Comment by TheTon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheTon | Hacker News Reader

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The author doesn’t attempt to address the issue that Apple and iOS are the only remaining effective bulwark against Google’s complete control of the web.

Think about what Google’s end game looks like if they are able to convince lawmakers and regulators around the world to force Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. Google will continue to spam standards proposals and implementations that Apple or Mozilla will be unwilling to adopt for various reasons. Google will continue to advertise Chrome heavily, and push users of its other services to install and use Chrome exclusively. Google search will prioritize sites that use Chrome specific technologies. Google Gemini will generate code that uses Chrome specific APIs.

When Chrome reaches sufficient market share, Google will start to use Chrome to disadvantage computing platforms that they do not control completely. New features will come to Android and ChromeOS first. Bugs may go unaddressed on other platforms.

I realize it’s frustrating as a web developer to have to deal with browser specific issues, or to be unable to take advantage of necessary APIs or platform features from your web app. It is also frustrating to be blocked from the App Store because Apple wants to avoid competition in some area. The current situation is unfair and far from ideal. Apple are not the good guys here.

But, framing the issues as being entirely about Apple and not addressing the situation with Google doesn’t work. And, unfortunately, many commentators (including the author of this article) as well as regulators (including the EU), don’t seem to get this. If these folks get what they are asking for, we aren’t going to enter a golden age with a single web platform that is feature rich and open to all equally, we are all just going to get crushed by Google.

Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to uninstall Chrome from Android; but that's not the case; to the contrary, it's Apple's Safari that's impossible to uninstall from Apple's iOS.

Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to install Apple's Safari on Google's Android because of Google, but that's not the case, either, it's actually Apple that has discontinued Safari outside of their own ecosystem some 10+ years ago. Which, BTW, was a few years after Steve Jobs predicted that Safari will be the only browser on the planet, on both Macs and PCs, and that it'd be good.

Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to use Google's Android without a Google Account tracking your every move; but this is not the case, either, because you can easily sideload F-Droid and Aurora Store, and side-load any of the free Play Store apps as published and signed by Google, without any Google accounts, and uninstall Chrome, YouTube and most of the other pesky apps, yet still have access to your banking apps, to YouTube through free clients like NewPipe or PipePipe, and to lots of other stuff, all without any signs of any Google Accounts. Can you even install a third-party YouTube client on iOS? Ironically, you can on Android. In fact, you don't even lose any major functionality by foregoing Chrome and a Google Account on an Android; even the experience of watching YouTube is actually superior with PipePipe. I have several extra phones without a Google Account, and they're fully usable without any unexpected limitations; sync is the only thing that's missing.

Yet to the contrary, NONE of these things are possible on iOS.

On iOS, you can't even use even the "premium" pre-installed apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand or iMovie, without assigning them to an Apple Account first. You can't install any apps or stores, either. You can't do anything without at least an Apple Account. Yet it's Apple that's the last bastion of our privacy?! How?!

> Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to uninstall Chrome from Android…

Wrong. "Chrome is already installed on most Android devices, and can't be removed." https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95319

Google's support article is wrong/misleading. You can uninstall all app updates for Chrome. You can disable Chrome. Once disabled, it cannot run again, unless you expressly enable it. It's basically equivalent to an uninstall for most purposes.

The latest trend in OS design are an immutable system partition, so, obviously, you cannot modify the underlying system image, neither on macOS, nor iOS, nor Android, but what evidence do you have that doing an overlay disable isn't enough?

I've been using Android for years, and have not seen funny business after I disable Chrome. You can use Brave or Vivaldi or Yandex Browser or Opera in place of Chrome at all times. Or Firefox in many cases. I routinely have fully functioning test devices with stock Android without any Google Accounts or any Chrome. Everything just works the way it should. Including the banking apps installed through Aurora Store through F-Droid, as well as the streaming apps like Amazon Prime Video etc. Again, all of this works without a Google Account in any way on my side as an end-user, and it's expected to continue working even in 2027 even if the trial they've announced goes through worldwide. It works on any Pixel device, it works on any Motorola device, it even works on Samsung, too.

> I've been using Android for years, and have not seen funny business after I disable Chrome.

You have not seen any funny business because Chrome WebView, which many applications depend on, is a separate application. Developer settings let you change it to another application, but only from a hardcoded list of package names and only if they're installed to /system. There are also no non-Chromium WebView implementations available to my knowledge.

So no, unless you're OK with breaking applications that use WebView, you can't remove Chrome from an Android smartphone.

> Which, BTW, was a few years after Steve Jobs predicted that Safari will be the only browser on the planet, on both Macs and PCs, and that it'd be good.

Safari is good. As a user, I could not care even an iota less about how "annoying" it is to develop over-built, shitty websites to work right on Safari. Web developers as a general rule don't really seem like they give a shit about delivering good work, that respects the users wishes and devices and privacy, so if it makes it harder for them to have to write garbage like fucking Confluence or whatever for two platforms claiming to comply with "standards", sounds good to me, I don't care. Works great for reading documents and watching videos. Works great checking a menu of a restaurant from a QR code. I don't want it or need it to be my entire operating system, accessing my camera, my microphone, my location, my goddamn serial ports, running gobs of terrible quality, remote, slow code ensuring my brand new computer feels the same as my brand new computer from 10 years ago, to do what a barebones platform API app could do talking to the exact same JSON-RPC APIs their dogshit React app is talking to.

> Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to use Google's Android without a Google Account tracking your every move

And this argument would hold water if it was solely about being forced to do something horrific to your privacy instead of led to or being tricked into doing it. It holds as well as "well you can just not buy an iPhone". Give me a break! Google is not out to empower anyone. They are out to own general computing and the mountain of data if produces, and turning the browser, the one platform they have control over, into the operating system, is how they are going to do that. And in a stroke of brilliance, for the last 15 years they've "allowed" the "choice" to sidestep their overreach, which leads to braindead arguments like "well, at least you can sidestep it, therefore its really not that bad" from libertarian brained bozos who can't see the forest for the trees.

Apple is by no means free of sin. There are a million things I would change about the App Store monopoly. But that isn't the world we live in. We live in a world where one company controls and inspects the conduit to the internet for a vast majority of the population, and one controls it for the vast majority of the remainder. Whatever their reasons, the latter are holding back the Kraken ready to envelop and consume everything, and I'm not going to poo poo their efforts because it doesn't immediately comply with whatever half-assed, hostile "standard" the former pushes out of its rectum.

I feel the same, I agree that the web has gone downhill with all the endless JavaScript wasting all the available CPU cycles. (With all the rest CPU cycles being wasted by the swap-in/out because of the memory bloat of web browsers, again.) This is why these days I ALWAYS enable Low Power Mode in any browser or system that provides such a functionality; macOS has finally added this a few years ago — better late than never.

But I feel like ALL browser vendors are not doing enough to combat this bloat. There have to be resource limits, warning messages/icons, and stop-gap measures to avoid pointless JavaScript wasting our electricity; but NONE of the browsers do this to an extent I'd wish they'd do; in fact, Chrome has actually been ahead of Firefox and Safari in reigning these sites, probably because it has to run in production on 4GB ChromeOS machines costing $99, whereas all the Firefox and Safari devs are probably using 48GB machines costing $2399 as their benchmarks. So, the reality, is that, ironically, Chrome is again the leader even in this area. Because Chrome on a $99 4GB ChromeOS machine feels snappier than Firefox on a $999 MacBook, given enough open tabs.

Your point about feature bloat sounds good in principle, but is not practical in reality. In reality, if things don't work in Safari, you're simply asked to install an app from the App Store. Or if you have to configure a keyboard on a Mac, you have to use a Windows machine with the native keyboard configuration tool, instead of VIA in Chrome WebHID or WebUSB. Why in your opinion are these alternatives not worse than having these sorts of things as web standards as written by Chrome?

The author here. It wasn't addressed in this post because it was treated separately several years ago in the same series (linked at the top):

https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...

TL;DR is that the premise of the argument is false, or at least almost entirely so, and deprives Apple of agency, when in fact it has all the power in the equation.

That article also does not appear to have anything to say about the validity of "standards" that are nothing more than Google's feature creep for web browsers. At some point, you need to actually defend the idea that a web browser should be able to enumerate what Bluetooth and USB devices you have connected. Dancing around such issues is what's making your "Assault on Standards" claim sound so hollow. You need to justify how your position doesn't simply boil down to "Apple should follow Google's lead".

That's simply a misunderstanding of how features come to the web. There is no immaculate conception for web APIs. No magical room in which they are dreamt up, or spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus.

Instead, they come from open, honest, iterative design (when done well), and shipping ahead of others is risky, but that's why we designed the Blink Launch Process to demand so much pre-work (specs, tests, origin trials, good faith attempts to include other vendors in design, etc.) in order to launch that way.

Some background on these points here:

https://infrequently.org/series/effective-standards-work/

https://youtu.be/1Z83L6xa1tw?si=939PBH4_idtZGI6Y

As to, "should Apple follow Chromium's lead", perhaps ask "how would that be different than today?"

See:

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/safari-16-4-is-an-admission...

And:

https://infrequently.org/2025/06/the-ghost-of-christmas-past...

You're still dodging the issue. Your article title accusing Apple of an "assault on standards" is implicitly treating Google's proposals as a fait accompli that Apple is resisting, which is not at all what the situation is for many of the Chrome features you are trying not to be specific about.

You say that shipping ahead of others is risky, but can't seem to acknowledge when the negative outcome comes to pass and other browser vendors aren't interested in adopting questionable feature proposals.

I'm simply pointing out that Apple declined to try to constructively solve the problems developers expressed, demurred from engaging in design work in many areas, and did not ship alternatives instead (as it could have, and did in the past when Safari/WebKit were not on a starvation budget).

The downsides to this are not lost on me. Why do you think I'm making an issue of it publicly now? We tried literally everything else. This is last resort stuff. The goal is always more collaboration, and through it, better, better-funded, and more capable browsers. Apple is the unique obstacle to all of that today.

Please consider the possibility that some proposed features should not exist. The objections to many of Chrome's features are fundamental, not aesthetic, or complaints about nuances of how it's implemented. Many people outside Google simply do not want the browser to be a full-fledged OS, especially if that means weakening privacy or security controls of the host OS.

Sometimes, the right response to a feature proposal is simply "no". But you're seemingly unwilling to accept that as a valid answer. The alternative you're not seeing is that of not having the dubious features in the browser.

But those features do exist as long as you're willing to pay Apple's tax.

I feel like that's already explained in the originally linked article here.

If you don't want Bluetooth from your browser, you can always install Firefox on Android.

I feel like it's 2005, and you're arguing that web browsers should not have access to a camera.

Or is camera access by a web browser still not a standard today in 2025, either, thanks to Apple, I may guess?

Or let me tell you as a Firefox user on macOS.

I'd much rather have to switch to Brave or Vivaldi for a video phone call, or keyboard configuration, or NFC, than install half a dozen of outdated third-party XXX-only apps with full permissions and questionable security practices or distribution methods.

The better question to ask here, is, why would you NOT want to have a CHOICE to have these things in a secure browser by SEVERAL distinct major vendors like Google, Microsoft, Brave and Vivaldi, and Yandex, and Opera, and others?

Again, I don't even use Chrome. I replace it even on Android. So, I am not concerned with Google taking me over, because they clearly aren't.

But how am I more secure when I have to install lots of dodgy apps to get the most basic things like video conferencing working?

Thanks for the link. I read it.

Alas, I think you and I are probably too far apart on the premises we accept to have a useful discussion, but I appreciate learning about your perspective and I appreciate your reply.

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