Ask HN: Why exactly is Chromium dominance such a bad thing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why exactly is Chromium dominance such a bad thing?

I’m asking this out of curiosity, not cynicism. Considering it’s open source, can Google really blacklist websites? It’s not like Microsoft Windows where we have no idea what they’re doing.

How does this affect any company outside of the other two rivals not being able to play catch up?

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It's bad that something invented as a standard for dead-easy self-publishing has been usurped and perverted into animated TV and app delivery. And having the player app (the browser) and the content coming from the same party is a bad result, too, considering how much public money and community work went into the web. We had proprietary nets and bogus media and protocol standards with CompuServe, AOL, and others already - we didn't need a 20+ years detour to arrive again at square zero with monopolistic middle men.

Well put, I forget how much Google actually owns. Microsoft had an OS, AOL had ISP, but Google has The Internet and a good portion of phones.

"good portion" is putting it mildly - according to statcounter the worldwide mobile OS share is about 70-30 in favour of Google, with Japan being one of the only markets where there's more Apple devices than Google ones.

I've been reading tech news for quite a while, I've heard bad things about Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla, but I rarely hear anything bad about Google.

I bet some of that is caused by their prevention.

Open source is gimmick when topic is a project like Chromium; it's a monolithic ecosystem contains too much hurdle to tame using it as an independent product for independent developer(s) and/or communities. Reflects mostly Google's vision on web, not users' or independent entities.

Arc, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi or any other Chromium-based project can't really make a difference on the web yet, big thanks to the Chromium codebase; changing mostly visual bits, adding some cryptoish features, built-in adblocker, more hooks to system for usage analysis, etc. Even still, too many things going to the Google's services, maybe because of addons or phishing protection.

I don't know if it's some kind of "if it works, don't fix it" and/or "don't reinvent the wheel" thinking but that's for sure web and users pays the price not the companies.

I think similar things for Android, Firefox, Windows and Linux. They're dominating their positions and holding their territories at all hazards and sometimes this defence means destruction of alternatives, without regard to qualifications and qualities.

This is a bad thing for me.

Puts too much power in Google's hands. Maybe not in terms of blacklisting, but certainly in terms of setting standards. What's good for a single giant megacorp is not necessarily good for other megacorps, or medium or small businesses.

All I see is they’re pushing the envelop past what Mozilla and Apple can keep up with. How does this directly affect medium to small business?

Who knows? I'm not Alphabet CEO or even upper management. Anywhere.

I do know that questions like yours were common when MSFT made IE 6.0. We all know that ultimately was a disaster. Give Google a year or two of "not directly affecting" other businesses and then get back to me

Chrome saved us from an abysmal browser market and endless websites that said “best viewed in Internet Explorer 6”.

Support ticket from Carvana yesterday told me to try chrome if I was experiencing problems. An open web won’t stay open for long if there’s a browser monopoly.

Do you think Google would try to crush competition the way MS did with their browser?

Without hesitation.

Why wouldn’t they?

Yes. Sorry that was vague. Chrome dominance is bad for the open web and Google is a bad actor in every space they inhabit. Web devs who code for chrome are as bad as those who coded for ie 6 before chrome.

Absolutely not the point, don't be dense.

Public corporations do things in their own interests. USA legal environment guarantees that. Google has been a decent actor in the past, but have slid into monopolizing ad sales and into surveillance capitalism.

Google will use a Chrome market dominance to warp standards for their own purposes. You personally may or may not like the warping or the results.

Google might end up creating features for its own benefit, or moving standards faster than other companies can keep up with, ensuring that only they can serve the modern web.

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