's clearly not what people want to view or build, they want apps. So we have 1 million javascript frameworks trying to vie for support on various browsers on various operating systems. All this infrastructure to support 'web apps' that can only call into http and dom manipulation apis. Mobile apps have proven there are other ways to make apps, with security and containerization and allowing full (but secured) access to all OS apis, and easier compatibility. All Google's endearing endeavors to create cool, web-based tech, are just efforts to prop up the terrible web platform, to prevent it from being superseded by a better open system. Facebook (which uses the web only non-exclusively) shows us a better system is possible, but it is not open.

So, back on topic, Google won't stop being good to the web, because the greatest evil of Google is that they're good to a platform which doesn't deserve it.

In your hypothetical from-scratch internet, there's probably still a confy place for Google's flagship search engine. It's the ranking, it has always been the ranking. Nobody is interested in a rank of who paid the most for each keyword.

Sorry, the point was you can still rank them but you can build it into the system itself instead of having to parse it out or reverse engineer any information.

So one of the most complex algorithms in the world was supposed to be built-in in your hypothetical internet protocol?

Agreed with you up until "any less bad than if it were Microsoft."

IE was (is) closed source

Technically, so is chrome.

Not in the same way as IE.

Closed source is a boolean. Chrome is distributed only as a binary. I.e. it is totally closed source.

It currently has a very large relation to the open source Chromium project. But Google could change that tomorrow if they wanted to - they could also gradually move more and more to their closed source Chrome builds (as they have done with Android).

Are there any viable chromium based open source browsers out there that have consistent updates?

Yes, Brave [0] and Irdium [1].

[0] https://www.brave.com/ [1] https://iridiumbrowser.de/

https://vivaldi.com

My understanding was that vivaldi wasn't completely open source either.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/54kzpc/psa_...

Vivaldi isn't open source but you can read the source code, which is better than nothing....

There is some debate inside Vivaldi about making it open source and it would be easy enough to do. I'd guess that it probably doesn't make economic sense while it has such a small market share, but I don't know if that's true.

> Closed source is a boolean.

I disagree. There's a difference between having 99% of the source available and 0%.

I currently have zero hope that Google voice calls will ever be reimplemented to work on Firefox again.

Funny, I got a Google voice call on FF yesterday.

Disagree on Google doing same as MS. They already could have on multiple fronts and have not. Vastly different corporate cultures.

But there is more than just web browsing. Microsoft owned the entire platform at one point.

Why do you think google is pushing web-everything and chromebooks? They want to own the entire platform just as Microsoft did.

Their intention doesn't matter. Companies can strive for a monopoly without breaking rules. The point is that at this moment, they don't have it and there is high competition (although oligopolies) in both mobile and desktop preventing them from having a platform monopoly.

Your comment that I replied to, didn't talk about intentions, and neither did I.

You said "Microsoft owned the whole stack" (OS, Office Suite, Browser). My response is, that Google is trying to achieve the same thing: The blurred O/S+Browser that is Chrome, and browser based software like Google Apps.

You're right, that what they intend to do with said monopoly is not relevant to that specific point. The point is that both saw an advantage of some kind that made it worthwhile having control over a large portion of the software their user's ran.

Where it does matter though, is that in the Microsoft monopoly, it was a monopoly of defaults and business contracts only. Nothing technically prevented someone from installing a separate browser, a separate office suite, etc., on their computer.

With a Chromebook, which Google is pushing heavily in education, what options do you have when it comes to installing an office suite? What options do you have when it comes to installing a different browser?

If your answer is "Android Apps", I suggest you read up on Google's own docs, which show that just 10% of devices support that functionality, only 7% support it without using a Beta.

Google owns Android, the most used computing platform in the world.

It is official, Google is the new Microsoft.

To me, that's one more reason to use Firefox over Chrome/Chromium.

Compare the scale of Google's Scandals to Microsoft's scandals?

Microsoft lied to the Justice department, microsoft intentionally broke software on other system, microsoft actively tried to kill open source, microsoft tried to co-opt standardization bodies, microsoft has bought competitors only to fire their staff, microsoft has...

Microsoft has a plethora of criminal charges levied against it.

Google.... Reads your email if send to or from Gmail and sometimes some of its things don't work in FireFox and even then they try to fix it. Google open sources a bunch of things, even when there is no obvious profit motive or requirements to do so.

There is a world of difference. Google's shit doesn't smell like roses, but they are only human and not overtly evil.

EDIT - If you downvote me, please comment so I can know what part of what I said was wrong.

Google does have a profit motive to open sourcing things though: keeping positive developer mindshare.

Google corporate culture is vastly different than MS during their heyday.

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