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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that would help.

As the lead dev of VLC in a recent interview said, they’ve been offered huge amounts of money to include Google Chrome in their installer, and saying no was the hardest decision he’s ever made.

As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites, as long as Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox (see the youtube redesign), as long as Google pays developers to ship Chrome as malware with every single installer, as long as Google forces OEMs to install Chrome with Android, Chrome will rule the market.

The only solution now is the EU.

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Agreed with everything but your first sentence.

MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help.

(Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right thing)

Whoa.

Internet Exploder was constantly evolving and multi-platform.

Did you forget IE ran on PPC Macs, X86 Macs, Windows, and CP/M?

IE updated... just slower than Netscape.

IE ran on... CP/M? What CP/M are you talking about?

They probably meant Windows CE or Pocket PC (P/PC)

There was even briefly a version of IE for HP-UX and Solaris.

IE6 was not updated for 6 years. On Windows.

On the Mac it went as far as version 5 only. And never made it to x86 (unless you count Rosetta)

So, through the dark ages, IE was very much frozen and Windows only, for all intends and purposes.

Internet Explorer wasn't really multi-platform. The Mac version used a different rendering engine (Tasman as opposed to Trident) and it of course didn't have support for ActiveX extensions.

For a long time being a 90s Mac user sucked as different websites required you to use IE on a Windows PC.

IE ran on Sparc/Solaris too, at least as of IE5. I don't think they ever ported IE6 there.

Chrome is not open source. Chromium is.

Its rendering and JS engine are, which is what matters to compatibility and portability

> MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again.

The Web won because a) its introduction was a one-time technological change whose social impact was on the order of the printing press, and b) Microsoft had gotten fat and lazy on their monopoly revenues from Windows and Office.

We can't get cocky here. It is perfectly plausible that HTML will still render 500 years from now. And I'm dead certain that it will still dominate 20 years from now.

Growing up in a major technical revolution, it's easy for us to assume that the future will have a lot of technical revolutions that will keep knocking monopolists, rentiers, and authoritarians off their perches. And if that happens, great. But we should really be planning for the opposite case.

Not cocky, just watchfully optimist

It's an interesting comparison.

With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with via its control of the client - Windows.

Google is influencing what the web is viewed with by simply being such a key part of the web itself, and using its weight from that direction instead.

(One could argue that they have Android for the client, but as a percentage of web users it's still far from what Windows had in the IE6 days.)

Firefox won back the web by having a great product, grassroots evangelism, and a Microsoft who badly neglected their competing product for many years. They left an opening.

Chrome might be losing its lustre but it's certainly not being treated the same way. I think Firefox's new battle for market share might be harder than it was vs IE, simply because Google is still so active on this front. In response, the only real new thing in our arsenal is hindsight, which I guess is what the VLC example above is a result of.

> With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with

Microsoft was trying (and succeeding) for the web not to be a preferable API to Win32, so as to keep that way a high barrier to entry into the OS business. Which is why IE was squarely against standards.

Mobile is where the war is being fought. A better browser can ship with hundreds of millions of mobile devices. Firefox-next with ad blocking and better support for parallelism is just what phones need. Users will use what came with the phone.

Firefox's performance on Android is horrible though. I tried switching to it a few times but always have to switch back because of performance issue.

Agreed. It's the browser I'm using right now, but it's got some big problems. It's draining my battery and it interferes with chromecast.

I've been using Brave[1] on my Android phone for the past two months. It's been brilliant. A much better experience than Firefox, which was a bit slow and some pages loaded as a white screen.

I'd love to use Brave on my desktop too, but their lack of plugin/extension/add on support cripples it a little. There's a couple I just can't live without. Using Iridium[2] on the desktop instead.

[1] https://www.brave.com/

[2] https://iridiumbrowser.de/

It doesn't has text reflow after zooming, which Opera has. For all the other features I don't see anything horrible. It used to be slow at drawing pages but it's not anymore. I've been using it since Opera changed hands and it's nice to have uBlock on the phone too.

It's the default browser I'm using right now on Android. Performance is still not on par with Chrome but it did improve since the last time I tried it a few months ago. The ability to install extensions surpasses anything else for me so I'm sticking with FF.

I find Firefox on Android to be much faster than Chrome. The browser itself may or may not be faster, but the uBlock Origin plugin makes it scream...

And saves battery and data. The absence of plugins on ios/safari and android/chrome is a severe deficiency. It is also interesting that adblocking firewalls get denied by the app stores...

How do you get Firefox on devices? If OEMs want to use the Google Play store on any single of their devices, they have to make Chrome the default browser on all of them.

> In practice this means that the position of packages in node_modules is computed internally in Yarn, which causes Yarn to be non-deterministic between people using different versions.

I believe Chrome has to be installed, but it clearly doesn't have to be the default. Just see all the Samsung phones with the default Samsung Internet Browser as evidence.

Open play store and install it unlike iOS, android supports setting any browser as default. You can then even completely disable chrome

Again, 90% of users out there will never change the browser, not even if the default is IE6 (as the browserchoice case showed).

As long as Chrome is preinstalled, it will win.

> As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites

Where do you see this? I have Firefox open and don't see this on Search, Drive, Google Music, etc.

Do you have a link to the interview? And how is the YouTube experience worse on Firefox? I didn't know of Google's practices except for the banner in other browsers.

You can find an excerpt in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx1P93nS0c&t=51s

Transcribing the subtitles:

> "To be honest we’ve been offered some insane amounts of money to do bad stuff around VLC, like shipping tool bars at the same time of the installer of VLC or or installing other software like Google Chrome and so on. And when you see the numbers they propose to you, you’re just like: How the fuck am I going to say no to that?"

> "The thing is, it’s not only my project so I’m not allowed to do that. [It’s the] legacy of other people. That wouldn’t be moral."

can you elaborate on that last point? What does the EU have to do with this?

Perhaps he means a similar thing to what they did to Microsoft by forcing them to make it possible to choose a different browser when installing Windows.

I think, I could be wrong but I think he/she is referring to what the European Union did with Microsoft and asked them to include a way that asks new Windows users to select a default browser and offer them choices besides Internet explorer.

The European Commission has successfully acted against Microsoft in the past and has repeatedly tried to act against Google on various antitrust concerns.

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/technology/google-europea...

Thanks!

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