6 ms·
This is the point in the dominance cycle where the dominant player decides they no longer need to be the fastest or the most secure and that their dominance wil
by moomin 7y ago
This is the point in the dominance cycle where the dominant player decides they no longer need to be the fastest or the most secure and that their dominance will allow them to coast along doing their thing.
There’s nothing particularly inevitable about what happens next, but let’s hope they get an IE6-sized kick in the teeth.
- sqrt17 7y ago> they get an IE6-sized kick in the teeth. as in: people will continue to suffer for about a decade while good alternatives readily spring up but suffer slow adoption?
- moomin 7y agoYeah, let’s hope that it’s IE6-sized, but not IE6-speed. Although I’m not ruling out a lost decade of web tech happening again.
- Nuzzerino 7y agoWhy does an alternative have to be widely adopted to be seen as good? Tech has an obsession with "popular or bust" and that's the ultimate cause of the lack of choices IMO.
- wbl 7y agoFirefox is already here.
- claudeganon 7y agoSince Firefox is already dependent on Google for a great deal of their funding, I’d say the next phase in Google’s strategy will be scaling that back.
- pnako 7y agoThey still need to keep Firefox alive, because it allows them to control market concentration and avoid the antitrust issues that MS had to fight.
- claudeganon 7y agoGoogle is already deeply in bed with the Democratic Party and has been buying up some just lovely Republicans at a good clip: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/google-miles-taylor-dhs-muslim-travel-ban-nielsen https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/google-miles-ta... While I tend to agree with you about them keeping Firefox alive, my guess is that they’re becoming less concerned with a legitimate antitrust complaint and that this “alive” will end up being “just barely.”
- TeMPOraL 7y agoBetting protection from antitrust issues on getting cozy with a political party is a risky strategy; political landscape shifts on quite regular basis. It's safer to keep a competitor alive so that if and when the power goes to people who don't like you, it won't be easy for them to go after you.
- gjm11 7y agoThat would be why they're (allegedly -- I haven't checked) buying up those lovely Republicans. I think it's likely to be a while before any political party other than the Democrats and the Republicans holds a lot of power in the US.
- claudeganon 7y agoIt’s been ongoing since Trump’s win. I can’t find the link right now, but they’ve also been bankrolling and having speakers at those weird, right wing DC conferences. And they’ve been supporting ALEC for years. https://fortune.com/2016/12/14/google-conservative-outreach-donald-trump/ https://fortune.com/2016/12/14/google-conservative-outreach-...
- ajsnigrutin 7y agoAnd other projects will apear, all the people that visit sites like this one here, will switch, and slowly transition their families. Majority will conitniue "suffering" since they already don't have adblocks installed.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Nasrudith 7y agoThat doesn't make any sense. Firefox already is open source and forked already. New features can easily be cherrypicked even.
- JohnFen 7y agoFirefox is a great alternative for many. But it is not great for everybody.
- 9dl 7y agoAnd we definitely have to help speed up this process
- hechang1997 7y agoMany many people use adblockers now. The amount of users they will alienate would be very high.
- darkwater 7y agoNope, mostly tech-savvy people use adblockers, it's astonishing how many people still see ads on a daily basis.
- mojuba 7y agoIt is true and I wonder if the tech people aren't becoming the privileged class who knows ways of not feeding the big corporations. For example, it takes a lot of effort and energy for me to explain to non-technical people that comparing Apple and Google in terms of their mobile devices is non-sense. Just look at their regular financial reports, I usually say, and understand that one is an online advertisement business, while the other is a purely software + device business. One wants you to use their devices at all costs, while the other wants you to buy them. Those are very different core business models, different mentality and approaches. Etc etc. And so the choice between them comes down not even to taste or quality or price; it comes down to which business model you sell your soul to. And then there's ad blockers and understanding how modern internet works etc. It worries me that the disconnect between those who understand the inner workings of tech and those who don't becomes bigger and bigger by the day. As the tech business itself becomes more and more sophisticated (and monopolist/authoritarian).
- pb82 7y agoMakes sense for them to kill it now before the majority gets a taste of what it could be like.
- chatmasta 7y agoAccording to stats I’ve seen, around 30% of people use ad blockers. And that’s growing. Nobody stops using an ad blocker. It’s not just tech savvy people. I imagine plenty of people here have set one up for their family members.
- 7y ago
- rusk 7y agohas anyone else noticed a marked decline in the quality of Google search results over the last 12 months? I swear, around about 2011 I thought Google was going to become self aware but it's declined from that high-point to a point where duckduckgo has become a viable alternative for more than just reasons of privacy. Which is a great thing! Turns out "Don't be Evil" was more than just a feel-good marketing slogan. It may have actually been good for business as well. Bye bye Google. It really has been great!
- pmlnr 7y ago> over the last 12 months More like since 2014. I use google search for one thing only these days: product search, when I'm trying to find a local dealer for a product. For everything else, duckduckgo, which, to be completely honest, is a lot more like the old google from the early 2000s, than the current google.
- rusk 7y ago> More like since 2014 I do remember remarking to somebody around this time that google search had become something of a glorified grep. You could still get things though. What I meant in this comment is that it has gotten even worse to the point that its almost unusable. It really does remind me of Microsoft of the 00’s.
- pmlnr 7y agoI think 2014 was the big change into "AI first" for Google. I remember Translate working fine in 2014 in China with the offline pack, and the offline pack was ~220MB. In 2016, the offline pack was ~30MB and nobody understood the translations over there.
- mcv 7y agoI've noticed that for far longer than 12 months. Google search results are frequently crap. DuckDuckGo is often better. But sometimes I dream about building my own search engine. It would avoid the big ad-driven sites as much as possible, and give preferential treatment to obscure blog posts about topics nobody else has written about. I want a search result to show the many different ways it could be interpreted, rather than assume one of them based on whatever heuristic, and show me tons of identical results that aren't what I want.
- vkizl 7y agoThey still are the fastest and the most secure, and Manifest v3 is faster than uBlock Origin since no javascript code needs to run. I won't be using Chrome anymore once they implement this since I like my element-hiding rules which I wrote myself, but for the common rabble, Manifest v3 will be an improvement.
- blep-arsh 7y agoThey could support declarative rulesets without disabling request blocking. And the request inspection API is still live, it seems; I wonder if this means SimilarWeb and other spyware peddlers can stay in business for now.
- hendersoon 7y agoThe speed difference is only noticeable in benchmarks. It's completely meaningless for humans. Manifest v3 will not be an improvement for anyone previously using uBlock Origin.
- throwaway-hn123 7y agoYou poor autistic kid. It's no surprise that you're a lonely incel.
- dmos62 7y ago> IE6-sized kick in the teeth Sorry to distract, but I'd like this on a T-shirt.