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Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait until regulators do their job and take away Apple's dictatorial control, in all areas, and all these doom-and-gloom predictions on all these tangential issues end up proving ludicrous.

What kind of control would Chrome have over the web? Adding APIs doesn't force the billions of websites to adopt them. So what if a website adds WebBluetooth? You don't want the web to have that anyway, and if you keep using Safari, you still won't have it. Happy you!

If scrappy Firefox on open platforms could save the web from 95% IE, then why are we all dependent on Apple, alone, to save us from ~60% Chrome? It's learned helplessness and Stockholm syndrome. I wonder how our species survived before the trillion-dollar company started taking such good care of us!

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Not even a day ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454115:

> I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.

> I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation Robin Hood waylanders)."

Why did you link me to a random comment?

edit: I see now. Firefox still has uBlock Origin. You missed the point. If Chrome wants to make itself less attractive, you should celebrate.

If you read it, it shows the impact Google has on browser quality for end users.

Firefox onpy works because iOS means site owners have to support multiple engines

I wonder how many chrome fanboys remember the ie6 days.

> If Chrome wants to make itself less attractive, you should celebrate.

I appreciate that Chrome reducing user autonomy in order to further Google's own business goals _should_ be a reduction in their competitiveness in a perfect market.

But the web browser market does not have perfect competition today, and I cannot recall a time when it had.

Regulators preventing Apple from controlling iOS browser engines but allowing Google to have de facto ownership of the web would be an example of governments picking winners and losers.

Public policy needs to move the market towards real competition.

> What kind of control would Chrome have over the web? Adding APIs doesn't force the billions of websites to adopt them.

You are assuming adding APIs is a net positive, and the debacle that was Chrome’s privacy sandbox initiative suggests that’s not the case

> why are we all dependent on Apple, alone, to save us from ~60% Chrome?

How’s Firefox doing now? They’re literally dependent upon Chrome to exist. Without Google they have no money to fund development.

The only viable non-Chromium browser engine today that is not funded by Google is WebKit.

That was almost 20 years ago though. Things are really different now and it's hard to imagine Firefox saving anything these days. Sadly, the only entities powerful enough to control FANGs are FANGs (although fingers crossed the EU holds it's nerve and EU nations belatedly act on the realisation that being beholden to US tech giants is a massive strategic blunder, akin to relying so heavily on US military satellite data for Ukraine).

Yes, new problems will require new solutions. I'm calling out the logic of paternalism and dependency, an impotent hope pinned on a "benevolent" corporation retaining absolute control forever.

I don't have much faith in Firefox saving us, given its organizational turnover and cultural issues.

I have much more faith in a new entrant, like Ladybird. I should be able to use Ladybird on iOS. Why not?

The problem with "new entrant" is that only revolutionary features convince users to switch en mass.

Tabs/stability (Firefox vs IE). V8 (Chrome vs Firefox).

Anything else is a battle of attrition, where the deepest pocketed competitor in terms of advertising spend wins. Or Google, because it flood all its own advertising channels.

And Chrome still barely only won.

Ladybird has too much pride.

They are more concerned with making something from scratch than something that actually works.

Also they’re switching over to Swift which can only be worse for performance.

So what do you want another chromium based browser? The whole point of Ladybird is to kinda prove that a completely independent browser engine is feasible. Also, they are not doing everything from scratch for example it will use the same graphics library that chromium uses (Skia) and also now firefox. You should probably read the FAQ on their homepage:

https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=What%20does%20%22No%20code%20f...

> So what do you want another chromium based browser?

I want something free of Google code, which sounds like they aren’t doing if Skia is anyway involved.

Instead they’re wasting resources where it’s less needed. Like building a JS engine instead of starting off with something like SpiderMonkey, JSCore, or QuickJS.

Let them spend resources however they want. It's not like they are subsidized or anything

>It's not like they are subsidized or anything

View sponsors https://ladybird.org/

Am I missing any govt org there?

Subsidize doesn’t only mean government funded.

> What kind of control would Chrome have over the web?

Do you remember Manifest Version 3? They did away with ad block extensions.

If we all end up using Chromium, there’s no longer a web standard. It’s whatever conforms to Google’s standard because all sites will have to support Chromium. That means there will be an undocumented spec. It’s much too difficult for browser engine developers to compete with them, they don’t have nearly the resources.

Do you think the web should be an open standard? How can company catch up if Google is the one pushing the envelope?

Just want to be super clear here… the other party in this question being Apple who is currently the worlds richest company who makes the worlds buggiest browser as seen here https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...

The idea that you’re pushing is a hole that Apple themselves have dug on purpose, this is not an oversight but a very intentional decision of theirs to protect their profit margins that their main user retention strategy is that many courts in the world especially the US are never going to force them to compete freely in an open marketplace with consumer choice is a factor.

I never once said anything in favor of Safari, that’s not something I’m “pushing”. I’m in favor more than just Chromium.

So according to you, a company that has about 25% of the global smartphone market, should be _legally forbidden_ from creating a tightly integrated software/hardware bundle.

Whereas, a company that has 70% of the global browser market somehow would have no way to take advantage if they had an even larger share.

I wonder how our species would survive without the unique market analysis from one-of-a-kind minds like yours.

Web and Apple ecosystem is not comparable. IE had quite large market share and was brought down by Chrome in quite short time. Firefox challenged IE quite effectively before that. But Windows (desktop) still enjoys quite large market share even though Google, Linux and Apple (macOS) are trying hard.

The OS lock-in is much more difficult to break than Web where the standards are openly built and made available. One aspect in favor of Google is the complexity of implementing all those standards. But that is not lock-in, rather an issue of having enough resources to implement a compliant browser.

> The OS lock-in is much more difficult to break than Web where the standards are openly built and made available.

Where have you been in the past 10 years or so? Chrome views the web as their own fiefdom, and web devs happily oblige. There are now dozens of Chrome-only non-standards that are presented as "openly built standards" and devs deride other browsers for not implementing them.

It is the decision of the other vendors to not implement the standards (for good reasons, like for e.g. privacy - but it is still the vendor's decisionand not an inherent limitation). The documentations and specifications are available for free.

In case of Windows, there is no spec. There is no possibility of implementing another Windows clone (patents limit such clones). Wine exists, but was reverse engineered with great difficulty.

> It is the decision of the other vendors to not implement the standards

A scribble on a napkin does not a standard make.

A feature released in a single browser engine without support, consent, and against objections of other browser vendors does not a standard make.

Just because Chrome ships something does not make whatever they ship a standard.

> The documentations and specifications are available for free.

That's how Chrome abuses its position and relies on gullible devs to assume that just because something is documented it becomes a standard the moment it's shipped in Chrome.

That's not how standards work.

> a company that has about 25% of the global smartphone market, should be _legally forbidden_ from creating a tightly integrated software/hardware bundle.

Absolutely not. Most of us are perfectly happy with Apple tightly integrating Safari with their hardware.

However, we're going to legally forbid them to prevent users from breaking that tight integration, because it's their device. Apple doesnt "own" the smartphone market: it provides hardware and services, and it shuts the fuck up.

> If scrappy Firefox

Because ie at the time was dogshit. FF was such an indisputable improvement that people just had to switch.

Chrome great. There is nothing a newcomer can do to compete.

There are plenty of things to compete on: efficiency (startup time, memory use), security (from ad blocking on sites to extensions to the app itself), customization (both in looks and behavior)

There is plenty a browser could do to compete, from blocking modern popups (which now occur within the window, putting a gradient over the content forcing you to interact with their "subscribe to our mailing list" or "join our site to socialize" prompt that you would have to waste time clicking past, auto-pausing looping videos in unfocused tabs, throttling crypto mining tabs, providing uBlock Origin, handling WiFi Terms of Service click through, etc.

Think of the plethora of instances where you wish your browser made minor changes to make browsing easier

Additionally, the predatory UI in Windows that pushes Edge, and on Google.com that push Chrome, simply did not exist at the time.

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