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Comment by crabmusket | Hacker News Reader

As a small business owner, I'm actually keen on the benefits to other businesses that antitrust enforcement and pro-competition enforcement can have.

As a really specific example in the case of Apple, I really hope the DMA causes wider availability of browser choice on iOS so that we as a business that ships a web app can offer our customers features like notifications and other PWA benefits. Our customers are somewhat willing to switch browsers to get the best experience when using our app. But switching to Android? Not a reasonable ask from us.

Most consumers also have jobs right? Making their lives better and easier at work, increasing competition to give their employers more opportunity to thrive, is just as important as making their groceries cheaper.

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The flip side of this as a consumer is that I'm happy that mandating safari on iOS means I can be relatively sure any given site is going to work in Safari. I'm glad I don't live in the days where I needed 3 separate browsers on my computer (Safari, Firefox and IE) to ensure that I can use websites when I need to. In "ye olde days", even if you were using Safari for most of your browsing because it gave the best battery life on MacOS, you'd run into some sites that wouldn't work with it. You'd try Firefox maybe next, hoping that it was just some site that didn't have any developers who knew what a mac was. But even then, you'd run into sites where, no the problem was the developers just assumed everyone used IE and used a bunch of IE specific stuff.

I can't remember the last time I saw a "this site only works in XYZ" message. Some of that is a lot of modern sites are all built on big frameworks, but some of that is also because only supporting Safari, or only supporting Chrome or only supporting IE is going to lose you huge swaths of customers.

What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?

As always these things are tradeoffs and balances.

> What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?

What if I cannot do that due to there being no incentive for Apple to support web standards in Safari?

We don't want our users to have to switch browsers, but that leaves us with no ability to use lots of the features that make modern web apps competitive at all with native apps.

Like I said, it's all tradeoffs. It's worth noting though that software companies definition of "best experience" and the consumer definition of "best experience" aren't always in sync, and plenty of Apple's restrictions align more with the consumers version of things. The most obvious example is mandating apps ask for tracking permissions, or location permission or access to photos and calendars. I'm sure Facebook and Google and plenty of other vendors would argue the "best experience" is a seamless one where the user doesn't need to be bothered with such minutia. And yet, I for one am quite glad they can't deliver their "best experience" to me.

True. On my iPhone, I just did an extremely complicated checkout flow involving registration on multiple websites as well as a credit check, and it worked like a charm.

Several years ago I wouldn't have even bothered trying to do that on my phone. There is some benefit to Safari being so ubiquitous.

Why not just have the government mandate that the only browser in the world is now Safari for everyone on every platform then?

Then all websites would be designed for the one browser!!

Because then there would only be one option? How did you go from "hey the fact that Apple has enough clout these days and control over iOS to ensure that the web doesn't suck as bad for alt browser users like it did in the IE days is a good thing" to "it would be awesome if the federal government outlawed all other browsers"

If it goes through, your customers can switch, once, to Chrome.

After that, Google leverages its other service monopolies, Chrome goes to 95%+ market share, standards fall by the wayside, and nobody has any choice.

I guess the answer to that is antitrust against Google, but I’d rather do that first than go through the Chrome domination phase.

The DMA also applies to Chrome, so there'll be some pressure from that direction.

Nothing in the DMA does anything about Chrome taking over completely. Actually the DMA is more or less a dream come true for Google, Amazon and Meta, it drastically strengthens their market hold at the cost of making the Apple ecosystem more diluted.

It will be a sad day in the near future when the web becomes “Chrome”, even on mobile, much as it was “IE” not that long ago, alas, we seem to never learn.

The biggest threat to the open web is Chrome’s dominance. Firefox is dwindling away and even Mozilla doesn’t seem to care about it, leaving Safari the only thing stopping Chrome from completely taking over. Google are already executing the Embrace & Extend playbook with non-standard functionality.

Everybody who says “Safari is the new IE” seems to be too young to know what IE and front-end web development were really like during the 00s. I’d take WebKit on iOS over a Blink monoculture any day, and so should any web developer.

No argument from me, I disregard anyone who says “Safari is the new IE” as someone who doesn’t know better but claim to do, or someone who is just trolling. I had to work with both IE on Mac and IE6 on Windows, Safari is not even remotely close to the isolated non-conforming nightmare it was back then. It’s also a bit terrifying how many seem to think Chrome gets it right all the time, even when they blatantly ignore standards or leave implementations with bugs for what feels like forever. But they get away with it since they’re so big, just like Microsoft did with IE.

I don’t know what the solution would be, not like you can mandate the existence of a web browser engine into existence and making one gets harder for every new thing added.

The EU has designated the following Google services as gatekeepers:

Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, YouTube, Android, Alphabet's online advertising service.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en

And here's what that designation means for them:

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

I am aware but that does nothing to prevent total dominance of Chrome as the primary browser on all platforms moving forward. The EU is not calling for a random subset of the population to forcibly run Firefox. With the power of Google they will corner the market incredibly fast, and it will all be “user choice”.

What it means is that it's going to be difficult for Google to give Chrome an unfair advantage by leveraging their other services.

If Chrome wins on merit and Chromium remains a viable option to build competing browsers then that is fine.

I don't want Apple to prevent that by forcing an inferior browser down peoples' throats to make sure the web can't win against native apps.

Maybe, but I doubt it, and who will prosecute them? I doubt EU will keep good track of their entire portfolio and their push for dominance, I could be wrong of course.

Isn’t chromium still bloated with tracking? Last time I read about it, it was far from a “clean Chrome” at least, now if it was truly open sourced and not mainly controlled by Google I would be much more hopeful.

As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all, different sports altogether, but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.

>Isn’t chromium still bloated with tracking?

I don't think Chromium based browsers such as Brave, Vivaldi or Edge have to send data to Google.

Chromium development is highly dependent on Google of course. Google could theoretically do to Chromium what they have done to AOSP, i.e make sure it's not longer a viable platform for competitors. But I think that's exactly what the DMA could prevent.

>As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all

I think it's an empirical fact that they do compete. Almost all the installed apps I use could be web apps if it wasn't for arbitrary restrictions.

>but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.

How about not randomly deleting or arbitrarily restricting local data?

Google has already given Chrome an unfair advantage by leveraging their other services. I suspect the browser market is an unstable system where absent outside intervention Chrome’s 65% market share naturally becomes 100%.

Chrome is such a complicated piece of software that the “forks” are highly dependent on Google and when Google unilaterally makes decisions they have to follow suit. Brendan Eich explains that Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 as long as Google doesn’t remove the underlying code paths: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152

I think a lot of people don’t appreciate how delicate the balance of web standards is right now. We have it so good (three high-quality implementations of an open spec) and I’m not willing to throw that away just to run Chrome on my iPhone.

A lot of small business is more similar to consumers than to large corporations. It's really no wonder that some pro-consumer regulations might benefit small business.

Agitation for consumer rights might actually be an easier way to get benefits to small business.

Because when you try to lobby for small business it becomes lobbying for all business and in the end it's the big business that benefits because somewhere in the process they outlobbied every other interested party and the end form of legislation or action benefits them the most.

Like the right to repair. If it was focused on helping small business it would have been defanged way easier.

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