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Comment by digitalzombie | Hacker News Reader

I think the original comment is trying to convey is that perhaps developers should be wary of goodwill.

Microsoft have done this in the past. They actively eat the browser market share with IE and left it alone after being the monopoly in web browser. This forced Netscape to become Mozilla. They also tried to be the gateway and believe OS is the gateway for all program and was left in the dust with web app and web search engine. Their past modus operandi was always to stay a monopoly not to create a good environment for developers.

And I think it's a good thing to keep in mind because microsoft's past actions we should all be wary and keep in mind when we decide to do anything with Microsoft.

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Google is pretty much doing the same thing with Chrome. Opera has switched to its rendering engine and Firefox's share is dropping (after Google pumped tons of money in them and used their work to enhance their own offering). Gecko is barely on the map while Google's render can be found in newer versions of Opera, Vivaldi, and others.

I mean if you go back far enough, Microsoft did this with IE. IIRC, they licensed a bunch of stuff from NSCA Mosaic, who thought they were going to make some good money off a percentage of sales. IE was originally part of the Plus! pack which you had to pay for with Windows95, but then MS released their browser for free.

So Google is bad because they poured millions of dollars into Mozilla for Firefox development, but even so their own browser is still better and more popular, and the code is open for other projects to use. Which is a bad, evil thing to do and we want none of that round here!

And this is the same as developing a crummy browser, not sharing the code and not funding any alternate implementations, and leaving it stagnant for years.

Ok.

«So Google is bad because they poured millions of dollars into Mozilla for Firefox development, »

No. Google paid for having its search engine in firefox (as the default engine).

To be precise, Google/Yahoo deal(s) made by Mozilla only affect certain countries. Mozilla is free to include whichever default browser they want in the rest of the world.

In fact, they did that during the Yahoo deal. Yahoo was default only in countries affected by the deal, while Google was the default one... I would say in the rest of the world, but I'm not 100% sure if they made deals with Yandex in Russia or some other deal.

Chrome is absolutely the new IE... it’s just in the heyday stage instead of the “ancient barely supported monster” stage that IE was in when developers began to hate it.

The need for greater variety in the spread of popular rendering engines is dire and real. Browser monoculture is dangerous and I refuse to use any browser that’s Chromium/Blink as my daily driver for this reason. I seek alternatives for sites that obviously haven’t been tested in anything else - if you can’t be bothered to properly service Gecko and/or WebKit you don’t need my traffic.

I disagree that Chrome it will become stagnated like IE.

Microsoft had no desire to improve IE and make the web a more desirable platform than Windows. (I'd suggest it still doesn't)

Google, however, directly benefit from the web being a better place, and they know first hand that a dominant browser can be toppled. And the competition is fierce, with MS back to bundling and it's so easy to switch browsers now that there's (currently) a good compliance of standards and no such things as ActiveX.

I've noticed some unfair rot in Chrome. Like not being able to remove the start page without a plugin.

Even if Chrome never stagnates, it’s not a good thing for it to be overwhelmingly dominant with competitors stuck in firmly the margins. It gives google too much power, regardless of its intentions. It might be more convenient for web developers (if I had a dime for every time I’ve heard of desires to ignore everything not chrome...), but what’s convenient for devs is rarely what’s best for users.

> Microsoft had no desire to improve IE

Microsoft was given an ultimatum by the US Department of Justice to stop improving IE, because at the time people thought browsers and the web shouldn't be a part of an OS base install.

Microsoft started what Electron/Cordova/PWAs are continuing today, where the web is a first class application platform in nearly every OS, and nearly every OS needs to bundle a web browser as core functionality.

> Google, however, directly benefit from the web being a better place

…to serve ads. As long as the web remains the most universal platform for ad serving, Google's interests follow.

> now that there's (currently) a good compliance of standards and no such things as ActiveX

Let's not forget how recently Google tried to make NaCL, its own play at an ActiveX-like thing.

It's only recently we've "killed" Flash, and Oracle and others are still holding a lot of Enterprises hostage to Java applets.

Mozilla may be the only group without sin here, and they live in a glass house, to mix metaphors.

Chrome will never be IE6. Both Firefox and Chrome do constant rolling releases. There's no more "This works with Firefox 4" because in a few years we'll see versions over 100 and they'll be irrelevant. They move up, just like the web, together.

Even MS Edge is on a rolling release with IE11 just sitting back there in its corporate shit role. Safari is really the last big browser not to move to rolling releases.

So long as Chrome/ium remain open source, it is absolutely impossible for it to become the new IE. Chrome itself has no magic that makes it a better browser than base Chromium if you aren't invested in Google's ecosystem.

> Firefox's share is dropping

Firefox's share was never very high to beginning with, because Mozilla doesn't have the resources to play the vendor bundled game that Microsoft and Google have been playing.

And now it's rising again, because they've made great improvements in Quantum and are on a roll. I use Firefox and it really is the best browser, at least for me. The only problem that Firefox has at this point is that its developer tools are worse than Chrome's, however they've been making improvements there as well and I'm sure they'll manage to win back the developers they've lost.

> Google's render can be found in Opera, Vivaldi, and others

You mean WebKit, which originated in KDE and then forked by Apple? It's not really Google's engine ;-)

Also Opera, Vivaldi and others are at this point completely irrelevant.

Mozilla is playing this game correctly. If you don't have your own rendering engine, you can't compete and you don't count. Which is also why Google developed V8 and then forked WebKit into Blink.

Firefox share was about 30% in 2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

"You mean WebKit, which originated in KDE and then forked by Apple? It's not really Google's engine ;-)"

Google has since replaced WebKit with Blink in Chrom(e|ium), and the projects based on Chromium have been following suit. Even Qt is switching from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine, which is Blink-based.

Granted, Blink is a fork of at least some of WebKit, but still.

>Firefox's share was never very high to beginning with, because Mozilla doesn't have the resources to play the vendor bundled game that Microsoft and Google have been playing.

>And now it's rising again, because they've made great improvements in Quantum and are on a roll.

You say MS/Google are winning because they have money to bundle their browser, and at the same time Firefox is rising because they made improvements to their software. That's a contradiction.

Personally, I left Firefox for Chrome because how unbearably slow Firefox is/was, something Mozilla seemed to ignore for a long time.

Google keeps enhancing Chrome and where do you think http2 came from?

Heck Google created SPDY and gave to standards group who changed and then Google went and moved their SPDY to the standard.

Heck Google has over 60% of the browser market and the 2 most popular web sites in the world and easily could have kept to themselves as a competitive advantage. Most would consider that just good business.

But instead Google did the right thing while consistently MS does the wrong thing.

Beware of Microsoft bearing gifts...

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