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Comment by hayksaakian | Hacker News Reader

I agree the client side situation is a mess, but I think its getting better.

The biggest problem is the conflict of interest between the major browser makers in that they are also handheld device makers.

They have every incentive to keep the browser dumb in order to keep devs using java/objc and staying on their platform.

Firefox is really the only thing that has the influence and power to "save us" (obviously barring anything unpredictable).

But last I checked, they were still bankrolled by Google, and their browser has stale market share.

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That may be true with Apple (WebGL please?), but I haven't felt that way about Google before. I've always seen Android as a means to an end for them, to get more people using the web. Any further reading?

I've always seen Android as a means to an end for them, to get more people using the web. Any further reading?

That used to be the story, but then it changed as a means to get people into Google services, and guess what: You don't need a web to do that.

The current state of Android is that all defaults, unless you override them and install third party apps, involve you logging into a Google account and storing and associating everything you do with that: Mail, Contacts, Calendar-data, Photos, Music, etc.

And to install third party apps, you need to log in with a Google+ account, and when you do that, the sync for all the above-mentioned things get activated.

Escaping the Google-creep is getting harder and harder on Android, so I seriously hope FirefoxOS, Jolla, Tizen or anything really will be getting somewhere and soon.

Android is not feeling quite as cozy as it used to anymore.

It's a means to an end for them in that it gets more people using their ecosystem, which means more personal data for them to harvest, which means ever-better targeted ads for people to click on, and ever-more-varied platforms on which to show said adverts.

I've always seen Chrome, Chrome OS and Android as first and foremost defensive products: if you control the OS you control the default browser, and if you control the browser you control the default search engine.

When you look at it that way these products are all very logical moves to protect Google's search business (and the very very lucrative ad business attached to it). The rest is added bonus.

> They have every incentive to keep the browser dumb in order to keep devs using java/objc and staying on their platform.

It's IE6 all over again :(

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