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Comment by jascination | Hacker News Reader

1) does it though? It seems like the Google-specific parts of it are pretty ancillary to the whole experience

2) how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?

> 1) does it though? It seems like the Google-specific parts of it are pretty ancillary to the whole experience

You're unwittingly describing the textbook definition of anticompetitive practices only made possible by abusing a dominant position.

> 2) how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?

Safari does not represent >65% of all web traffic. Also, there's the major liability of having a single ad company controlling the browser that the average internet user uses to browse the web.

You literally can’t use your mouse to copy/paste in google docs if you’re using Firefox. If that isn’t anticompetitive, I don’t know what is.

As a firefox user, that copy/paste drives me insane, but I think you're making a logic leap here along with assuming the worst. It's very possible (and likely) that there are API deficiencies that break their ability to offer this when overriding the right-click menu. For example, Firefox not allowing javascript in random tabs from writing to the system clipboard.

You can still use Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V (and in fact the UI will (or at least used to) tell you that).

JupyterLab also doesn't have copy paste in right click menu. I figured it's probably a security feature (preventing malicious JavaScript from harvesting clipboard content).

Firefox only implemented the APIs for that a few months ago; Chrome has had them for five years: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Clipboard_A...

It's funny how many "unsupported" browser features suddenly start working if you happen to change your User Agent header...

> how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?

It’s not, other than Google has a way larger market share (especially if you count Edge/Opera/Brave/etc.) and has been (ab)using that position to push web standards in a direction that favors their business and that other browser vendors have to follow to keep up.

If Safari had Chrome’s market share and was throwing their weight around like Google does and Microsoft did with IE, it’d be the same argument and I’d also personally support forcing them to divest it.

Safari is the #2 browser behind Chrome. It's about 55% to 30%, so while Chrome has a larger market share, it's not an order of magnitude larger.

Really the main difference is that Apple has a captive audience on iOS and no incentives to improve so they don't do anything with it.

18.5 for Safari 65% for chrome + 5% for edge = 70%

It is a magnitude higher.

I think you mean order of magnitude, which means 10x. Magnitude just means size. Chrome's market share is not an order of magnitude higher than Safari.

In the business world it is, because going from 18% to 65% market share is much more than a 4X improvement. Market share progress is highly non-linear in cost/investment/strategy. There are network effects at play favoring a winner-takes-all.

A (truly) clever argument! Def seems like a stretch though, especially if you're hoping to save GP's comment by suggesting that this is what they had in mind :-)

No, that might be the word origin but not how it is actually used. Just like "decimate" nowadays does not require a factor 10.

So instead of "10x" substitute "by a large enough factor or margin to make a significant difference". That is totally true globally speaking. Locally, in the US, you could however argue that apple abuses it's iPhone market share to sabotage competition (e.g. streaming, webstandards,etc). That just means you should sue both not neither.

Decimate used to mean 10% less (1 out of ten gone), nowadays folks mean 90% or about so less (9 out of ten gone).

Nothing more evil than pushing standards and even sharing the source code. How dare they...

So why are those standards impossible to keep up with and we already see plenty of sites break under Firefox? Which by the way is the only independent browser remaining in game, even goddamn Microsoft leaving the domain behind?

Because development costs money. Your "impossible to keep up" here is easily explained by Google simply investing more money in development and thus being able to "innovate" faster. The only way to compete is to invest more, but where do you get that money from?

The easy fix is to make them slow down development, but I fail to see how that's a good thing.

Sure. Continuing my analogy to the British empire's rule over the seas has also surely resulted in technological improvements, but that is not the only way to achieve that.

For a more practical example, Linux is also developed mostly by paid employees, but they are from many different companies and thus improvements can't be weaponized as easily.

Maybe if Mozilla spent more money on development and less money trying to be an NGO they could keep up... Mozilla gets more than enough revenue (from Google ironically), they just spend it poorly.

Or they could do what Brave, Vivaldi and others do and simply use Chromium as a base.

> Or they could do what Brave, Vivaldi and others do and simply use Chromium as a base.

Don't you even see the problem?!

Even Microsoft dropped out from developing a web browser, it literally has a larger scope than a whole OS.

But sure, enjoy your Chrome OS proprietary "open" web.

Again, how can it be a proprietary web if everything is open source and available to every other vendor?

Not sure if you remember all the "native" applets that actually were proprietary before Chrome came on the scene and made JS fast enough to kill them... ActiveX, Flash, Java... Those were the dark ages, because of Google the web is more open and better than ever...

More like there were actually multiple vendors that would have to agree on a common thing, but they died out so the single leftover can do whatever it wants...

Here's a list of members of the W3C:

https://www.w3.org/membership/list/

It's a lot more than just Google...

As a long time FF user what is one website that breaks on FF?

my ad-blockers ruin plenty of websites. never met a site that was broken due to FF itself.

Miro board is simply unusably slow, but plenty of other commonly used websites have annoying breakages, like login screen not actually logging in and the others.

Facebook Messenger video chat. It straight up doesn't work. I have to open a Chromium instance to chat with my family.

Good example, but sounds like Facebook or Firefox are to blame for this, not Google.

The parent asked for examples of sites that don't work on Firefox. I gave him one. No one was talking about who to blame.

I see them all the time on internal websites. Corporate frontend devs favor Chrome and those sites aren’t automatically tested.

> how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?

Apple hasn't been found to have a monopoly like Google has [1].

[1] https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-ve...

Found to be is doing far too much work given the DOJ lawsuit that it has a monopoly (2546 points, 8 months ago, 2623 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39778999

Right. DoJ sued Google and a judge agreed. That's a big difference.

Google is a convicted monopolist.

The DOJ is weird. They're so concerned with whether or not a company is a monopoly, not whether or not they're abusing their power.

Look at the EU, levying multiple billion dollar fines against Apple. But in the US, Apple is free to abuse customers since their market share is a few % short of a monopoly...

I mentioned elsewhere, but the EU wrote an entirely new law to designate some companies as 'gate keepers'. A company no longer has to be a monopoly in the EU to fall under the new law. The DoJ is operating under US law where Apple has largely come out unscathed in any cases brought so far (like Epic).

So far the US has had little desire to regulate big tech in any significant manner.

The EU laws make sense. If you buy something in the EU, you own it. You should be able to do what you want with it. They also have great laws to protect consumers WRT warranties and service and even their AI law is pretty good.

2) consumers cannot use products like Safari as their exclusive web browser. The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting and the world needs to keep Chrome at-the-ready for when the alternative browser eventually breaks.

For example, Chrome has replaced IE as the corporate browser, due to the integrations with Workspace accounts and Authentication mechanisms. In order to use the fingerID on my/employer's macbook pro, I have to give my employer root/sync access to Google Chrome.

"The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting…"

That only tells me that governments can no longer leave technical aspects of the internet (standards/APIs, etc.) to market forces. There are many historical precedents for such action such as flight/aircraft, RF spectrum management, road and maritime regulations, health/food standards, etc. There's a myriad of them.

Regulations would enforce interoperability and uniformity. To say this would stifle innovation is nonsense, it would be like saying that road rules and maritime law have stifled the development of motor vehicles and shipbuilding.

I use Safari as my exclusive web browser without issue.

I use Firefox, same result.

Try using a miro board. Unfortunately many sites have started breaking under Firefox, and it's a shame that web devs don't test under the 3 remaining browser, at least on a surface-level, before release.

It's not like supporting a completely different OS..

> For example, Chrome has replaced IE as the corporate browser

Strange, thought it was Edge, as it integrates with MS products much better. Must be an US thing then.

Edge is a custom Chrome, much as Opera is custom Chrome, much as ..

Although Edge is Chrome plus OS search & telemetry integration so there's extra over and above just browsing.

> 2) how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?

It's only different in the share of the overall market they hold - and it's notable that the EU has already acted to break Apple's monopoly over specifically the iOS browser market.

The EU wrote an entirely new law that designated companies like Apple as 'gate keepers'.

Yeah, and the effectiveness of the enforcement still remains to be seen - Apple is sure making every effort possible to adhere to the letter rather than the spirit of the law, and to isolate any changes they make exclusively to the EU. But I think it's a positive signal that we might see the decline of the big platform monopolies in our lifetime.

If Apple can do that then it's a problem with the law. You can't really make a law and then argue "we're angry that people are complying with what we said, not what we meant to say".

But then again, I wonder if part of the reason is that they can't make the law too prescriptive because that would create other problems politically (especially if it ever got pointed towards European companies)...

Well, it's also not generally very clear whether a geographical political entity like the EU actually has the ability to legislate what occurs outside its borders

re: 1) logging into a Google domain in a chrome browser, logs the browser into the Google account [auto-profile-login] [gSignin], and by default, syncs browser history to the cloud, cloud-readable [gSync]. Google's own docs describe that you can add a passphrase "so Google can't read it". While Google can read it, they have an arguable duty to shareholders to read it.

- [auto-profile-login]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26200298

- [gSignin]: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277

- [gSync]: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139?hl=en

> Keep your info private with a passphrase With a passphrase, you can use Google's cloud to store and sync your Chrome data without letting Google read it.

Thank you appealing to reasonable expectations, but Google, as their own docs make clear, ties uses together quite aggressively^W conveniently.

2) Whatabout Apple and Safari? Apple doesn't offer an email service supported in part by scanning email content for ads.

Apple has gone to some lengths to engineer a system where they can credibly(-ish) claim to "protect your privacy when you browse the web in Safari," [Apple private relay].

- [Apple private relay]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602

Google re-engineers their browser to prevent ad-blockers from working.

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