Guess we'll find out!
This one is scary. People who don't know history like to think that IE was a backward browser and MS forced it upon people but what actually happened is that IE was very innovative until Microsoft diverged from the standards and lock people into it. When the ecosystem(websites) integrates enough that your platform(the browser) is the only way to run all that(through Google services for Chrome?), they stop innovating and start monetising.
"Works with Chrome" is the new IE, not Safari.
If Google is indeed leveraging their market position in an anticompetitive way to push Chrome, then they should be stopped from doing that.
Which isn't to say that Safari and especially Firefox aren't important drivers of competition. But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE.
Why would websites support this? Well, it can provide good rankings in search or some other goodie like speeding up the loading times through Google CDN or something and works for %90 of the people(because they use Chrome). Once enough websites integrate this, it's over.
In my experience, Apple haven't exactly been very open-source friendly - I know working with them there's a rejection of any GPL dependencies, even if well separated and unmodified, or even just tools used in the build process if they're GPL3+.
I don't doubt if Apple developed a html engine from scratch it would use a different license, and the entire landscape of browsers would look very different today.
It may be open source but no individuals or small teams would be able to manage a competing product, you’d need huge investment to compete. There’s a barrier to entry all the same.
Plus keeping up with the constant updates while trying to build a competitor…
The standards and functionality that are required in a modern browser are already far beyond what "an individual or small team" could build from scratch.
The existence of Chromium absolutely makes it much, much more feasible to launch a Chrome competitor than if Chrome was entirely closed source.
I imagine even this already very unlikely outcome would also depend on said fork having a big slice of market share before they even try to drift away from Chromium, otherwise it won't have any effect and will likely die exactly because of said differences.
Additionally, nothing forces a company/group to merge that "firehose of changes". If google ever oversteps sufficiently, there is always the possibility that companies that are maintaining forks will stop integrating those changes.
Very few of the changes in even the most diverged of Chromium forks change anything significant about Blink, which is really what matters. The bulk of differences are tied up in the bits wrapping the engine.
If forks don't keep up with Google's changes they're putting their users at risk of getting hit by 0days and other vulnerabilities.
That’s because they don’t need to because there’s nothing wrong with chromium. In the hypothetical situation where Google goes rogue and messes with chrome to the point that forking is required, this would be done differently.
Firefox is a clear example that a smaller organization can manage the complexity of a modern browser.
There's plenty of other examples too - like linux - which show hugely complex open source projects are possible.
A new organization coming in fresh and thinking, "hey I know what, let's fork Chromium", does not seem like a very long lived effort. I also don't see any new operating systems coming out from an unknown team anytime soon.
The open source projects you use as examples are entrenched, and it's going to take a major shakeup and/or cracks in the large organizations for something new in the browser or operating system space to emerge.
The situation is different from IE, but there's still a lot of similarities and open source isn't necessarily the balm it appears to be. They code may still "be there", but code still needs people to believe in it/trust it/work on it.
Google isn't trying to kill the web and grow desktop App development, so yes it's different. And also people weren't complaining about Internet Explorer while it was innovative and competing against Netscape Navigator with annual releases. It was after 5 years of stagnation, not supporting new W3C standards, and unfixed bugs.
Google learned from Microsoft's mistakes. They participated in standards, they update often, and resolve bugs quickly. Everything Microsoft didn't do.
They also implement new features outside of standards but just as temporary experiments mind you. If developers happen to adopt them and implement them on their sites, well Google's hands are tied and y'all might as well make them standards (e.g. SPDY, QUIC).
Or, because the control the standards process they can propose a change to a private list, push it to WHATWG and get representatives from Apple and Firefox to pull it into the "living" standard without any public discourse or feedback (e.g. removing alert();).
This isn't to say everything they're doing is bad, but that doesn't mean they aren't working in their own self interest.
"just"
Will they also "just" fork search monopoly, and web's most visited properties like youtube?
> Indeed we already have Edge as a well-maintained fork.
Indeed we have a Chrome re-skin with very few differences because even Microsoft couldn't maintain a browser.
We remember things very differently, then.
IE was hardly innovative, unless you count things like the <blink> and <marquee> tags, and the ActiveX which their blatant attempt to tie the web to Windows.
The other thing IE was known for was missing, incomplete, or out-right broken support for extremely basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript functionality that other browsers had no issues with. Leaving web developers to scatter their code/markup with IE-specific workarounds. Compounding this problem was lack of regular releases and updates. Except for security fixes, Microsoft considered IE to be part of the OS and refused to issue updates for it between OS releases, for the most part, which is why IE stuck around so long.
Nobody _wanted_ IE. It was just there as part of the OS at the same point in history that Internet access became a mainstream thing.
But if one window crashed, the whole IE crashed. Then Firefox tabbed browsing took over hungry for system resource. But at least it didn’t crash, right?
I remember IE research pane. Innovation in the browser became from a toolbar thing. Remember google toolbar? It was the number one bar in many countries.
But then Firefox extensions took over hungry for system resource, but not like Chrome hungry.
IE had addons. Some of them slowed the browser. And it had plug-ins.
It had everything independent innovation needed to thrive. It just didn’t have any vision for the “open web”. No one understood what that was then anyways.
And where ie could not innovate on the web, they used active X plug-ins. This was the Microsoft way. You can’t blame them for being themselves.
"It had everything independent innovation needed to thrive. It just didn’t have any vision for the “open web”."
But it didn't had an open source core and was windows only. The vision was microsoft only (forever).
"This was the Microsoft way. You can’t blame them for being themselves. "
So the argument is, "yeah, Microsoft is a big monopolist who do everything they can, to lock people on their system, you cannot blame them for it, this is just the way they are"?
Either way, in this case luckily their monopol strategy failed and IE died because of it.
Right. I never would have understood the love for open source if Microsoft hadnt left so much thirst for deeper complex innovation in my mouth.
After IE 6, things when downhill fast with the stagnation, but before that point, IE was a good browser.
That particularly became a problem because the time gap between XP and Vista was huge (and a lot of people skipped it and went to 7/8/10). In the meantime firefox and chrome came up and started innovating rapidly. Chrome started it with the evergreen model and FF quickly adopted that model.
"You need to download Chrome" is the scariest thing these days, especially if you see it in Firefox.
Did you live through the IE5 and IE6 days? Does the term “quirks mode” mean anything to you? Do you remember how Mac IE was completely different from Windows IE? Internet Explorer, back in the early 2000s, was a serious support burden for anyone doing web development at the time. Around 2010, Google dropped support for IE6 (in apps like GMail + Youtube) and a ton of other sites followed suit. It made a big splash across all the news sites and all the web developers breathed a sigh of relief, because they could say “we’re dropping IE6 support because Google did.”
Meanwhile, there was a parallel world of IE-only sites. Some of them were built on future widespread web technologies like DHTML, others were built on stuff like ActiveX. ActiveX ended up in the trash bin (where it belongs) and DHTML became normalized. It was… common, and annoying, to deal with corporate sites that only worked in IE, and then build your own site and fight to get it working in IE. It was not a fun time to be a web developer.
Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I remember that Safari was missing some of the newer features that Chrome or Firefox had, but when I investigated, it usually turned out that I was using some future/experimental feature in Chrome or Firefox, and it wasn’t a problem with the standards-compliance of Safari per se. Or sometimes I was relying on behavior that was not part of the standard at all). Nowadays, my sense is that Chrome tends to have more experimental stuff available and a better set of dev tools, but otherwise, most stuff works in Safari or Firefox with little to no modification.
If Apple keeps their browser compatible, I doubt they have much to fear. Linking users to the app store because your site doesn't work is a great way to drive them away from your website, I doubt there will be much push for installing Chrome.
Currently, Chrome for iOS has a slither of the market share that Safari has. Most people don't even know you can install another browser at all. Unless Apple makes/keeps their browser uncompetitive, they won't lose a serious amount of market share.
If I recall correctly, Google was paying 1$ per install, so everyone was promoting Chrome and Chrome was actually better than Firefox.
Firefox then made a lot of missteps, tried to make a push open video and audio codecs for idealistic reasons and lost. They also failed to catch on Chrome's performance for quite a long time. They spent a lot of resources into experiments that went nowhere.
Not the Google Chrome app. The Google app. :facepalm:
I’ve tried to explain why this isn’t necessary but as far as she knows, google is the internet. And I cannot say anything to convince her otherwise. After all, every search in safari will re-advertise to her “hey you should be doing this in the google app” and she will click the button without even thinking.
A hundred years ago, we'd be worried about getting knifed by strangers, bear maulings, starving to death, being homeless, eating food laced with botulism and lead, influenza, tuberculosis, diphtheria ...
Things are pretty good.
Oh wait. That’s not happening at all.
Don't forget about Google search which will push Chrome every chance it has. And Youtube.
Which cannot be said about Windows.
In Android, the app just throws an intent to open something, the OS opens the list of app capable of handling it, the user picks the wanted one (either 'only this time' or 'use this as default next time'). The OS, not the app, then remembers the choice.
I don't think they are responsible, but you can invoke a specific app if you need. Google's apps keep showing this sheet with "browser choice" quite often, conveniently forgetting that the user keeps setting "don't ask me again".
The choices are: Chrome, Google, Safari, Default system browser.
On macOS, Chrome is dominant by far, with 66.22% as of January 2023.
Safari is 2nd place with 27.72%.
https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options...
Currently I’m seeing Safari and Chrome at roughly 50:50 and 60:40 for visitors across some large public sites. That’s the reverse of what NetMarketShare has, but agains I don’t think that’s malice or error as much as different perspective.
Not many Apple fans have ever defended Apple's exclusivity on the browser engine. It's long been an annoyance, honestly.
But it also has never had anything to do with scamming grandmothers. That's always been an argument for not allowing arbitrary untrusted app downloads and/or 3rd party app stores. Nothing to do with browser engines, where Apple's (weak) argument has always been about the risk of unknown browser vulnerabilities allowing malicious code to escape the app sandbox.
And if iOS browser share winds up mirroring macOS browser share, then it'll go to about 2/3 Chrome.
But yes, most likely this will result in a Chrome monopoly.
Well that's because the phones don't belong to Apple.
Instead, once a consumer purchases it, the phones belong to the user, who should be allowed to do what they want with their own property.
The thing people are worried about is being forced to use Chrome and Chrome being a worse experience than Safari. If web developers en masse say "oh thank god finally we can drop support for Safari" then we're in a worse situation for everyone involved. We've done nothing but trade a lack of choice for a different lack of choice and ensured that the already dim situation for web apps being ported to non-Chrome browsers will get even worse.
I agree in general regarding it being better if multiple engines are available. On the other hand, when I build something, and I'm developing it on Firefox, it usually just works on chromium-based Browsers. Safari tends to be the odd one out that has some weird behavior, although it's much less common and much less bad than it was in the IE days.
Also: not having to buy a Mac every few years just so I can test things in Safari sounds sweet, too.
Web developers wouldn't drop support for Safari as long as a significant amount of users use it (and especially not if those users are premium users, which they tend to be: higher disposable income, better trained to pay for things etc), so I don't think that's an actual risk. At least for anything I'm involved with: we'll drop Firefox before we drop Safari, and we pretty much keep Firefox only because some developers and some PMs are using it.
Yes, probably. WebKit browsers on other platforms like GNOME Web/Epiphany on Linux is easier on battery than Chrome or Firefox. WebKit is generally speaking more efficient than Blink and Gecko.
I have used Arc browser for a bit. It's Chromium-based. It didn't seem to have a bad effect on the battery.
I haven't used Chrome in a few years now, but it used to be a major CPU, memory and battery hog. I don't know how it fares these days.