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Comment by mplewis9z | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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

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.

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