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Comment by techpression | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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