11 ms·

Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to

206 points by sbuk 8y ago

mrep 8y ago
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703172
- magicalist 8y ago
  Unsourced HN anecdote becomes Ars story becomes HN discussion. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    exactly. it's like money laudering, only for bad anecdotal information, or conspiracy theories. I'd sooner invoke Hanlon's razor than a single div tag that Edge's hardware acceleration should have been robust enough to handle anyway.
jeromebaek 8y ago
> even if Google takes Chromium in a direction that Microsoft disagrees with or opposes, Microsoft will have little option but to follow along regardless. I keep seeing arguments like this and it doesn't make sense to me. Help me understand. My impression is that since Chromium is open-source Google cannot have a monopolistic wield over it. And now the fact that a bunch of Microsoft engineers will be contributing to Chromium seems to imply that Google and Microsoft will have the same amount of muscle mass to struggle for control. For example if Google tries to make a change in Chromium that will break Microsoft's products Microsoft can quickly respond to this. So why is the argument that Microsoft is ceding the web to Google, rather than trying to wrest back? To me it seems like the latter is at least as plausible as the former.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  Google effectively has the right to veto patches into Chromium. In the worst case, Google could fork Chromium, and since Google controls the build artifacts, in a dispute between Google and Microsoft, it's Google who wields the power.
  - Micoloth 8y ago
    But, isn't it reasonable to assume that microsoft will get hold of the Whole codebase if they embrace this as their new default browser? I mean its Microsoft we're talking about..
    - tracker1 8y ago
      Well, it's likely they'll only use the core rendering engine (Blink, formerly Webkit) and wrap their own application around it. Hell, with all the applications they've released or are working on with electron (Teams, VS Code, SQL Operations Studio), I'm far less surprised. I've been hoping they'd come up with for a more shared model for applications in the node/npm ecosystem similar to Adobe's Air. If MS did a good job of such a platform from open-source with tooling to build applications that run everywhere, more power to them.
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    How is it Google? Anyone could just fork Chromium and do anything about it, it's open source after all. Microsoft could buy people from Google if they wanted to, they probably could buy an entire Chrome team. Google has some control over Chromium engine right now, but this control is fragile. It's the same control that Oracle has over MySQL. Abuse it and you'll have MariaDB instantly. Abuse Java control and you'll have plenty of companies forked Java and ready to provide real LTS for Java 8. It'll be the same for Chromium. The best outcome would be to have some Non-commercial organization funded by Google, Microsoft, Yandex and other big players who benefit from Chromium which would have some kind of independence. But current situation is not that bad. There are other things than just source code license. May be Google has patents for Chromium sources and could use them to forbid fork? Then it's a bad situation but I didn't heard about that point of view yet.
zeckalpha 8y ago
Don’t forget where Chromium came from. KHTML lead to Safari lead to Chrome which lead to Chromium. It’s been forked and obounced from open source to corporation to corporation to open source.
- zitterbewegung 8y ago
  Also to note on the engines used it went from khtml to WebKit and then google forked WebKit into Blink. Also opera switched from writing their own engine and moved to chromium .And now it seems the next version of edge will also use Blink being derived from chromium. Which puts everyone in a position that on all platforms you are using WebKit derived browsers (also mobile is in the same boat with WebKit powering both Chrome and Safari.
- ajross 8y ago
  All thanks to the LGPLv2, I guess? Maybe we should have handed the internet over to RMS.
  - utopcell 8y ago
    That'd be a nightmare.
    - snaky 8y ago
      Ads would be not as perfectly targeted as they are now?
      - heavyset_go 8y ago
        The horror!
      - utopcell 8y ago
        They probably would, they'd just be named GNU / Ads.
    - femiagbabiaka 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ori_b 8y ago
Which one should we have handed the web over to?
- dana321 8y ago
  Not Microsoft, thats for sure.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Microsoft still largely operates by you paying it money in return for software and services. Hell of a step up.
    - s17n 8y ago
      That's because it's an enterprise company. Consumers won't pay for software.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Hasn't seemed to discourage them from vacuuming up information and handing it to the NSA.
    - dmitriy_ko 8y ago
      You can use Windows 10 for free with no limitations.
      - freehunter 8y ago
        Windows is far from the only product Microsoft makes.
      - ac29 8y ago
        Not legally.
    - kgwxd 8y ago
      Paying for things does not stop ads, telemetry, and various other malware from being part of a product. Microsoft is a prime example.
the_other_guy 8y ago
Yet I'd choose Google over Facebook, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon every time if I have to. Even though monopoly is always worse than competition, Google has managed to advance the web experience using Chrome/Chromium (e.g. V8, pushing HTTPS, supporting the latest CSS and JS features, GQUIC, WebP) EDIT: to downvoters, what's your argument here?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Yes, we can trash Google but I can't think of many others who'd be better. Imagine if GM, Ford, Exxon or Dow Chemical ran the show :)
  - the_other_guy 8y ago
    It seems people keep complaining that Google is "evil" but they forgot that until only a couple of decades ago, the business world was ruled by oil, banking and finance ultra selfish assholes who had no shame to bring their own countries and even the world if possible to its knees to make profits.
    - Jedi72 8y ago
      People also forget that when those companies were young they were hailed as tech innovators who brought economic prosperity, not evil monopolists destroying the planet with their unintended consequences. That part comes after
PinkMilkshake 8y ago
Just a hypothetical. Is it possible the way to fix this issue is to actually have all vendors do the same thing. Should all the vendors including Mozilla switch to Chromium and then fork it, couldn't we look at this as a "rebasing" of the Web? If the forks are true hard forks, then we shouldn't necessarily end up in a situation where one vendor has more power than the other. On the contrary, all vendors would now be on an even footing with the same strong, highly-compatible core engine. All the issues people have with Firefox and Edge would no longer be relevant, and the only thing left to judge one company from another would be their value-add services or their ethics.
- pdkl95 8y ago
  Similar to problems seen in agricultural monocultures, software monocultures massively increase the risk of widespread failure from a single attack.
- Santosh83 8y ago
  Forks diverge over time and then we'll have more or less the same incompatibilities start cropping up. Besides forks prevent fundamentally new ways of doing thinks. Given that the major engines all implement specs pretty closely, it should be up to web devs to do minimal cross browser testing...
- aylmao 8y ago
  The problem isn't really who has the engine itself-- I'd say for most purposes, most browsers are about as good for 99% of workflows. It's more of the forces and plays each company has around their browser strategy. IE wasn't the best browser and didn't have the best engine, but it came bundled with Windows and was free. Firefox was a better browser by some metrics back then, in spite of having a company with less resources backing it. Today, Chrome isn't the best and doesn't come bundled with devices, but Chrome-only sites are starting to appear (YouTube TV notoriously was Chrome-only until just this August [1]. This article lists Google Meet and Google Earth as other Chrome-only sites, at least at launch [2]. Moreover, you hear stories like these [3]: > "I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up. For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life." So even if all browser engines were to be hard-forks of the same, each one would be developed different, and each company would play their cards differently to try to gain or maintain dominance. Google being such a big web company makes it difficult to compete against. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17203192/youtube-tv-google-firefox-browser-support-chrome-update-streaming https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17203192/youtube-tv-google... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-only-sites-internet-explorer-6-web-standards https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-onl... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
Aeolun 8y ago
Google was the company I trusted to hand the internet at some point in time.
- misterprime 8y ago
  Back when they launched Google fiber in Kansas City they still seemed like the good guys. Maybe I should have known already bank then that it was too much to give them.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  Hopefully you (and others who thought similarly) have finally learned the lesson that dictatorship is never the solution.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    A benevolent dictatorship is really, really great and effective. It just never lasts :/
- kodablah 8y ago
  What did they do different since then? Or are you saying you've changed not them? Since one can find fault with any company, is there any company you would trust even if given a rebuttal for why you shouldn't?
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    The main difference is that I now see them striving for profit instead of excellence. They go together to some extend but the focus has shifted. It used to be that they made a ton of money off advertising and put that money towards building all kinds of crazy (free!) shit. It’s possible it was always their goal to just lock in their userbase, but I think it’s just that the company has transformed into something different. The specific point I’ll always refer back to is the switch from the playful ‘Don’t be evil’ to ‘Do the right thing’, as cementing the difference.
Zelphyr 8y ago
Maybe Google should split Chrome and related assets (Chromium, Blink, are there others?) into a separate foundation that has control over the source with a board that has membership by major players such as Google themselves, Opera, and Microsoft. That way Google can put a wall between their direct influence in such a powerful and relied-upon piece of software so as not to have the undue influence we’re all worried about.
- matmann2001 8y ago
  Worked for Android, right?
  - thesephist 8y ago
    Android's governance is entirely under Google/Alphabet for all practical purposes today, even as the OS is open source. Reasons for this are numeorus (licensing, Play Services, etc.) Chromium is in a similar boat. Parent is proposing that Google effectively spin off Chrome and related assets as a separate company or nonprofit entity, much like the Linux Foundation, to avoid potentially monopolistic behavior that such vertical integration may lead to. I think this is one possible way to a solution.
    - ahartmetz 8y ago
      Though please not exactly like the Linux foundation, which is doing some pretty shitty things. Companies can become members of the Linux foundation and violate the GPL of Linux no problem, they are paying their membership fee after all. The Linux foundation is effectively the "Megacorps Linux user group". Its executive director Jim Zemlin famously doesn't use Linux himself.
jhuni 8y ago
The problem is that maintaining a browser engine is enormously expensive. There are so many features you need to maintain, security issues to deal with, etc. In the past Microsoft made money off of their operating system, and they made Internet explorer then Edge off of that, but now they make money off of the cloud and clients expect people to support Chrome. Microsoft was spending too much money they didn't need to for return. I think because of the expensiveness of maintaining a browser engine used by so many people, they were destined to be basically a natural monopoly operated by a few concerned actors. Of course, google as one of the two major internet giants, is the most concerned with supporting the development of a web browser.
dmourati 8y ago
What is Edge?
- JohnL4 8y ago
  Microsoft's replacement for IE, now with less horrible.
Waterluvian 8y ago
It feels kind of like a... Truism? Maybe that's the word? Any company large enough to "hand the web over to" isn't a company we want to be handing the web over to.
nyrulez 8y ago
People want innovation but ultimately they don't want companies to profit off them. In the beginning, everyone loved Google. Now that their innovation gap has increased so much over their peers for some areas, the consequences of that are starting to sting. I am not sure what people would prefer: for them to be less competent or to not to profit from it? The truth is Chrome and their web team has been amazing in advancing and supporting web standards. (except AMP which is pretty bad in some aspects)
- thesephist 8y ago
  I think a less cynical way to phrase your (correct) idea is that people love the promise of profit as an incentive to create innovation. It's not a fully self consistent system. But the end goal isn't profit imo, it's innovation, and competition via promise of profit is a way to efficiently allocate resources to innovate. For what it's worth, I think the general arc of antitrust rulings bend toward the ideal over time and it's a fine enough way to deal with the self inconsistency.
cageface 8y ago
As another example, YouTube uses a feature called HTML imports to load scripts. HTML imports haven't been widely adopted, either by developers or browsers alike, and ECMAScript modules are expected to serve the same role. But they're available in Chrome and used by YouTube. At least in this particular case my understanding was that Google was pushing for the adoption of HTML imports as a web standard, which would have been better for all browsers, but other browser vendors balked and Google was forced to use JS module imports instead. AFAIK I know they are now discouraging any further use of HTML imports. This is a bummer because it's not possible to leverage web components without JS now. I'm concerned about a web monoculture too but so far Google has mostly done a good job IMO. Even Mozilla has done some pretty dumb things when it comes to web standards (unilaterally killing WebSQL, for example). I certainly can't think of any other big tech company I'd prefer to see calling the shots on the web.
- JeremyBanks 8y ago
  WebSQL's SQL spec was literally: > User agents must implement the SQL dialect supported by Sqlite 3.6.19. That's only a "standard" in the way that "Chromium-compatible" is becoming a standard.
  - cageface 8y ago
    Yeah this was the argument at the time. I still think it would have been better to formalize that spec instead of just pull indexdb out of some unmentionable orifice.
Santosh83 8y ago
A lot of statements for and against this or that company having stewardship of the web, but the more important point is we should, IMO, strive for a web which cannot be controlled by any one entity. In this view, whether Google is a 'better evil' than MS or Exxon controlling the web is beside the point. The web has a good chance to approach the ideal of direct democracy rather than a representative one. Sure it might be a long road, but let's not give up and concede to the established paradigms on the web too, though some will say it is already too late.
- martindale 8y ago
  Hear hear! The commons belong to us all.
bsimpson 8y ago
His arguments are really weak. He uses both SPDY and QUIC as examples of Google behaving badly. From my perception, Google basically said "this major web standard is inefficient. If we make these changes, the network is faster (especially for people with poor connectivity." They validated those hypotheses with real traffic on real devices over real networks, and then proposed standards based on that work. The standards bodies started there, and made adaptations until there was consensus, and new standards were minted. What part of that is bad?

206 points by sbuk 8y ago

mrep 8y ago

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703172

magicalist 8y ago
Unsourced HN anecdote becomes Ars story becomes HN discussion. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- ineedasername 8y ago
  exactly. it's like money laudering, only for bad anecdotal information, or conspiracy theories. I'd sooner invoke Hanlon's razor than a single div tag that Edge's hardware acceleration should have been robust enough to handle anyway.

jeromebaek 8y ago

> even if Google takes Chromium in a direction that Microsoft disagrees with or opposes, Microsoft will have little option but to follow along regardless. I keep seeing arguments like this and it doesn't make sense to me. Help me understand. My impression is that since Chromium is open-source Google cannot have a monopolistic wield over it. And now the fact that a bunch of Microsoft engineers will be contributing to Chromium seems to imply that Google and Microsoft will have the same amount of muscle mass to struggle for control. For example if Google tries to make a change in Chromium that will break Microsoft's products Microsoft can quickly respond to this. So why is the argument that Microsoft is ceding the web to Google, rather than trying to wrest back? To me it seems like the latter is at least as plausible as the former.

jcranmer 8y ago
Google effectively has the right to veto patches into Chromium. In the worst case, Google could fork Chromium, and since Google controls the build artifacts, in a dispute between Google and Microsoft, it's Google who wields the power.
- Micoloth 8y ago
  But, isn't it reasonable to assume that microsoft will get hold of the Whole codebase if they embrace this as their new default browser? I mean its Microsoft we're talking about..
  - tracker1 8y ago
    Well, it's likely they'll only use the core rendering engine (Blink, formerly Webkit) and wrap their own application around it. Hell, with all the applications they've released or are working on with electron (Teams, VS Code, SQL Operations Studio), I'm far less surprised. I've been hoping they'd come up with for a more shared model for applications in the node/npm ecosystem similar to Adobe's Air. If MS did a good job of such a platform from open-source with tooling to build applications that run everywhere, more power to them.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  How is it Google? Anyone could just fork Chromium and do anything about it, it's open source after all. Microsoft could buy people from Google if they wanted to, they probably could buy an entire Chrome team. Google has some control over Chromium engine right now, but this control is fragile. It's the same control that Oracle has over MySQL. Abuse it and you'll have MariaDB instantly. Abuse Java control and you'll have plenty of companies forked Java and ready to provide real LTS for Java 8. It'll be the same for Chromium. The best outcome would be to have some Non-commercial organization funded by Google, Microsoft, Yandex and other big players who benefit from Chromium which would have some kind of independence. But current situation is not that bad. There are other things than just source code license. May be Google has patents for Chromium sources and could use them to forbid fork? Then it's a bad situation but I didn't heard about that point of view yet.

zeckalpha 8y ago

Don’t forget where Chromium came from. KHTML lead to Safari lead to Chrome which lead to Chromium. It’s been forked and obounced from open source to corporation to corporation to open source.

zitterbewegung 8y ago
Also to note on the engines used it went from khtml to WebKit and then google forked WebKit into Blink. Also opera switched from writing their own engine and moved to chromium .And now it seems the next version of edge will also use Blink being derived from chromium. Which puts everyone in a position that on all platforms you are using WebKit derived browsers (also mobile is in the same boat with WebKit powering both Chrome and Safari.
ajross 8y ago
All thanks to the LGPLv2, I guess? Maybe we should have handed the internet over to RMS.
- utopcell 8y ago
  That'd be a nightmare.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Ads would be not as perfectly targeted as they are now?
    - heavyset_go 8y ago
      The horror!
    - utopcell 8y ago
      They probably would, they'd just be named GNU / Ads.
  - femiagbabiaka 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ori_b 8y ago

Which one should we have handed the web over to?

dana321 8y ago
Not Microsoft, thats for sure.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Microsoft still largely operates by you paying it money in return for software and services. Hell of a step up.
  - s17n 8y ago
    That's because it's an enterprise company. Consumers won't pay for software.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Hasn't seemed to discourage them from vacuuming up information and handing it to the NSA.
  - dmitriy_ko 8y ago
    You can use Windows 10 for free with no limitations.
    - freehunter 8y ago
      Windows is far from the only product Microsoft makes.
    - ac29 8y ago
      Not legally.
  - kgwxd 8y ago
    Paying for things does not stop ads, telemetry, and various other malware from being part of a product. Microsoft is a prime example.

the_other_guy 8y ago

Yet I'd choose Google over Facebook, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon every time if I have to. Even though monopoly is always worse than competition, Google has managed to advance the web experience using Chrome/Chromium (e.g. V8, pushing HTTPS, supporting the latest CSS and JS features, GQUIC, WebP) EDIT: to downvoters, what's your argument here?

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Yes, we can trash Google but I can't think of many others who'd be better. Imagine if GM, Ford, Exxon or Dow Chemical ran the show :)
- the_other_guy 8y ago
  It seems people keep complaining that Google is "evil" but they forgot that until only a couple of decades ago, the business world was ruled by oil, banking and finance ultra selfish assholes who had no shame to bring their own countries and even the world if possible to its knees to make profits.
  - Jedi72 8y ago
    People also forget that when those companies were young they were hailed as tech innovators who brought economic prosperity, not evil monopolists destroying the planet with their unintended consequences. That part comes after

PinkMilkshake 8y ago

Just a hypothetical. Is it possible the way to fix this issue is to actually have all vendors do the same thing. Should all the vendors including Mozilla switch to Chromium and then fork it, couldn't we look at this as a "rebasing" of the Web? If the forks are true hard forks, then we shouldn't necessarily end up in a situation where one vendor has more power than the other. On the contrary, all vendors would now be on an even footing with the same strong, highly-compatible core engine. All the issues people have with Firefox and Edge would no longer be relevant, and the only thing left to judge one company from another would be their value-add services or their ethics.

pdkl95 8y ago
Similar to problems seen in agricultural monocultures, software monocultures massively increase the risk of widespread failure from a single attack.
Santosh83 8y ago
Forks diverge over time and then we'll have more or less the same incompatibilities start cropping up. Besides forks prevent fundamentally new ways of doing thinks. Given that the major engines all implement specs pretty closely, it should be up to web devs to do minimal cross browser testing...
aylmao 8y ago
The problem isn't really who has the engine itself-- I'd say for most purposes, most browsers are about as good for 99% of workflows. It's more of the forces and plays each company has around their browser strategy. IE wasn't the best browser and didn't have the best engine, but it came bundled with Windows and was free. Firefox was a better browser by some metrics back then, in spite of having a company with less resources backing it. Today, Chrome isn't the best and doesn't come bundled with devices, but Chrome-only sites are starting to appear (YouTube TV notoriously was Chrome-only until just this August [1]. This article lists Google Meet and Google Earth as other Chrome-only sites, at least at launch [2]. Moreover, you hear stories like these [3]: > "I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up. For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life." So even if all browser engines were to be hard-forks of the same, each one would be developed different, and each company would play their cards differently to try to gain or maintain dominance. Google being such a big web company makes it difficult to compete against. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17203192/youtube-tv-google-firefox-browser-support-chrome-update-streaming https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17203192/youtube-tv-google... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-only-sites-internet-explorer-6-web-standards https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-onl... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

Aeolun 8y ago

Google was the company I trusted to hand the internet at some point in time.

misterprime 8y ago
Back when they launched Google fiber in Kansas City they still seemed like the good guys. Maybe I should have known already bank then that it was too much to give them.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
Hopefully you (and others who thought similarly) have finally learned the lesson that dictatorship is never the solution.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  A benevolent dictatorship is really, really great and effective. It just never lasts :/
kodablah 8y ago
What did they do different since then? Or are you saying you've changed not them? Since one can find fault with any company, is there any company you would trust even if given a rebuttal for why you shouldn't?
- Aeolun 8y ago
  The main difference is that I now see them striving for profit instead of excellence. They go together to some extend but the focus has shifted. It used to be that they made a ton of money off advertising and put that money towards building all kinds of crazy (free!) shit. It’s possible it was always their goal to just lock in their userbase, but I think it’s just that the company has transformed into something different. The specific point I’ll always refer back to is the switch from the playful ‘Don’t be evil’ to ‘Do the right thing’, as cementing the difference.

Zelphyr 8y ago

Maybe Google should split Chrome and related assets (Chromium, Blink, are there others?) into a separate foundation that has control over the source with a board that has membership by major players such as Google themselves, Opera, and Microsoft. That way Google can put a wall between their direct influence in such a powerful and relied-upon piece of software so as not to have the undue influence we’re all worried about.

matmann2001 8y ago
Worked for Android, right?
- thesephist 8y ago
  Android's governance is entirely under Google/Alphabet for all practical purposes today, even as the OS is open source. Reasons for this are numeorus (licensing, Play Services, etc.) Chromium is in a similar boat. Parent is proposing that Google effectively spin off Chrome and related assets as a separate company or nonprofit entity, much like the Linux Foundation, to avoid potentially monopolistic behavior that such vertical integration may lead to. I think this is one possible way to a solution.
  - ahartmetz 8y ago
    Though please not exactly like the Linux foundation, which is doing some pretty shitty things. Companies can become members of the Linux foundation and violate the GPL of Linux no problem, they are paying their membership fee after all. The Linux foundation is effectively the "Megacorps Linux user group". Its executive director Jim Zemlin famously doesn't use Linux himself.

jhuni 8y ago

The problem is that maintaining a browser engine is enormously expensive. There are so many features you need to maintain, security issues to deal with, etc. In the past Microsoft made money off of their operating system, and they made Internet explorer then Edge off of that, but now they make money off of the cloud and clients expect people to support Chrome. Microsoft was spending too much money they didn't need to for return. I think because of the expensiveness of maintaining a browser engine used by so many people, they were destined to be basically a natural monopoly operated by a few concerned actors. Of course, google as one of the two major internet giants, is the most concerned with supporting the development of a web browser.

dmourati 8y ago

What is Edge?

JohnL4 8y ago
Microsoft's replacement for IE, now with less horrible.

Waterluvian 8y ago

It feels kind of like a... Truism? Maybe that's the word? Any company large enough to "hand the web over to" isn't a company we want to be handing the web over to.

nyrulez 8y ago

People want innovation but ultimately they don't want companies to profit off them. In the beginning, everyone loved Google. Now that their innovation gap has increased so much over their peers for some areas, the consequences of that are starting to sting. I am not sure what people would prefer: for them to be less competent or to not to profit from it? The truth is Chrome and their web team has been amazing in advancing and supporting web standards. (except AMP which is pretty bad in some aspects)

thesephist 8y ago
I think a less cynical way to phrase your (correct) idea is that people love the promise of profit as an incentive to create innovation. It's not a fully self consistent system. But the end goal isn't profit imo, it's innovation, and competition via promise of profit is a way to efficiently allocate resources to innovate. For what it's worth, I think the general arc of antitrust rulings bend toward the ideal over time and it's a fine enough way to deal with the self inconsistency.

cageface 8y ago

As another example, YouTube uses a feature called HTML imports to load scripts. HTML imports haven't been widely adopted, either by developers or browsers alike, and ECMAScript modules are expected to serve the same role. But they're available in Chrome and used by YouTube. At least in this particular case my understanding was that Google was pushing for the adoption of HTML imports as a web standard, which would have been better for all browsers, but other browser vendors balked and Google was forced to use JS module imports instead. AFAIK I know they are now discouraging any further use of HTML imports. This is a bummer because it's not possible to leverage web components without JS now. I'm concerned about a web monoculture too but so far Google has mostly done a good job IMO. Even Mozilla has done some pretty dumb things when it comes to web standards (unilaterally killing WebSQL, for example). I certainly can't think of any other big tech company I'd prefer to see calling the shots on the web.

JeremyBanks 8y ago
WebSQL's SQL spec was literally: > User agents must implement the SQL dialect supported by Sqlite 3.6.19. That's only a "standard" in the way that "Chromium-compatible" is becoming a standard.
- cageface 8y ago
  Yeah this was the argument at the time. I still think it would have been better to formalize that spec instead of just pull indexdb out of some unmentionable orifice.

Santosh83 8y ago

A lot of statements for and against this or that company having stewardship of the web, but the more important point is we should, IMO, strive for a web which cannot be controlled by any one entity. In this view, whether Google is a 'better evil' than MS or Exxon controlling the web is beside the point. The web has a good chance to approach the ideal of direct democracy rather than a representative one. Sure it might be a long road, but let's not give up and concede to the established paradigms on the web too, though some will say it is already too late.

martindale 8y ago
Hear hear! The commons belong to us all.

bsimpson 8y ago

His arguments are really weak. He uses both SPDY and QUIC as examples of Google behaving badly. From my perception, Google basically said "this major web standard is inefficient. If we make these changes, the network is faster (especially for people with poor connectivity." They validated those hypotheses with real traffic on real devices over real networks, and then proposed standards based on that work. The standards bodies started there, and made adaptations until there was consensus, and new standards were minted. What part of that is bad?