EU's new tech laws are working – small browsers gain market share
forth.news
forth.news
I know now that if i change my mind i can go to settings and pick any other browser.
And not thank you Apple because this is not the case in non EU countries and not the case for iPad, because EU did not classified ipads same way as iphones and Apple Inc took advantage of this instead of unifying user experience.
Whatever the intentions of that law where, and however against the spirit of it the companies implementing the ‘we care about your privacy’ popover whilst offering the option to opt out of data sharing with their 500 ‘partners’ - the law has failed in this regard. Perhaps even all these sites are breaking said law, in which case I am sure enforcement will be swift and firm.
Of course if i was evil corporate drone and would like to piss of EU and had means for that, i would show this pop up to choose browser regularly and unexpectedly to piss off end users and then blame it on EU that they have "forced" to do this.
Too many annoying popups have trained me to, by default, react to popups as I react to flies or mosquitos.
As I can't tell which category a popup is in before I've read it, this makes me extra angry about the time-wasters.
Personally, I find the multi-page terms and conditions to be the worst part. Nobody reads them and it would be considered entirely unacceptable UX if people really did read them. Their entire purpose is to hold people to terms they aren’t aware of.
Also there is absolutely no concept of geolocalization on the internet, and all attempts to do that are just "tried my best but still broken".
Even should users select at random, would this result in a market share increase for alternative browsers.
Celebrating this gain early is firmly “counting the chickens before they’ve hatched”. Let’s see if users actually stick to these alternative browsers or if the market merely reciprocates what we have on desktop: lots of Chrome users.
I’d eat my hat if it turns out any different, because I’m not so naive to believe that one mandatory click-through would stand against Google’s web properties constantly asking the user to switch to Chrome.
Last time I checked, moving even more of the market under a single vendor was the opposite of competition and the consumer’s interest.
I think the current wave of absolute failure to respect or even understand European privacy needs coming from California is going to lead to generational knock-on effects.
There's a very good cultural reason why no-one here has even heard about green/blue/yellow chat messages, why Apple has no majority market share, why state and federal governments all over the EU have tried and are still trying to ditch Microsoft. Only now it's not just about the cultural difference in respect for the privacy of your fellow man, now it's also about strategic importance and even our own sovereignty.
It doesn't make sense for an uptick in usage of smaller browsers to be just an artifact of forcing the decision, because the easiest and least cognitive overhead choice when forced to make that decision would be to just pick the default browser you would have used anyway, like Safari on iPhone or Chrome on Android. So the uptick must be the result of people actually wanting different browsers now that they have been made aware of the other options and presented with a convenient Choice up front. Which makes sense for the eu, considering as other commenters have said the recent distrust and resentment of American tech companies there.
> Web freely with the built-in Web3 crypto wallet
Second point on their website ...
Also small browsers, that are all chromium based. The only exceptions I'm aware of are:
- https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ never heard about this one before, but found it while searching.
Why is that a problem? Implementing a browser from scratch is an insanely complicated task (bloody Microsoft abandoned it!), and Chromium is kind of the gold standard. It's unrealistic to expect anyone to develop a new browser entirely from scratch.
Mozilla will now need to invest the limited resources they have to port Gecko to iPhones in the EU — read: _iPhones_ and iPhones only, not iPads, and not for any market other than the EU.
Meanwhile, everyone will install Chrome, and we're done with the second wave of the browser wars.
I _really_ hope Mozilla will pull their thumb out on this, but the baffling omission of iPads, and the EU-exclusivity of the law, make this an unattractive endeavour in terms of investment.
I really can't understand how the EU let iPads off the hook. Can someone explain that?
Not having Firefox built on Gecko ready to go is an absolutely massive misstep from Mozilla. I’m having trouble understanding how their leadership didn’t prioritize this based purely on the timeline of public proceedings I had available to me. Presumably they had even more advanced knowledge. What has Mozilla been prioritizing?
> In iPhones, users can see the choice screen only when they click Safari, and then users are shown a list of browsers with no additional information, said Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, CEO of Norway's Vivaldi.
> "The process is just so convoluted that it's easiest for (users) to select Safari or potentially some other known name," he said.
> The complicated design has led European Commission to start a non-compliance investigation into whether Apple may be preventing users from truly exercising their choice of services.
It's very fun to see that the EU is refusing to give up and take Apple's passive aggressive compliance on any front!
Maybe few hundred millions additional fine will cool some oversized egos in management. If not, add 0, and keep repeating, we are too sweet and rich market to ignore and continuously insult.
How anybody can buy products form this company and feel they are buying from somehow better and more moral vendor than rest of the market is beyond my understanding.
> marketing
Chrome has been becoming the new IE with the websites giving the best experience on Chrome - only. That's the risk.
What pipes the browser makers choose to rely on is between them and pipe makers I guess. Probably the pipe makers should focus on the developer experience.
they don't get to decide this if push comes to shove. Banks and governments in European jurisdictions obviously can be forced to comply with European laws and if there was some geopolitical question about security you can just force them to switch to a local fork of Chromium which given that it's open source is technically relatively trivial.
It's the same as Linux essentially. The overwhelming majority of commits comes from RedHat, Huawei and Samsung or other international corps which is fine because there's always the implicit option to fork it. We don't need fifty different kernels given that we're talking about open source software. In the olden days of Internet explorer and dependence on proprietary software this argument made sense because you could theoretically be squeezed without an ad-hoc alternative, but that's not the case any more.
From the long lasting first party cookies to the ease of fingerprinting the engine is designed to make advertising more effective. But hey who cares about privacy.
We steered into a corner that is hard to get out of...
Norway's Vivaldi Chrome
Germany's Ecosia Chrome
U.S.-based Brave Chrome
U.S.-based DuckDuckGo Chrome (truly a disappointment)
Norway-based (actually Chinese-based) Opera Chrome
Hurray, "small" browsers are winning! Gud news everyone! :)
We need to establish some name for this bullshit. For example similar to "greenwashing" in the energy sector, we can call this disinformation campaign a "chromewashing".
PS: not that I expected a quality journalism from the unknown site forth,news, but not even mentioning Firefox as a true real alternative in the whole article is baffling. Sure, it gets a small mention in the end, but not on it's own merits, but as an example of some Apple's business process problem. Not a word that this is the only Chrome alternative left on some OSes.
From a purely technical standpoint you are correct, of course.
Now the counter question - how much money did you personally contribute directly (taxes don't count) to any alternative to anything you were dissatisfied with? Name the issue and the amount. If you will not name at least one issue, I will consider that lie (deliberate or by omission).
And the second question to you - how the hell is YOUR question even relevant to the discussion of Google's browser monopoly?
My question is relevant because (almost) nobody supports an alternative to the monopoly, yet you complained about it.
I guess gmail might not stop asking you to make sure you want to open a link with your default browser instead of chrome, even if you click “remember my choice”.
Which means that Apple’s anti-tracking mechanisms will be rendered ineffective and we will see a new pro-advertising world where every advertiser will be able to track you with ease. Or did people forget how Google makes its money ?
All championed by the very developers who say they care about privacy and competition.
When harmful for competition: “We’ll say it’s good for user choice”.
When harmful to users: “We’ll say it’s good for competition.”
The act of writing a law that will result in Google’s Chrome total market dominance will of course fall under “user choice”.
Meanwhile music streaming market leader Spotify has announced a price increase of 9% in the UK (and assuredly others soon) and simultaneously demonetised all artists with less than 1000 streams per annum. Naturally the EU has nothing to say about that because it’s one of their own this time.
I mean... yeah.
Users want stuff. They want emulators, YouTube song downloaders, game streaming and online games, the sorts of things Apple otherwise mediates on the App Store. The web can conditionally provide that to them if their browser has enough features, so these locked-down users then are driven to fringe featuresets.
In an ideal world, your phone just installs software like your computer and you don't need to use your browser to enable basic native functionality. Unfortunately, making software "just work" requires developers to pay an annual fee and arm-wrestle with a distributor that doesn't care about them. The web, in all it's mangled madness, becomes a more viable platform than a computer's native runtime. If you owned any other device that worked that way, you'd be rightfully furious.
And so, Apple dug their own grave. Their entire business theory revolves around getting developers to create high-quality native experiences, but the incentive to do so is lower on their platforms than anywhere else in the industry. The software people pay for today isn't native Mac apps, it's B2B cloud infrastructure and cross-platform Electron apps. Apple's philosophy has staunchly failed, and the longer they stick to their guns the more dissatisfied users will become.
If Apple wants to invest in a future where Chrome doesn't dominate, then they need to ship a competing browser. Keeping a userbase hostage does not qualify as maintaining a competitive market.
1. If you base your browser on Chromium you do not install Google tracking.
2. On iOS there were already multiple browsers , so Google could have already used their "Chrome = Safari skin" to track your browsing. So google always advertised and promoted their browser, now it will just have a better engine under the skin.
What I am referring to is (a) the maximum lifetime of first party cookies which is used by advertisers for retargeting and tracking and (b) the reckless way Google adds API e.g. MIDI without minimising fingerprinting.
These are what are embedded in the Chromium engine.
Only if Apple fails to ship a competitive default. Hell, if sideloading worked right I doubt most users would even feel the need for a different browser.
I'm unsure if that's irony or not, but Google having to advertise Chrome instead of showing ads that other organisations have paid for is probably a loss for them (depends on how you quantify the revenue from the usage metrics of Chrome per user, which I don't know).
Otherwise you will ends up in Russia-style oligarchy.
* Google in search, video, browser, email
* Meta in social media for massive age segments (what, 30-70?; younger than that may be on Snapchat/TikTok (too))
* Amazon in online retail, and specifically in online books and e-readers
* Microsoft in desktop OS and productivity suite, especially for business
If we go into oligopolies, where there are a very small amount of market players that can still abuse their position, we can also add video and audio streaming, mobile phones and tablets, CPU and GPU manufacturers, smart watches, etc.