Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome

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125 pointstodsacerdoti16 comments

I will give my benefit of doubt to the maintainers as well (as the author notes). Chromium is an open-source project - so there is a way for an interested browser vendor to make a change to this behaviour and enable support for their browser. So far there doesn't seem to be any indication of a malicious intent. If such requests were made and shot down consistently, _that_ would be concerning.

Chromium is a Google project, that they happen to open source.

That they put in a preference for their own interests wouldn't be 'malicious intent' from their part, it would be 'why they built it in the first place'.

That said, it may be anti-competitive.

> it may be anti-competitive

Unless contributions to add other search engines have been denied by the developers, it's not a strong argument.

Considering Edge uses Chromium I'd argue it increases competition.

The market has decided that it does not care about a lighter footprint browser engine - it just wants autocomplete, to remember all your passwords, and users don't want to have to think too much. This much is clear. If there was a browser with the light footprint of Safari with the nice flexibility of Chrome without the permanent 5gb of memory usage, you'd have a winner. I'd even pay Sublime Text prices for that (once, optional upgrades).

Chromiums governance isn't entirely Google.

Parts of the codebase are maintained by Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft and others. There have been times when Google engineers have had changes rejected by people from those companies.

You might be thinking of Android, which has a far less open governance...

Google has been open about expanding beyond search to make more money from search.

I'm curious if competing search engines have considered adding themselves to the list described here. I would imagine a service like Bing at least could afford to be added to the list without getting effectively DDoS'd.

Can you imagine Google turning this on for all search engines and DDOSing them?

This isn't really in chromium, but the chromium-hosted open source application layer of Chrome so it's meant to be opinionated:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/chrome...

Sort of unrelated, but does this exist for Firefox? I have disabled the preloading of regular websites when typing in the address bar but I would specifically like searches to preload since I trust DDG.

Just a reminder: Firefox works great on Android. If you are concerned about privacy or features like those discussed in the article, give it a try.

Isn't this also basically a telemetry that tells Google every time someone opens the browser?

OSD may have been the correct way to do this, but as the patch was not contested by any party, this was the easier way to get a promotion for an engineer at Google.

For Google to enable this on 3rd-party search providers without some kind of agreement they would be sending them a significant increase in traffic and load without warning.

That said, this should be configurable by the user at least.

Or perhaps Google should ask other providers if they want to opt in to this performance enhancing feature instead of "assuming" they don't.

As discussed in the article.

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