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Comment by erik | Hacker News Reader

> You mean Google will deliver a better browser than what currently iOS users have to the point that iOS users will decide to move away from the default

No, I mean that Google will use their search monopoly, along with their dominant position across other product areas to undercut the market share of any competing browser. Any merit Chrome has is dwarfed by the strength of Google’s ability to push it on users.

I have many complaints about Apple’s handling of iOS. But it seems to me that their stance on iOS browsers is the only thing preventing the web from becoming a Blink rendering engine monoculture.

I don’t like Apple’s approach. But I’m also concerned about the prospect of a Blink-only future.

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Please provide any proof that Google has a greater strength of pushing their browser to iOS users than Apple, the owner of the platform which sets Safari as default, sets Safari as default link handler, sets Safari icon on the preinstall and requires several steps, including creation of AppStore account, to even switch away.

Please, provide ANY proof, that Google has this crazy amazing power against the company that owns a platform and that easily caused a tank in Meta revenue by just slightly flexing the power on that platform.

And after that, please provide ANY proof that that megacorporation, richer and more competent than Google, cannot provide a browser that could even remotely compete with better user experience on the platform they themselves own.

Because what you're claiming is pretty crock that has no basis in reality or history.

Edit: I said PROOF, not downvotes ;P

The downvotes are probably because all the parts of this that didn't also apply to Windows when Chrome came out, aren't actually barriers because nearly all users will have already done them for other reasons (like creating an app store account), and Google demonstrably managed to gain huge share there through a massive advertising campaign on their properties, using what amounted to lies ("Youtube is better in Chrome"—eh, not really, not in any way that mattered to anyone reading that message, anyway).

You're exaggerating while also being abrasive and wrong ("is pretty crock that has no basis in reality or history"), basically.

Chrome didn't rely on word-of-mouth and geek evangelists to spread like FF did in the early years—Google leveraged their monopoly on multiple web products to do it. The proof is that they already did it once—a whole lot of users who truly don't give a shit which browser they run, ended up with Chrome, because Google told them it was better. The differences you list that make this situation seem different aren't actually notable barriers, as you imply they are. If anything, tapping an "install this!" call-out and following through in the app store is both an easier and higher-confidence action for most users than downloading a .exe installer file, running it, and clicking through the installer.

It is an indisputable fact that if "the doors were opened" that at least some iOS users would be switching browsers and other apps. That is good for competition and innovation, yes, but Google does have a lot of power to nudge people toward doing what they want through the most widely used search engine and all of their other services.

"I don’t like Apple’s approach. But I’m also concerned about the prospect of a Blink-only future."

It's the web's destiny anyway. Its design lacks modularity to such a huge degree that a monopoly open source implementation is inevitable. There's no deep reason that has to be bad, Blink is open source and can be forked. In some ways it's not really clear what benefit the duplication between WebKit, Blink and Gecko brings to the table nowadays, as they implement the same specs in essentially the same way.

> It's the web's destiny anyway.

I hope that you're wrong! Google already has a tremendous amount of influence, and a Blink monoculture would give them near complete control of the future of the web. (And I think Google have been poor stewards of the web. But that's an entirely different conversation.)

Blink being open source is better than the alternative. Internet Explorer achieving total dominance would have been even worse. But it doesn't buy you that much. Under a monoculture, your fork of Blink could never deviate from the original meaningfully because sites wouldn't be built to standards, they would be built to work on Blink.

Google not being able to unilaterally dictate web standards is a good thing. For example, I'm glad we have WASM and not Google Native Client.

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