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Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

Chrome needs to be addressed, too. It’s achieved near-monopoly status (especially if lumping in Chrome reskins like Edge) and posing meaningful competition to Google’s cross-promotion, marketing, and army of engineers working on the project is for practical purposes impossible. Prying away significant marketshare would be incredibly difficult even for the best non-Blink browser imaginable.

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Edge is not a Chrome reskin, it's a Chromium reskin, and I think that distinction matters a lot here. The point of Chromium is that there is effectively no promotion or marketing in it. I think the fact that Microsoft push pop-ups to get users to move to Edge from Chrome is testament to that.

Now from a technical perspective, more diversity in browser engine might be nice, but this doesn't really contribute to the competition discussion.

(my opinions, not those of my employer)

The distinction doesn’t matter that much in my mind, because Chromium reskins give Google just as much power over the web as Chrome reskins would. If for example the marketshare of Edge and Chrome suddenly traded places, very little would change in terms of Google’s control of the web.

Chromium/Blink being FOSS with Google also by far being the most dominant contributor essentially allows them to wield the same sort of power over the web that Microsoft once did, except this time it’s been whitewashed with an “open” gloss that helps keep the regulators off their backs.

> If for example the marketshare of Edge and Chrome suddenly traded places, very little would change in terms of Google’s control of the web.

I think it'd make a bit of a difference, because Microsoft would now have the threat available of changing rendering engines and taking all their users with them (via Windows automatic updates). It'd be expensive and risky, so they wouldn't really want to do it, but they'd have it as leverage against any Google decisions.

Having an army of engineers working on an open source project is an anti-trust violation?

Let’s say there’s a hypothetical world where Safari had 90% market share like Chrome does. Would the fact that WebKit is open source make a difference? Chrome is to Chromium as Safari is to WebKit after all.

Chrome is to Blink as Safari is to WebKit.

If Safari had 90% market share because it was a great browser available on every OS promoted on some of the most visited websites (which, in this thought experiment, would be owned by Apple), while people were able to choose their browser on iOS, and browser vendors were able to choose the browser engine and if a version of Safari without sync were open source, that would make a difference.

Two major differences: Chromium itself is a standalone browser, not just a rendering engine. You need to compare Blink to WebKit. Also WebKit is the only engine allowed in the App Store and iOS. There's no such limitation in the Play Store and Android.

> Chromium itself is a standalone browser, not just a rendering engine.

WebKit has always been and still currently is a standalone browser. WebKit even has a standalone browser version for Linux too.

If said project has a monopoly marketshare which the parent company can then use to drive profits in its main lines of business, then yes I think it can. In this case the engineering resources presents a moat of sorts — it means that anybody hoping to meaningfully influence the project or fork it needs to dedicate as many or more resources, which is difficult or impossible for most organizations. Without that, the most that forks can hope to dissent on are things that can easily be toggled on/off or patch parts of the codebase that don’t change often, which is very limiting.

There are many organizations which would have the resources to make a competing browser, like Apple for example.

It’s still not good though, because it essentially rules out the creation and growth of new browser engines. A group shouldn’t need to be a multinational gigacorp to pull that off.

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