But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
⸻
1. Although as I think about it, this may only be valid on the right side of the spectrum given the data points.
Your politics are part of your identity now. It's part of how you define who you are, and according to the research, over 95% of people are completely entrenched and will never vote for any candidate from the "other" party. (This the highest since right before the Civil War.)
That said, while nobody's changing sides any time soon, people _do_ stay home on election day, and we're going to see that next election.
The races for the next couple decades will be won by the candidates and the parties who can drill up enough enthusiasm from their base. Preach to the choir so the choir sings, etc.
Nobody is working on solving death/aging.
You have to pay rent, go to work, companies have average Joe’s shilling for them.
The entire society is death marching toward - well - death! And nobody notices or cares in the slightest.
The vast majority of people think they will live for all of eternity “in heaven” and many others just don’t even think about it.
The shortness and pointlessness of their lives doesn’t even cross their minds - worse - they think the point is feelings!
And so it’s a war of who can have the best feelings for ~80 years and that’s it.
Doesn’t get any more idiotic than present day wealth inequality and total lack and void of real intellectual pursuits
Humans have figured out an easy medicine to reduce weight, which is the number 1 causal factor in morbidity/mortality.
There are also novel cancer immunotherapy medicines that are drastically increasing quality and quantity of life for cancer patients, like keytruda and blinatumomab.
For wealthy cancer patients.
I imagine it is available most Europeans/Canadians/Australians/etc too.
I guess they are wealthy though compared to the billions of people in poorer countries.
However, it's generally hard for me to give Biden much credit for anything, however, given his own and his party's general complicity with decades of genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Same for Harris.
That and oversight of many more atrocities also carried forth by his predecessors really puts a damper on any good deed and make it hard to buy into any narrative of authenticity when it comes to politics that benefit human beings.
I also generally think Bernie would have played hardball on antitrust and given what we got with Biden, I'd prefer to have seen what Bernie could have done with the time.
Eight years of Sanders would have left us with a far more gridlocked country. The man has virtually no political talent.
More unique individual people donated to his primary efforts than any other candidate in history. Wouldn't this be indicative of some large amount of political talent?
Sanders couldn't do that. How do you think he would have fared with Republicans?
He's never passed a significant bill of his own and focuses on renaming post offices.
The man has no political skill. As president he would have been a disaster.
This is what I take issue with. It's a heavy enough accusation that it needs receipts. It needs proper framing on why exactly the benchmarks you've listed are important for delineating political skill and why other benchmarks are not.
- legislation proposed and passed - elections won (i.e. candidate WAR) - ability to make backroom deals - campaigning skills
He's not good at any of those except the last one. I've mentioned the bills, he lost two primaries (his staffers engaged in election denialism both times), only has a seat because he's in a safe Dem state, and has a reputation for being a difficult politician to work with. He is obviously out-of-touch with American voters, his policy proposals are very fluffy and barely substantial, and about the nicest thing I can about his campaigns is that they draw in an enthusiastic crowd, but not one that seems to vote for him and his candidates.
Progressives have much better politicians now: Mamdani, AOC, Al-Sayed. If all of them can deliver like Mamdani - who might genuinely have the best political skills of any American politician living now - then maybe this "what if Bernie won" stuff could actually work. But Sanders would have crashed and burned the second the GOP shut down the government, because he's not good at convincing people who disagree with him.
Considering that he actually won the primary, I would consider him to be much more of a "man of the people" than Sanders.
Even Mitt Romney, who has the WRONG LETTER NEXT TO HIS NAME, spearheaded bipartisan COVID tax reforms that halved childhood poverty.
I think calling someone a man of the people requires them to have successfully accomplished things on behalf of the people. Sanders... has really not.
> Considering that he actually won the primary, I would consider him to be much more of a "man of the people" than Sanders.
This is how I know you are either being disingenuous or ignorant, so your arrogance is not warranted. Sanders was snubbed and cheated by the DNC during his 2016 campaign and they did not support him seriously the second time around. At the time, he felt a Democrat victory was more important than Trump winning, saw how the DNC was treating him and backed down in order to support Biden.
> I think calling someone a man of the people requires them to have successfully accomplished things on behalf of the people. Sanders... has really not.
Sure, if we start choosing arbitrary definitions for things, you can make any point that you'd like. However, there is little use in you redefining words that I used, because then it's just a straw man. When I say "man of the people", I mean someone who has my and your best interest at heart.
That is not Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris nor the DNC nor Trump nor Vance nor the GOP. Doing some good here and there doesn't erase Biden's legacy as an extreme warhawk, as the man who wrote the Patriot act, as someone who expanded our national domestic surveillance network, as an Israeli-Palestinian genocide supporter and a host of other horrible anti-democratic things.
You're disregarding the entire point, that the status quo is not working, and literally anyone with their heart in the right place is an improvement over the majority of politicians working in the legislative and executive branches today.
Clearly you're getting emotionally upset, your little "FFS" is not needed, your patronizing attitude is not needed. If you want to have a political discussion, great. If you're just here to belittle me while displaying your own ignorance, we can cut this short here.
This is completely disconnected from reality. Biden would have been considered a republican in any era except the current hyper-extremist times.
I don't think we're exactly talking past each other. I think the problem is that you've misdiagnosed the problem as, like you said in another comment, "a malfunctioning executive branch", and don't realize the full scale of Congress's culpability. I honestly thought you would know what I was talking about regarding the feasibility of a "functioning Congress", but you apparently just think that's an important but trivial detail to mention. Woops.
Almost all the major problems either stem from or could at least be mitigated by Congress doing its job. This became very clear on the micro level when I worked in the federal government, but as far as I can tell it's true at all scales. Here's a macro example: a functioning Congress would have removed Trump many times over.
At no point did I assign triviality to the process of establishing a functioning Congress. In fact, I promoted it to be equal alongside a functioning executive branch.
You're arguing with a sarcastic attitude and continuing to interpret my words uncharitably. I'm interested in having this conversation and hearing your perspective as a former federal worker, but I don't want it to be hostile.
> If only the DNC was interested in promoting candidates that work for the people and aren't just interested in lip service while mostly maintaining the status quo. Things could have been different. Imagine what 8 years of Bernie and a functioning Congress might have accomplished.
Yes, you acknowledge that a functioning Congress is necessary for the scenario, but at least by my reading, only perfunctorily. It's thrown in with no visible connection to the rest of the scenario.
Maybe I misread this and the actual starting point for your scenario is a DNC that works for the people, and this leads to both Bernie and a functioning Congress? I still don't buy it. Such a well-intentioned party is already fantasy in my view (we could equally well imagine a well-intended GOP), and even if it existed it wouldn't fix all the problems that a single party can cause. The whole scenario falls apart. That could be why I missed this interpretation: it's less common to see, still doesn't make sense, and Bernie in particular doesn't really figure into it.
> But as you've already pointed out, it's kind of pointless if the fundamental problem is a malfunctioning executive branch (and a federal government with far too much power).
This is technically phrased as a conditional, but with subtext that accepts the premise about the "fundamental problem" (and is content-free otherwise). This makes it an implicit claim that the fundamental problem is indeed the executive.
If you don't think these statements show a lack of focus on Congress's dysfunctionality, clarify.
Again, that claim of incorrect focus was the main content of my original response to your "things could have been better":
> That "functioning Congress" requirement is doing a lot of the work in that claim, and no single election result would make that happen.
Maybe the "no single election result" thing was a misread, but why else would you mention Bernie unless you thought that was significant enough to matter? It isn't. The problem is the incentives in the overall system, and everything you've talked about is downstream of those.
Anyway, my perspective as a former federal worker is mostly a hundred papercuts that have mercifully faded into the past, but which at the time were all traceable to some act, or failure to act, of Congress. It was mind-numbing at the time, and could only be boring now even if I recalled the details.
> If you don't think these statements show a lack of focus on Congress's dysfunctionality, clarify
Arguing about meta on the internet with a stranger is not something I find fun nor a good use of my time. I clarified my intent, so latching on to a misunderstanding that has already been corrected completely derails the conversation from the actual topic.
> This is technically phrased as a conditional
Dude, it's okay to misunderstand someone on the internet. I tried clarifying, smoothing things over and discussing the topic but you have replied with a list of technicalities and further assumptions and and even more negative attitude. This is not a healthy way to discuss anything, especially because we are no longer even discussing the thing; instead you're expecting me to continue defending myself against a barrage of further misunderstandings and assumptions.
Have a nice day, please do not respond with further bickering.
As a person who was born in the Soviet Union I can easily imagine that...
As well as youtube, and the combination of google drive/docs.
I constantly get something like "Today, we are going to discuss which model is better at programming. Is it an tropic's latest model, Cloud Fable? Or is it, Open AI's Chat G pity?"
It's as though Google hired my dyslexic ass to write the subtitles. It trips me up even more because I can't tell if I misread something or the chat messed up sometimes.
I cannot comment on translation or dubbing. English is the only language I can somewhat understand.
So, if I may change my opinion, early YouTube was better, despite being owned by Google. I feel like the platform has been atrocious in the last decade or more. Constant clickbait, a new NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends ad every 15 minutes, politics being injected into every other video, creators trying to game the algorithm to escape the rat race, the obnoxious algorithm itself, and now I am getting an absurd amount of LLM generated videos.
I would not dare claim there is not great content though. I am listening to a YouTube video as I type this. Though, I have been listening this particular creator since 2006, if that tells you anything.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel YouTube is just getting the slow squeeze of death -- like everything Google wraps its tentacles around.
Paying for views is both why we have high quality content, and why the site is so gamed.
What would limiting corporations from contributing more than the total of max donation per employee? I've never seen numbers from that, but I've heard people discuss it.
I do agree that we need to limit spending, but I don't know how to get there without a candidate like this getting traction. Sort of a chicken and egg thing.
The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.
In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.
I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
That hinders development.
In this instance, should we let AdSense persist as a platform? It does turn out lots of revenue, but it does so by creating a closed ad space economy that Alphabet manages. This not only gives Google and YouTube unfair advantages on their own ad service, but it also creates a blind auction for businesses that don't know what their advertisements are worth. The entire system is deliberately and artificially segregated from competitors to AdSense.
We see this throughout America's economy, with Apple and Microsoft too. It undoubtedly incurs fiscal damage to legitimate competitors that should be given fair ground to offer a better service. But since the US federal government encourages consolidation, all of America's services get described as "enshittified" by their customers while China innovates.
America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.
> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.
Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.
What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.
> know (academic) international relations Realism.
or you not knowing less about economics then you think
> to counter China and keep Europe safe.
eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).
So what Europe need is strong economy to counter US and keep us safe from them, the most dangerous country for world peace together with Israel.
Sadly for EU they will keep shooting themselves in one leg with RU sanctions and shooting themselves to other leg with Green Deal nonsense, so you don't really need strong economy to be better than EU, just a bit of common sense.
Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely.
> I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
I see you have an unconventional definition of the word "great". I'll take that to mean you're an outside-the-box thinker, so you're in a good position to understand that a break up of Google would radically change all the markets they're dominant in.
If Android 'dies' post-breakup, that would leave a gaping hole in the economy. iOS might fill it, but regulators would need to break them up too. Say iOS 'dies' too, would we all collectively just stop using smartphones? Obviously not. Entrepreneurs who can see opportunity will raise money and hire the right people to build a new OS, foundations will apply for grants to maintain Android or iOS forks, industry standards will form to improve interop and reduce development costs, etc. The sky's the limit!
If they charged users directly, everyone would just switch back to Firefox.
I think that Chrome development team members will have plenty of new job and business opportunities available to them if this ever happens. New markets will open up for browser tech that didn't exist before, and I think everyone will come out winning in the end, even users who would never even consider paying money for a web browser.
You just explicitly claimed that Chrome has definitively a viable business model as a stand-alone company ("Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely."). Now you claim the opposite...
Is the argument also as strong for the other cases?
The original question was:
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Please take note of the absence of the word "standalone" in that quote.
My response to the response to my response (henceforth responses['bogwog'][1]) was thus:
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? ...
Please note the truthiness of `'standlone' in responses['bogwog'][1]`
From this evidence we can surmise that my point was 'Chrome' the non-business can't survive as an independent business, because Chrome is not a business. Likewise, the 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' you get on an airplane can't survive as an independent business were we to break up the airline, as 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' isn't a business.
But can Chrome the project survive without Google? I say yes, just like Cheez-Its can survive without being complimentary additions to overpriced flights. For why I think that, please refer to my other comment in this thread.
Thank you.
No one is paying for browsers. Maybe there is a market for enterprise support contracts for it, but this is not going to replace the money spigot of Google Ads. If I were to guess, Chrome "as its own business" would go bust very fast, with the staff being picked up by Microsoft (to support Edge, which basically is a Chrome fork) and Apple (to make Safari decent).
Android I'd say could survive, at least as long as it is bundled in the same entity that handles Play Store, that thing is a money printer. Without it... I'd say Samsung won't care, they already have their own marketplace and mess around in AOSP to an unholy degree, and everyone else will either attempt to fork Android like some Chinese brands did, go for Graphene or go bust like HTC.
Youtube... they probably got enough Premium subscribers now to keep the lights on, the problems are going to start when they have to separate their infrastructure. Bandwidth is still insanely expensive and at the moment they benefit a lot from Google being the top dog, able to tell even the largest ISPs "peer with us for free, or else". Without that leverage, with their own infra, bandwidth costs are going to eat them alive.
It's an old American Tradition in need of revival
The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though
I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.
I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).
And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.
Market share appears to be hovering around 4%, which sounds small but that is still a massive amount of people, over 200 million users. It is even more impressive considering it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users, people overwhelmingly just use what is already installed. That's a huge number of users earned rather than inherited.
I don’t understand how it has any market share. It’s like finding out that 80% of people voluntarily install browser toolbars that force penis pill ads down your throat, and then there are a bunch of HN fanboys saying that all other alternatives are worse.
Will Google employees who used UBO now vomit over their own corp decisions and reverse?
Remember when Microsoft was sued for having installed one browser in their OS and making it default?
Now suddenly we're okay with another company installing another browser in their OS
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
I would not mind to pay for the browser, but they will not let me.
They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".
> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome
Very few people go to that page anyway.
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
QFT. The biggest impediment to Firefox's success is the Mozilla Org, which sees it as a cash cow to fund a zillion projects no one wants (sacrificing the future of the browser everyone wants).
Most "internet users" are mobile. The ones using windows are doing it from work laptops that are locked down and use edge (chrome).
If windows was a growing market MS would not be so far down the extraction path they have gone with the OS.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
No they wouldn't. Everyone recommended Chrome, and it came long before Edge (given Edge is based on Chromium). People have got used to Chrome. That's why it does well. People don't even interact with those sites so much any more, as they've all moved to phone apps, but they all still use Chrome.
> Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
Just paying far fewer executives and putting money aside for lean years is a good start. Put aside $150m/year and spend $100m on servers and engineers and that'll get you a long way. But because it's free money it gets spent on nonsense.
I'd gladly do the same for firefox, but they have not given the opportunity.
If I had the cash back then I'd do the same for B2G/firefoxOS.
If they stop paying tens of millions to their management, they could easily afford paying devs in perpetuity just from investing that money.
At $1M per year (equivalent to a good startup exit, but zero risk), that’s 70 engineers; probably senior to principal phd’s with 10 yr+ experience.
If that’s not enough to maintain a web browser, then pay them to simplify the damn thing.
Firefox works everywhere I point it to, for now. "Let the user modify their own software" does not cost extra.
We all know how that was paid for. Google. But instead of taking that money stream and investing it 100% into making it the best browser ever, they pursued a myriad of fancy distractions. Yes, making a sustainable browser project is hard. Making a sustainable browser project while being constantly distracted by side project and political activism [1] is even harder. I am not saying if Mozilla stayed focused the win would be guaranteed. But I am pretty sure doing it like they are doing it guarantees failure.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need...
Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.
Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:
>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.
It's fiddly to even manually wipe history in Vanadium as it defaults to the '15 mins' option, and then it tries to suggest a subset of sites it thinks you want to retain data for **
* (Yes I know about the suboptimal workaround of the intent shortcut)
** (Yes I know this is upstream behaviour.)
It starts to lag after a while on some sites but force-stopping occasionally fixes it for me.
No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.
I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.
Genuine curiosity: what's it lacking?
Joke: it doesn't have 80% market share.
But also with AI, the most I'm doing is hitting inspect and sending problem elements. Maybe screen resizing for mobile.
I created an automation tool recently for taking screenshots (for SOC2 reporting, hopefully tptacek is proud), and getting it working with FF on the CLI was very painful (but necessary since I needed my cookies!)
I think both are kind of equivalent nowadays but I find that the Firefox one has a better design and looks more polished
Cloudflare with their "checking if the site connection is secure" (while being MITM) is another example.
You may as well say all load-balancers are MITM because you might connect to a different host on each attempt and there's a man in the middle influencing your connection.
What makes it any different if the website executed the same logic cloudflare is on their own box?
Without Cloudflare it's highly unlikely that 20% of websites _would_ implement the same logic.
I am convinced all their metrics saying they reduce bot traffic are mistaken for the fact that they reduce all traffic by annoying users away.
The entire point was that it was a browser built by a warm and friendly community, and not corporate interests.
I have no hope that they will keep their other values if they’ve already been so quick to let this one go.
I've met so many people in the tech industry who use Zen Browser. Not even because of some ideological point, but just because it is cooler.
So no, I don't believe it'll be gone. I believe firefox and ff-based browsers will actually make a comeback.
Last time I tried it a thing saying "Refresh Firefox" popped up which I clicked and it wiped the extensions which I got back following some online help but lost completely I think the crypto keys in metamask - like https://www.reddit.com/r/Metamask/comments/14rcg6k/firefox_r...
Luckily I had backup elsewhere but it kind of freaked me out.
It's far more likely that one of the many addons/extensions you had was the cause.
As for 'Refresh Firefox', it does exactly what it says it does - wipe a lot of your configuration to bring it closer to stock. It's intended as a way to show people new defaults and help clear out old, bloated configs. It shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing.
We've been here before with Windows and IE dominance!
IE peaked at ~95% market share, and windows peaked at ~97%.
Broadly it seems to me that Google is behaving much like MS did.
But who knows, everything is the same and different this time around.
Primary: 94.140.14.14
Secondary: 94.140.15.15
I use chrome and those sites are miserable.
If everyone runs a vibe coded browser engine that evaporates and you might as well just have sites serve a bunch of markdown for LLMs to render in whatever inconsistent way they choose.
Now that mv2 is going away, I switch back to firefox, and it still has memory leak issues after all these years, it is really disappointing.
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.
I do know a few perpetually single people working in academia using some obscure Linux distro(btw my company is 90%+ Fedora).
I am completely over thinking HN nerds can cause an uprising. Somehow the aristocrats have almost no power in democracy and capitalism. Power is held in 0.1%ers and the masses.
I am 99% sure Firefox will run just fine without systemd, or OpenRC half of Gentoo would be with pitchforks and torches.
It isn't correct, either, that it requires PulseAudio; I'm running FF with PipeWire, for example. But perhaps let's steelman that to "does not work with ALSA". I'm not sure what the objection to PA would be. It appears you can run FF under an adapter that will backport FF's PA output to ALSA — so it is possible to do —, I'm just not fathoming what the objection to Pulse is. (Or for that matter, its successor, PipeWire.)