Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
(And for a description of Computer Space, see https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html)
"Due to a bug in modern versions of Chrome, this website only works with Firefox, Safari and Chrome 52 or earlier."
Upgrading to a better browser ;-)
Nonetheless, it runs smoothly on Chrome 76.0.3807.0 (Canary) on a Late 2013 iMac.
I.e., I just tried on an old MacPro (late 2008) with hardware acceleration disabled (Settings -> Advanced -> System -> Hardware acceleration + restart) and it runs smoothly.
Edit: Just updated the page accordingly. Thanks to everyone who helped in focusing on the matter of hardware acceleration!
Thanks to everyone who reported their experiences and helped to track down the issue!
On a more general level, the argument about all the eggs and a single basket still stands. (Knowing why a particular basket fails doesn't help the eggs.)
However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.
Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open source nature, is the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser.
At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari.
I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.
99.9% of browser users don't care or don't even know if their browser is open source - what they want is convenience and ease of use. I hope Mozilla prioritizes the ones that actually matter - the users, over whatever philosophy it claims to live by, that often times isn't rooted in customer centricity.
The obfuscatory language around it are arguably more insulting than the ads themselves. As John Gruber so eloquently wrote:
> If you want to sell ads, sell ads. Own it. Don’t try to coat it with a layer of frosting and tell me it’s a fucking cupcake.
I'm not gonna defend their action to do so because I disagree with it too, but if you wanna feel outraged about it, at least get the facts right. John Gruber should do the same.
Displaying the same ad to everyone doesn't have privacy consequences. It's why billboards aren't privacy issues, nor are the TV ads, nor ads in a magazine. Ad networks are a privacy issue, self-hosted ads are not.
I get the feeling that people are asking Mozilla to simply not deal with corporations at all, regardless of privacy, which is simply impossible if it wants to survive - almost all major actors are corporations, so the alternative is Mozilla turning into a shut-in.
If you want influence, you're going to need to deal. And sure, there are deals conceivable that represent giving up on principles for short term gain. But just because it's possible to conceive of a deal that's "selling out", doesn't mean every deal represents selling out.
I mean in this very same comment thread another poster is complaining how principled Mozilla is @ the w3c.
Suffocating Mozilla (regardless of whether you use/admire/detest/ignore Firefox) under impossible expectations is likely a permanent loss for users. There are precious few organizations like it with any influence that are advocating for the individual in web tech, so once Mozilla dies (which seems likely, at this point), whatever tech firm special-interests can get away with is going to happen. And as modern politics should make clear: there's not a lot of reasonableness left with which to restrain actors like that once things turn political.
What do you think of when the Mozilla Corporation sent the browsing history of users by default to a third party advertisement company?
>Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
As for their "battles at the W3C", you mean DRM and H.264, the patent-encumbered video codec?
The philosophy you're talking about is probably why they still have that 5% of the market, otherwise they would be irrelevant ;-)
Mozilla Foundation is a Non-profit foundation who mission to the ensure the web is open and accessible to all, not to make the most commercially successful web browser
It's not the hill I want Mozilla's philosophy to die on because if they do (and they will if they do as you ask), then there is no point to it. The open web dies to thundering applause from Google employees.
I fail to see how having FireFox around has a Chrome Clone is in anyway different
Otherwise you're basically giving in to eternal serfdom; letting large corporations dictate the terms, knowing that individuals will never be able to extract the long-term compromises needed for a good deal. It's basic negotiating 101 that the party holding all the cards is going to get most of the value.
Where "did some marketing" equals "unethically abused monopoly position to aggressively push through dark patterns", sure. I think I can still blame them for that.
Do you mean that they advertised for Chrome on their properties? Advertising on your own property is legitimate in my book. And simple advertising isn't a "dark pattern".
Or do you mean something else?
The most interesting part in all this is that the Adobe Flash you just downloaded and installed is not even used by Chrome, which ships its own.
It is ostensibly for security and benefits developers because of less fragmentation. But it actually hurts users in the long run because of the centralizing effect. It also enables chrome to sneak in features that users wouldn't necessarily accept.
And advertising something on your own property sure sounds reasonable, but I think it's a slightly different story when "your own property" is "the de facto homepage of the internet". That's what I meant by "abusing monopoly position".
Maybe as someone with above-average technical ability this looks obvious to you. To a lot of people, it isn't. And this pattern is aimed at fooling the less technically literate.
The requirements to have unticked checkboxes predates GDPR.
For example, signing into a Google site from Chrome also signs you into the browser; it's unclear how this happens, what personal information it compromises, and more than that it's an unexpected and unwelcome surprise when it happens.
Clearing Google cookies in Chrome also doesn't work, for related reasons. Try deleting all cookies in Chrome the immediately refreshing the list: Google cookies immediately re-appear.
It's not that these things are necessarily actually dangerous. But the blurring of the line between service and user agent scares me.
They eventually created an option to disable that behaviour after a lot of user complaints:
"While we think sign-in consistency will help many of our users, we’re adding a control that allows users to turn off linking web-based sign-in with browser-based sign-in—that way users have more control over their experience. For users that disable this feature, signing into a Google website will not sign them into Chrome."
https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-base...
So much so that many many people I know that worked on helpdesk;s at the time where getting lots of complaints about "the internet is missing" meaning their Icons changed from the IE logo to the Chrome logo because chrome was changed to the default browser with out them understanding what happened.
Add to the fact that Chrome would also install in AppData to avoid having to have Admin rights to install so it could be install on corporate/enterprise systems by normal users...
Another example: Windows: Chrome, installation being under user profile to bypass any system checks during installation process itself and further updates.
IE was free when Netscape Navigator was a paid product.
Chrome was free when Opera was a paid product.
Chrome didn't exist when Opera was a paid product.
I have pictures from 2012 (I think) when they had the entire grand hall of Paris' Gare de Lyon hung with dozens of huge Chrome banners.
That alone must have cost them tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Euros.
That said I think the web's under Google's thumb screws (AMP, mail, DNS, browser-almost monopoly, etc) is in a bad place. But they did invest a hell of a lot in pushing Chrome.
They spent a ton of money on promoting Chrome But essentially defending them on that specific issue doesn't make it a nice, or admirable company in my book.
Edit, to clarify some more: I was "defending" them on some accusations that they promoted Chrome with dirty tricks and dark patterns. Initially, I'd wager, they didn't.
Does that clarify it?
If that's not true, and some marketroid in Google woke up one day and thought "hey, we could get a lot more bang for our buck by being super scummy!", then that would be an interesting tale. But it seems more likely that what happened was that Google just pulled out all the stops.
At any rate it's not much of a defense. Their "legitimate" marketing in no way absolves them for their "illegitimate" marketing.
I think we are in general agreement here.
Spending a lot of money on legitimate marketing certainly doesn't absolve scammy tacticts at all.
One of my more recent pet peevees is their fiddling with GMail in a way that a lot of mails from external sources are flagged as spam. Even though they're sure as shit and very obviously not. And not only that. They're constantly moving the goal posts on what is "legitimate" mail.
Having such a big slice of global email this is super scummy and I really hope that (probably European, if any) regulators crack down hard on them yet again.
But I'm digressing here, I'm afraid.
Instead of “Virus detected! Click here for free scan” it was “Old browser detected. Click here to upgrade”.
It was literally 100% out of the malware deployment hand guide.
And paid lots of third party software vendors to bundle it as a drive-by installation 100% malware style.
There’s a good reason many of my technically inclined friends still today don’t trust Chrome.
It’s malware after all.
They did make a good browser. However, their market share is not down to better browser or "some advertising." They use their other assets (search, youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome the "default" option.
It's a dominance breeds dominance cycle... a hallmark of modern monopoly.
Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without leveraging google's greater web dominance.
There was a time when IE was a good browser and the default one. They dominated. A few years later, Mozilla had the better browser. Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.
IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was at its highest. Much bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is far more dominant than FF or anything ever was... except IE in its monopoly day.
Bing can be Edge only too.
Edited to add: This has actually happened to me when setting up a new Windows PC for someone.
The EC recently ruled against Google in a "slam dunk" case about anti-competitive contracts with "search partners." €1.5bn & it barely got noticed.
I do get a page of Firefox results, but I also get a box titled 'People also ask' after the first four results, with the very first item being; 'Is Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?' I also get a box at the bottom of the page titled 'Web Browsers,' with the first item in that box being Chrome. And Firefox is just not in that box at all. Not a popular enough web browser to include in the box marked web browsers when searched for by name, it would seem. On the other hand, UC Browser makes the list after Chrome, Opera and Safari, which I hadn't even heard of until today, but is apparently by Alibaba.
If you search for Chrome, Chrome will not show up in that box either. And the first browser in that box is, guess what, Firefox. You just searched for it, why include it in the box?
UC Browser is pretty popular in Asia. Statcounter reports 3% market share worldwide, right between Samsung Internet and IE.
Oh, good catch, you are right. Is just a bad title for the box and does not appear to be in any way nefarious. 'Other Web Browsers' would be a lot less confusing.
Am still cocking an eyebrow at 'Is Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?' though.
I would appreciate a screenshot if you can grab one, it would be funny to whip out in certain situations. (Doctoring a photo would be dishonest.)
It seems Microsoft is bit more egregious in Bing. If you search for Chrome or Firefox you get "Promoted by Microsoft - Microsoft Edge is the recommended browser for Windows 10 and it’s already installed on your PC."
The benefit needs to be worth the effort. Early on, in the days you refer to, browsers were often crappy and motivated switching often. I bounced between IE and FF a lot (and later chrome), because things were often broken/bad, or various websites I wanted to use didn't work in one or the other. However, in the last few+ years, that's not really true (in any way I notice) now.
Basically, I think the only improvements that can be made are incremental/marginal, and aren't enough to make switching browsers worth it. They're all pretty good now. So, I expect market share for browsers to change much more slowly now.
It is not only good. When it came out it wiped the floor with the alternatives. Firefox 3, from that time, was absolutely pathetic in terms of performance. I remember sticking to 2 for a while. Even today Chrome is still the best, even if the margin has narrowed. Other browsers are having to adopt Blink to catch up.
Immediately before chrome launched, FF was slowly eating into IE's market share. Chrome was good, but so was FF.
I don't think chrome ever had a lead in FF anything like the lead FF had over IE. Mozilla always had to play with a disadvantage. Still do.
The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although a MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on 1 April 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[8]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
It also had working bookmark syncing way earlier than the others - that was the second reason for me to use Opera in the 2000-2010 timeframe. I eventually switched to Chrome when it got too good to ignore, and lately to Firefox when it got good enough to compete head-to-head with Chrome.
https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-no...
Don't forget their annoying bundling with freeware...
Mozilla could've paid for more advertising (e.g, partner up with Yahoo or some other big web property). But even with a push like that, FF won't have won because it didn't the high performance that drove Chrome's retention rate.
My parents never wanted to install Chrome. They still ended up have it. It came with an update and they didn't uncheck a checkbox. All their friends use Chrome also because of this despicable trick.
When this wave of bundled malware behavior by Google started and I had to uninstall it all over the people and family where I installed Firefox before, I stopped using it as a second browser too.
I whish someone would finally sue them for this. At least to give it the attention it should have.
what update? Windows update? Or did they download some software, and the installer came with chrome as well?
No it was some other software where it came with the installer. I assume it was Avast as I've seen it in an update already on a different computer.
When you installed or upgraded Flash, unless you checked a checkbox, Chrome would be installed.
No. Their market share is wholly due to being a better browser. That is an absolutely true statement when it comes to Windows and PC. It gets muddled with Android, because there you can make a case that they push Chrome as a default browser.
>Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.
It was a different time. FF did wonderful work with moving to a standards-based web and breaking IE hegemony, but they got blindsided by Chrome's relentless drive to squeeze every frame of performance out of JavaScript and WebKit. That's the thing with Chrome, they were not only pushing web standards forward, but more importantly they were pushing performance and security in a way that FF could not follow. Around the time that Chrome came out, FF was starting to struggle with a legacy architecture and that made it impossible for them to keep up with Chrome.
Firefox, IE, Opera have all been way late to the game on some or all of these features.
In the past I have been in the position to help make decisions on browser support at my company. We easily decided on Chrome because it was faster and more secure than IE, but more manageable than Firefox at an Enterprise level. Firefox is just starting to catch up to these feature sets. IE gave up. Safari is a literal running joke even amongst the most ardent of MacOS supporters at my company - features are simply non comparable.
I never once saw an incompatibility problem in Firefox that made me open Chrome. I currently run 2 browser sessions on my main computer - one in Firefox for personal use and one in Chrome for work use. I like and use Firefox, but Chrome has momentum.
Popularity != Monopoly
That's the premise behind antitrust (even though in practice, its 50 years behind the times). If you have dominant market share, things that are otherwise lawful^ aren't anymore.
^Antitrust stuff like anti-competitive behaviour isn't criminal regardless.
It would be anti-competitive in your hypothetical if your bank refused to make transactions to your auto insurance company because it was not the bank's insurance company.
Pop-ups in your bank portal are uncomfortable but are not anti-competitive.
They've turned the corner on that but it was very true for a long time, and during that time Chrome or Chromium became the default.
It is true that Google is pretty pushy with Chrome, but it's also true that FFox had years of time where it wasn't just obviously slower, it was obviously more dangerous.
I can't help but think this played a major factor in the resulting global bias towards Chrome.
Google's marketing for Chrome was (and is) so aggressive that literally every single Google-owned web property asks you to install it for the "best experience." And more often than not, because Googlers never test for other browsers, Chrome does offer the best experience on Google sites. But that doesn't mean it's the best browser experience, which is a totally subjective metric based on an individual's preferences.
Regardless, Google pushed it so hard, bundled it with so much software, and threw it in users faces so much that most non-technical users probably would have ended up with it installed -- probably set to the default browser, because of more nagging -- regardless of Chrome's quality. Even now, as Google makes steps to neuter adblockers, the average user continues to use it. Why? Because they just don't know any better or care. And I can't blame them: it takes immense effort to even use Firefox now because of random sites based on Google tech that break in every other browser. Chrome is certainly the easy way out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/btz1lc/youtube_mat...
1. Smaller Size, chromium was just a smaller foot print with less legacy code
2. Better Performance. There was no doubt the before firefox quantum Chromium was the performance leader, Bink and V8 where superior then, today not soo much
3. Better rendering support. Like IE6 in the 90's today there are many many sites that ONLY work correctly on chrome, so if you use chrome's render you have less work to do, and will have less complaints by users blaming your browser for some websites poor code
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView
(It might still be, but I haven't touched it in over a decade.)
This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.
However, they are not willing to anymore, which is a huge concern for future innovations in that domain.
Btw hello double standards, why shouldn't QT, WPF or GTK have redundant implementations?
> This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.
If Edge had all those things but could only render HTML4 and below, would it be considered a "modern browser" still? I would say no. That's an extreme hypothetical but it was similar to the future Microsoft saw for Edge, and a major factor in the switch to Chromium.
In initial days of chrome, it wasn't that better. It grew in popularity because of the bundle model of advertising they employed which was initially used to distribute spyware and the browser started growing.
All the nice things came later.
Maybe instead we can bemoan how the version of webkit in xyz repo is outdated?
Are they though?
Adherence to standards is very good across the board. It isn't like it was in the 90s when standards were seen as mere guidelines and suggestions.
Safari is going strong. FF is going to be around but they are certainly struggling - and it's their fault. They have had the uncanny ability to make the wrong decision every time. They are hamstrung by their legacy architecture that they are just starting to break out of. Their side projects (Firefox OS, Pocket, Reality) were/are a total waste of time. And of course, they promoted and then fired Eich over nothing - which leads one to wonder what kind of a circus they run internally.
Microsoft is interesting and for now they are using a packaged version of Chromium - but I could see them do a hard-fork in the same way that Google forked WebKit because at some point a trillion-dollar company won't want to be tied to another trillion-dollar company's roadmap.
They spammed it massively as in
- adding it to other popular downloads
- ads everywhere on their properties, including on the front page where no one else has ever been allowed to buy ad spots
- lies: would shamelessly present itself as a better browser not just for users of old IE versions but also for users of Firefox and probably Opera as well.
Agreed. Firefox is really fast, and I love it. Been using it for a couple years now. But even if Chrome was demonstrably, objectively faster, I would still use Firefox.
also, it regularly ran my cpu at max throttle when doing anything video-related within the browser (watching netflix, on a video chat, etc), while chrome is much more cpu-friendly with those things (don't know why that is).
I tried Opera, as well, and ran it as my main browser for months (almost a year, actually), but there is a wierd bug in windows related to the browser bar expanding when the machine wakes up from sleep, where the only way to fix it is to restart the browser entirely.
By doing this, Microsoft gets compatibility with the world's websites on day one, and they can take it from there. It's a smart move that many people seem to be misinterpreting.
If google’s killing ad block extensions, Microsoft will most definitely follow suite.
Your only best bet is Firefox right now.
Chrome is a Trojan horse and Google most definitely doesn’t give a shit about your privacy.
> Watching a video? Reading a blog?
> Chances are good that Google's involved.
That doesn't mean that they are doing anti-competitive stuff and are viable for enforcement, being a monopoly in an open market is not illegal, it does mean that with that level of marketshare they have some legal limitations that their competitors don't have. Usually it's a limit on merges, acquisitions, price setting and bundling.
In the EU you don't even need market dominance to break anti-trust law, while in the US you do. In either case, Chrome is not committing anti-competitive behavior nor is it the only option on the market, hence it is not a monopoly.
Being a popular product in a market full of consumer options is not a monopoly. If Chrome prevented you from downloading other browsers, then that would be monopolistic behavior, but Chrome is not doing that.
It's not well received because, as GP said, people have the opinion that Chrome is a monopoly because they lack the empathy to understand that consumers are choosing something they don't like, and they would prefer it was a monopoly because they want a reason to break it up.
But as far as other stuff, I hope people will give distributed p2p possibilities some consideration in terms of usage or development.
For example YaCy works pretty well as a p2p search engine. There are some others that I haven't tried.
Back to the browser stuff. The problem is the browser has a full operating system in it at this point. There are too many APIs to compete.
What could make competing browsers viable might be something like the following. Imagine a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Instead it emphasize fast rendering, has a state of the art web assembly implementation, and some kind of ABI/API for things like UI, UDP, etc. such as OpenGL (or a simpler UI system). It only allows a subset of CSS and HTML, maybe only Flexbox or something. It it could be just restricted to old-fashioned HTML rendering. But anyway it won't be able to have the scope of Firefox and Chrome.
I guess the biggest problem is if you don't support the whole ginourmous HTML5 featureset (starting with JavaScript) then most websites will not work at all. They either will not load or will be totally scrambled.
Maybe some kind of p2p content-centric web could become popular and have it's own streamlined and simplified browser.
Or maybe there could be a new browser tailored for augmented reality that could become popular and compete with Chrome.
It makes use of a regular browser (Chrome, Firefox) in the backend but provides a customized experience to the user and over the final hop to the user.
It supports a plugin development where you can use plugins to change the page before it is sent over the final hop to the user, and the JavaScript on the page is never executed on the user's machine, but only run in the cloud backend.
I actually built it for webcasting and scraping, and then needed a lower bandwidth access over my 4G connection while oversees so added a plugin to remove everything except for the essential HTML.
I'm actually looking for feedback right now on what to improve next, as I've got 50 issues I found myself but not sure what's most important to others. You can try it on https://staging.litewait.io and use a stripe test card number.
Mail me for issues and I'll try to help you. In profile.
The additional HTML5 suite of APIs would theoretically be supported by a plugin model, but given the depth of integration of some of the APIs, this might be a great deal more work than it sounds, and even more difficult to prevent the proliferation of questionable plugins to this backend. It would probably have to resemble something closer to the Linux distribution model; where an installed instance of the browser would come with a set of whitelisted plugins, with no real ability for the non-expert user to add plugins.
More important to me is the idea of making use of client certificates to attest identity more strongly, together with masking the use of those certificates over third-party channels. So if I went to facebook.com I would present a cert "abcd" (a self-signed certificate), and if I went to yelp.com I would present "bcde". If yelp loaded content from facebook.com, I would present "cdef". Similarly for cookie handling, at least initially.
My hope would be that websites would associate multiple client certs with a given "user" on their site, but unless the user explicitly associates a cert with an identity there's no way (outside of fingerprinting, etc.) to make that association; all third-party interactions show as incognito sessions. Eventually the goal would be that (if this technique is widely adopted) that cookies become kind of useless in favor of strongly attested server-side identity (rather than using bearer tokens in the form of cookies) that can be associated with session data.
These laws were based on 19th-century competition. The problems att were price fixing, predatory pricing (eg price low to kill competition then raise prices), supply chain bottlenecking (how you gonna sell your ore without my trains) ... industrial era trust stuff.
The precedents and laws are hair-splitting and specific. It's just not the kind of system that can "think" high level and apply abstract principles to totally new problems.
Google & Facebook mostly have no prices to fix. The ad markets where they make their money are competitive bid-based, ostensibly the opposite of a "monopolistic pricing" structure.
The economic/theory just doesn't match the pratices anymore. For example: Facebooks' revenue.
Imagine that tomorrow morning BMW's revenues are cut in half. BMW would need to produce fewer cars. Cars cost X to produce. Cut X in half, and you can expect half the volume.
What would happen if we did the same to FB. My guess is that they'd still make the same FB. If you take path dependency^ out of the mix (that it's hard to fire people and adjust downward), It's scary to think how big a company is required to make FB. Doesn't seem like a stretch to speculate that it can be done on a $5-$10bn budget... 1/10th of their current revenue. After all, Facebook was Facebook on that budget not long ago.
^By path dependency I mean imagine that FB's revenue had just never gotten to $80bn in the first place, the sahare price had never gotten so high. Etc.
IDK what exactly that implies about what antitrust laws should be, but it does mean that the theoretical foundation for the current ruleset is totally off. The way monopolistic power conerts to money in 2019 is fundamentally different from 1891... I mean genuinely fundamental, I'm not using it as a superlative. The definition of monopoly, benefits of owning one, the reasons why they're bad (or not).
Monopoly in its own is neither good nor bad.
Facebook has a monopoly in social network. Is that bad? What is the effect of the monopoly? Is Facebook's monopoly having an adverse effect, or is the adverse effect inherent in the way social networks work (and breaking the monopoly won't help).
Simply being a monopoly is an unreasonable reason to break it up.
Outdated laws and outdated economic theory embedded in them. There is only so far that you can extend a railroads, mining and foundries analogy.
I'm sure we could have lively back-and-forth about the impact of these monopolies, but the only legal and legislatively pertinent parts of that discussion are those that can be massaged into an analogy to the late industrial examples that the current legal framework (including, legislation, legal precedents and regulatory bodies) was designed around.
But it appears to me that there is a psychological bias towards an exceedingly narrow definition of substitution goods and therefore markets, especially in digital technologies.
For instance, Microsoft clearly has an extremely dominant position in PC operating systems. The market for PC operating systems used to be synonymous with personal computing, but that is no longer true. Mobile devices now dominate personal computing.
So Microsoft has lost most of its monopolistic power without ever losing its dominance in the market as it was originally defined by regulators and users.
Similarly, search used to be synonymous with using a web search engine and Google clearly has a monopoly there. But now we search Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, etc for various specific things in different contexts and Google has to pay billions to buy users from Apple.
So my point is that yes, monopolies are inherently bad, but they are also inherently unstable in ways that are not adequately reflected in the current thinking around anti-trust regulation.
This has not been true historically. Standard Oil was not "bad for society".
Facebook was Facebook, but it wasn't Facebook+Whatsapp+Instagram, and "mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce market competition" have been impermissible under the US anti-trust law for over 100 years, since the Clayton Act, and I'm not sure you need more than that.
To deal with that, the legal system needs to define market & dominance. The "markets" FB is dominating are far squishier and unstable than the markets of 100 years ago. The market for coal or steel or intercontinental shipping are easy to define. Photo sharing? Social Networking?
How do you define competitiveness. What effect does FB's dominance of photo sharing have on consumer prices? Barriers to entry? Anyone can launch a chat or photo sharing app. Substitutes? Plenty. Those are the types of questions the old laws and precedents will try to deal with. It's like an alien biologist trying to prod orifices that we don't have.
How does this harm consumers or the economy? The economics underlying the legal framework are just as outdated. They're looking for prices and outputs and stuff that FB doesn't have.
I suppose I should just use Safari when I'm not plugged in.
Of course, I use uBlock Origin as well.
Performance-wise I have no complaints and the sync across devices works just as well as it does in Chrome.
What if you aren't actually the good guy?
The jump to the null hypothesis that you've stated is made too soon without doing this first.
I don't think this is how they do anything anymore. They are not "the good ones" and they will probably do anything that fits into their business model or ideas without any hesitations.
1. That they are in a monopoly-like position where they have the power to decide over other web tech projects
2. That they have a very hostile process, not getting properly back to the developer for months. That alone is sabotaging of other projects.
3. That they make the wrong decision, seemingly only protecting their own position, without providing a proper reasoning.
Hear that? That was the antitrust investigator laughing. You can do that if it's about some random tech. You can't do that if the tech is linked to a browser controlling how 60% of internet users access the web, and worse, getting full access to popular stuff/success qualifying content like Netflix for all browser. They wanted that monopoly position when they pushed for DRM, now they have to handle it. Big mistake.
As for Electron, are you sure? I found this page:
https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm
It says:
To enable video playback with this new restriction, castLabs has created a fork that has implemented the necessary changes to enable Widevine to be played in an Electron application if one has obtained the necessary licenses from widevine.
So there's a fork of Electron that enables you to embed Widevine, if and only if you have the necessary licenses (otherwise presumably your Electron fork would be detected as a stream ripper).
Thus I'm not sure you're right about that. At any rate, if Electron became a back door to extract content, it'd be remotely detected and disabled. That's the entire point of the Widevine system.
As for "the good guy", gah, please, are we all 10 years old here? Content licensing and copyright enforcement is not a good vs evil fight. Some content producers choose to upload their video as WebM files to free hosting providers and let anyone who wants to watch them. Others stick it on YouTube and ask YT to monetize (means, no ad blocking). Still others want viewers to pay for the content (means, no content ripping). All these are valid economic models that are widely used, and Google obviously wants to support them because otherwise the answer is not "no DRM", it's "no in-browser Netflix".
It seems like it would be trivial for Widevine to revoke access if there were ever abuse.
I have more details in a blog post I wrote last month. https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
If you had a private, proprietary fork of your browser that was being distributed and nobody else could modify it or contribute code that would undo the DRM, and you were willing to sign giant contracts spelling out in exacting detail what features you could and could not add around video (e.g. no download feature), and the Widevine people thought you'd actually have the financial resources to defend your private fork against hooking, memory overwrite and other attacks (you don't think proprietary Chrome is just Chromium+library, right?) in a long term manner, then they might have been willing to work with you. But then you'd be a company, not an individual open source developer.
Rights enforcement and open source are not compatible.
I wish to qualify my complaint by acknowledging that Google have done tonnes of brilliant stuff, Chrome included. However, one can be over-awed by the brilliance and not see what is being missed.
A few years ago HTML5 came along with better elements than the humble div to describe content in a page. These new elements, e.g. section, aside, article, main, header, footer and nav, are what web pages should be written with. But Google are okay not really caring about HTML elements. They can sift through tag soup for search and therefore how well a page is written is of no consequence for them.
Chrome does support the new elements absolutely fine but the dev tools that we use and the things like Lighthouse are about metrics that matter to Google and don't concern quality HTML. This enforces a cargo cult mentality and we have 99% of the web bloated by markup that is quite hard to write and to debug. If Lighthouse audit reminded you that the div element was 'element of last resort' according to the spec and knocked a few percentage points off your score for accessibility if your page only used divs then that would encourage people to write decent HTML using the full element vocabulary.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-f...
Chrome did several things really well out of the gate:
- Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want.
- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me.
- N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar
- This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance issues. This was huge at the time.
- Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and everyone else.
- Chrome was standards compliant.
- Chrome ran across multiple platforms
- (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient.
- (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking.
Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can disappear or cease to be relevant.
I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been unable or unwilling to replicate.
Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support).
All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes people numb.
Privacy. Google doesn't worry about privacy, of course, but firefox tries to avoid sending all the URLs you ever type to google or your alternate search suggestion provider.
if (s matches possibly valid URL pattern) then try to open it else send s to search provider
Firefox already does what you suggested when hitting enter in the default URL bar - if it's not a valid URL, it gets used as a search.
FWIW, I now see search bar has been off by default in firefox for the last 2 years (still grandfathered in for legacy users like me), so I think mozilla gave up on this. https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/09/firefox-57-search-bar-off-...
You might also very well end up with something that is not a valid URL when searching in your local history or bookmarks.
1. Firefox does automatically download and apply updates like chrome does (at least on Windows), and has for some time.
It notifies you when update is downloaded and applied (I think it's just a notification badge on the hamburger menu), but user interaction is not required... the update would automatically get applied the next time the user happens to restart the browser, just like chrome.
2. Firefox has the equivalent of Chrome's omnibar for some time now... you can still add the second search box via the customize screen, but it's optional and is no longer the default...
What is shame is for such valuable effort to die. Tech dying is a shame and you can see it everywhere, from folks experimenting with TempleOs to 8bit game emulators...
They apparently believe so strongly that they are "right", that they literally forked a browser to allow their extension to be used, so that like-minded nazis and white supremacists can discuss.... how bad jews are I guess, on any site they wish.
What exactly is hyperbolic? The first sentence is almost exactly the description of GAB from wikipedia btw.
as a biz dev, it's a bit saddening to see a lot of browser competitors go down the drain. but this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?
So you just ignore the 30 percent of the market that isn't Chrome? Internet Explorer had 70+ percent of the market share until 2010. Was it good for consumers and the internet as a whole for devs to ignore non-IE browsers in 2009?
Just to give a recent example, if Google would dictate what gets implemented, instead of WebAssembly, the standard, you would have gotten PNaCl.
> this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?
I fail to see how the creation of a monopoly can be a win for business. For Google's business, for sure.
on your second point, monopolies create the setting for massive disruption.
IExplorer 5 was the best browser available, the Chrome of its time.
>> monopolies create the setting for massive disruption
I know that HN has a fetish with disruption, but no, it's not monopolies that create the opportunity for disruption, but the exact opposite of a monopoly, which is competition, often made possible by advances in technology. There's no inherent property of a monopoly that facilitates disruption, other than the monopoly just being on the scene nearby.
That's web 1.0
> but no, it's not monopolies that create the opportunity for disruption, but the exact opposite of a monopoly, which is competition, often made possible by advances in technology.
monopolies innovate less, thus making them prone for disruption. "We develop a new theory of why a monopolistic industry innovates less than a competitive industry" http://www.dklevine.com/papers/monopoly_innovation.pdf
The problem with monopolies is that they control all the power, for the good or the bad decisions, and without competition they are not forced to look for the costumers benefit...
It seems like there is little motivation to maintain a separate browser at the moment, but one day Google may do something that motivates people to fork/create a new one. That could be a big bang moment or just a slow crawl that opens up a niche that a new browser could fill.
The biggest is DRM. If stuff like that gets into the standard where only large players can make a compliant implementation, then it becomes a huge problem for the web.
Next after that would be web API additions or extensions that make sense to Google but interfere with or prevent other things from being pursued (eg more pro privacy directions). They may try hard to play nice with standards bodies, but a quarterly goal can be a strong influence...
https://blog.mozilla.org/sfink/2013/02/14/browser-wars-the-g...
If we're really headed to a single-browser future, enjoy those specs while they last.
https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-l...