6 ms·

Monolithic browser controlled by Google is already the case, the corpse of firefox is being dangled about "Weekend at Bernies" style so they can pretend they do

Monolithic browser controlled by Google is already the case, the corpse of firefox is being dangled about "Weekend at Bernies" style so they can pretend they don't control the web. Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action.

mfer 5y ago
> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action. This is because business tactics rather than technical or product ones are the reason for their domination. While I love technologies, it's so important to focus on the things outside of the tech itself at times.
- Devasta 5y ago
  Tbh a lot of the tech is business tactics. Pumping so much stuff into the browser makes it an impossible task just trying to maintain feature parity nevermind compete on quality. Building out a high quality subset is not viable, the second your browser stops working with Amazon or Ebay or whatever else your browser is finished.
  - mfer 5y ago
    > Pumping so much stuff into the browser makes it an impossible task just trying to maintain feature parity nevermind compete on quality. To compete or gain a market doesn't mean you need to have all the features. Doing things differently can and does work. The more I read books like Competing Against Luck and The Design Of Everyday Things the more I'm able to see it and even work on projects that do that. > the second your browser stops working with Amazon or Ebay or whatever else your browser is finished This is why standards are so important. Why it's important to have Firefox and Safari in the marketplace. Apple using Safari on iOS and iOS large market helps keep the standards ecosystem in check with Chromes dominance. The lack of modern tech communications standards is causing problems for consumers. While I don't always like the HTML, CSS, and JS specs... the fact that we have specs and multiple implementations is a benefit to people who want to try and compete.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      When it comes to a platform which’s only redeeming quality is that it is a standard, then not following that standard is quite dump in my opinion.
phkahler 5y ago
>> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action. Well not with that attitude.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  What do you propose instead of government action? Turning up as a crowd with pitchforks outside of the Google HQ?
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    People start using firefox?
    - ahaseeb 5y ago
      People SHOULD do a lot of things but ultimately distribution wins. If IE comes with OS, they'll use it. It's similar to people using windows or whatever OS is by default.
dimitrios1 5y ago
This is assuming quite a few things: 1. We the people are completely unable to use the power of market forces to come up with an alternative and supplant the established market leader 2. The government will regulate this in a way that is better than the alternative 3. That lobbying forces and the general corruption that is widespread in D.C. won't impact that in any negative way. 4. That big tech companies aren't experts in skirting regulations or that Google doesn't already have a plan B if something happened to one of their moats.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Re: point number 1 - market forces can't fix lack of DRM support in a browser made completely from scratch. Even Spotify, and sometimes news sites ask to enable EME now (which I refuse out of principle). A brand-new browser already got squashed by Google's refusal to allow Widevine modules to run on said browser, and if DRM becomes a commodity solution, it's goodbye to the open market of web browsers.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    But you just said the crux if the issue: you refuse out of principle, but that doesn't mean others share your principles. Why did Google's refusal squash a brand new browser? Why was it even a factor? Did it have to be? Is there an alternative approach one could take to not need google's involvement to include a Widevine module in their said brand-new browser?
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      My refusal to allow EME content is entirely my own decision, and irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make. My point was that DRM (EME) support is becoming an expectation, and you are outright locked out from certain EME schemes like Widevine unless you're a "blessed" browser (which you can't be, yet - by definition, you're too small to enter any meaningful communication with a large player, as the browser I mentioned found out). > Why did Google's refusal squash a brand new browser? Why was it even a factor? Did it have to be? Said browser (Metastream [0]) was meant to build a different experience for watching video streams together, potentially including DRM-ed sources. Widevine allegedly has a 70% market share, so the refusal really was a big deal and a deal-breaker for the intended vision of the browser. > Is there an alternative approach one could take to not need google's involvement to include a Widevine module in their said brand-new browser? What do you propose, beyond technical workarounds that can cease working at any time? I imagine that there may be a risk of invoking the DMCA or lawsuits, whether wrongful or not (might makes right after all, and Google has the deeper pockets here) The right way to do this is to engage into a DRM licensing process, which is a fundamentally business-based one. And when you're small and dealing with a stubborn large business, there's no right to appeal their decision. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941
ravenstine 5y ago
I agree, though I think your characterization isn't entirely fair. Firefox might have become irrelevant in terms of market share, but it's far from being a "corpse", if you meant anything by that outside of the "Weekend at Bernie's" analogy. It works quite well, its extensions are far less likely to get totally nerfed for the purpose of showing ads, and it even still develops features before Chrome does. It's definitely being dangled out there for the sake of excusing Google, but it also seems like someone's seriously holding it back. The Servo debacle was pretty inexcusable. Servo of course still exists under the Linux Foundation, but we'll be lucky if we ever see it mean anything to Firefox or become anything other than a curiosity.
_fat_santa 5y ago
> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action. Is it the dominance of 'Chrome' or 'Chromium'. I see 'Chrome' as Google's official product, 'Chromium' though seems to have become a boilerplate in recent years for kickstarting your own browser, and I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand Google is already a monopoly in the browser space, because we have gone from "Browser Wars" to "Engine Wars" where 3 distinct browsers (Edge, Chrome and Brave) all running the same tech from Google. On the other hand I see this as a major service Google has done to help everyone in web development. In a way this engine monopoly has made things much easier, I no longer care if you're running Chrome, Edge, Brave or some other V8 based browser, I know I will see a consistent experience across those browsers. And while part of me is fearful or this shift, another part of me is like "so what". So what if Chromium is a dominant browser "core", it's OSS and though Google has major influence, it's still OSS.
- pc86 5y ago
  Chrome (not Chromium) has something like 63% global market share. I'm not sure Brave, with its ~1%, is worth talking about unless you're also talking about Vivaldi and Opera and every niche browser that exists. Sincerely, a happy Brave user.
SllX 5y ago
> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action. Heard this once already when the song was about IE6.
- diputsmonro 5y ago
  And it was true https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
  - SllX 5y ago
    IE6 post-dates the conclusion of this lawsuit, and held ~90% of browser, not desktop browser, but browser market share for the better part of the next decade. What changed? Firefox was released, Safari was released, and quite a bit later, Google Chrome was released, but it would still be a while before IE6 would lose its dominance even once IE7 was released.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      Key differences between this situation and IE6/7: 1. IE6/7 were just egregiously bad experiences for both users and developers, with Microsoft being almost entirely disinterested to the point of disbanding their browser team. Holding the web back was clearly part of their strategy. 2. Chrome, on the other hand, is well-maintained and rather good. Unlike Microsoft in the 2000s, the web is a core pillar of Google's business. Any challenger to the throne will have to overtake a moving target powered by a world-class engineering powerhouse, rather than a static dinosaur like IE6/IE7. 3. The barrier to entry in the browser market today is roughly an order of magnitude greater than it was back then. Browsers today are far more complex; they're more like operating systems. As far as the free market is concerned, nobody is seriously challenging Chrome in this area. Ever. Unless/until Google loses interest and stops competing.
      - SllX 5y ago
        All of your criticisms of IE6 are fair and on point, but if you recall IE7 was Microsoft putting the gang back together again and trying to put some effort in again. Still not a great browser, but still a marked point where they abandoned their abandonment of Internet Explorer as a project. Google also originally piggy backed on WebKit to build their browser. The JavaScript runtime was homegrown, but Google worked within WebKit before forking out of there. My guess is when Google Chrome is eventually overtaken, it will be by another Chromium-based browser under similar circumstances. The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS and iPadOS.
hestefisk 5y ago
I use FF every day and it works really well for my purposes. I do all of my daily desktop browsing in it and only open Chrome if I need to access an internal corporate web site on my work laptop. To me, FF isn’t a dangling corpse, it works well and it’s just not fair to the devs at Mozilla to make such a harsh statement.
- throw10920 5y ago
  Statcounter says that Firefox has about a 4% worldwide market share, compared to Chrome's 64%[1]. Assuming that the parent poster was talking about Firefox's quality instead of market share is more than a little presumptuous. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  > I use FF every day and it works really well for my purposes Good for you, but the problem is what many other people don't use FF in any way, even if it worked well for their purposes.
  - ahaseeb 5y ago
    Hard to get adoption purely based on privacy. Privacy is a super hard sell
sydbarrett74 5y ago
I respectfully disagree. If Mozilla can lessen its dependence on hush-money from Google, that is a /good/ thing. One may believe that Firefox/Gecko is an animated corpse, but it's the only realistic alternative to the Chromium ecosystem that we currently have. Other rendering engines are too obscure to matter and/or the hobbyist project of one person or at best a small team, including Palemoon and its ilk.

mfer 5y ago

> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action. This is because business tactics rather than technical or product ones are the reason for their domination. While I love technologies, it's so important to focus on the things outside of the tech itself at times.

Devasta 5y ago
Tbh a lot of the tech is business tactics. Pumping so much stuff into the browser makes it an impossible task just trying to maintain feature parity nevermind compete on quality. Building out a high quality subset is not viable, the second your browser stops working with Amazon or Ebay or whatever else your browser is finished.
- mfer 5y ago
  > Pumping so much stuff into the browser makes it an impossible task just trying to maintain feature parity nevermind compete on quality. To compete or gain a market doesn't mean you need to have all the features. Doing things differently can and does work. The more I read books like Competing Against Luck and The Design Of Everyday Things the more I'm able to see it and even work on projects that do that. > the second your browser stops working with Amazon or Ebay or whatever else your browser is finished This is why standards are so important. Why it's important to have Firefox and Safari in the marketplace. Apple using Safari on iOS and iOS large market helps keep the standards ecosystem in check with Chromes dominance. The lack of modern tech communications standards is causing problems for consumers. While I don't always like the HTML, CSS, and JS specs... the fact that we have specs and multiple implementations is a benefit to people who want to try and compete.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    When it comes to a platform which’s only redeeming quality is that it is a standard, then not following that standard is quite dump in my opinion.

phkahler 5y ago

>> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action. Well not with that attitude.

selfhoster11 5y ago
What do you propose instead of government action? Turning up as a crowd with pitchforks outside of the Google HQ?
- lamontcg 5y ago
  People start using firefox?
  - ahaseeb 5y ago
    People SHOULD do a lot of things but ultimately distribution wins. If IE comes with OS, they'll use it. It's similar to people using windows or whatever OS is by default.

dimitrios1 5y ago

This is assuming quite a few things: 1. We the people are completely unable to use the power of market forces to come up with an alternative and supplant the established market leader 2. The government will regulate this in a way that is better than the alternative 3. That lobbying forces and the general corruption that is widespread in D.C. won't impact that in any negative way. 4. That big tech companies aren't experts in skirting regulations or that Google doesn't already have a plan B if something happened to one of their moats.

selfhoster11 5y ago
Re: point number 1 - market forces can't fix lack of DRM support in a browser made completely from scratch. Even Spotify, and sometimes news sites ask to enable EME now (which I refuse out of principle). A brand-new browser already got squashed by Google's refusal to allow Widevine modules to run on said browser, and if DRM becomes a commodity solution, it's goodbye to the open market of web browsers.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  But you just said the crux if the issue: you refuse out of principle, but that doesn't mean others share your principles. Why did Google's refusal squash a brand new browser? Why was it even a factor? Did it have to be? Is there an alternative approach one could take to not need google's involvement to include a Widevine module in their said brand-new browser?
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    My refusal to allow EME content is entirely my own decision, and irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make. My point was that DRM (EME) support is becoming an expectation, and you are outright locked out from certain EME schemes like Widevine unless you're a "blessed" browser (which you can't be, yet - by definition, you're too small to enter any meaningful communication with a large player, as the browser I mentioned found out). > Why did Google's refusal squash a brand new browser? Why was it even a factor? Did it have to be? Said browser (Metastream [0]) was meant to build a different experience for watching video streams together, potentially including DRM-ed sources. Widevine allegedly has a 70% market share, so the refusal really was a big deal and a deal-breaker for the intended vision of the browser. > Is there an alternative approach one could take to not need google's involvement to include a Widevine module in their said brand-new browser? What do you propose, beyond technical workarounds that can cease working at any time? I imagine that there may be a risk of invoking the DMCA or lawsuits, whether wrongful or not (might makes right after all, and Google has the deeper pockets here) The right way to do this is to engage into a DRM licensing process, which is a fundamentally business-based one. And when you're small and dealing with a stubborn large business, there's no right to appeal their decision. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941

ravenstine 5y ago

I agree, though I think your characterization isn't entirely fair. Firefox might have become irrelevant in terms of market share, but it's far from being a "corpse", if you meant anything by that outside of the "Weekend at Bernie's" analogy. It works quite well, its extensions are far less likely to get totally nerfed for the purpose of showing ads, and it even still develops features before Chrome does. It's definitely being dangled out there for the sake of excusing Google, but it also seems like someone's seriously holding it back. The Servo debacle was pretty inexcusable. Servo of course still exists under the Linux Foundation, but we'll be lucky if we ever see it mean anything to Firefox or become anything other than a curiosity.

_fat_santa 5y ago

> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action. Is it the dominance of 'Chrome' or 'Chromium'. I see 'Chrome' as Google's official product, 'Chromium' though seems to have become a boilerplate in recent years for kickstarting your own browser, and I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand Google is already a monopoly in the browser space, because we have gone from "Browser Wars" to "Engine Wars" where 3 distinct browsers (Edge, Chrome and Brave) all running the same tech from Google. On the other hand I see this as a major service Google has done to help everyone in web development. In a way this engine monopoly has made things much easier, I no longer care if you're running Chrome, Edge, Brave or some other V8 based browser, I know I will see a consistent experience across those browsers. And while part of me is fearful or this shift, another part of me is like "so what". So what if Chromium is a dominant browser "core", it's OSS and though Google has major influence, it's still OSS.

pc86 5y ago
Chrome (not Chromium) has something like 63% global market share. I'm not sure Brave, with its ~1%, is worth talking about unless you're also talking about Vivaldi and Opera and every niche browser that exists. Sincerely, a happy Brave user.

SllX 5y ago

> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action. Heard this once already when the song was about IE6.

diputsmonro 5y ago
And it was true https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
- SllX 5y ago
  IE6 post-dates the conclusion of this lawsuit, and held ~90% of browser, not desktop browser, but browser market share for the better part of the next decade. What changed? Firefox was released, Safari was released, and quite a bit later, Google Chrome was released, but it would still be a while before IE6 would lose its dominance even once IE7 was released.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Key differences between this situation and IE6/7: 1. IE6/7 were just egregiously bad experiences for both users and developers, with Microsoft being almost entirely disinterested to the point of disbanding their browser team. Holding the web back was clearly part of their strategy. 2. Chrome, on the other hand, is well-maintained and rather good. Unlike Microsoft in the 2000s, the web is a core pillar of Google's business. Any challenger to the throne will have to overtake a moving target powered by a world-class engineering powerhouse, rather than a static dinosaur like IE6/IE7. 3. The barrier to entry in the browser market today is roughly an order of magnitude greater than it was back then. Browsers today are far more complex; they're more like operating systems. As far as the free market is concerned, nobody is seriously challenging Chrome in this area. Ever. Unless/until Google loses interest and stops competing.
    - SllX 5y ago
      All of your criticisms of IE6 are fair and on point, but if you recall IE7 was Microsoft putting the gang back together again and trying to put some effort in again. Still not a great browser, but still a marked point where they abandoned their abandonment of Internet Explorer as a project. Google also originally piggy backed on WebKit to build their browser. The JavaScript runtime was homegrown, but Google worked within WebKit before forking out of there. My guess is when Google Chrome is eventually overtaken, it will be by another Chromium-based browser under similar circumstances. The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS and iPadOS.

hestefisk 5y ago

I use FF every day and it works really well for my purposes. I do all of my daily desktop browsing in it and only open Chrome if I need to access an internal corporate web site on my work laptop. To me, FF isn’t a dangling corpse, it works well and it’s just not fair to the devs at Mozilla to make such a harsh statement.

throw10920 5y ago
Statcounter says that Firefox has about a 4% worldwide market share, compared to Chrome's 64%[1]. Assuming that the parent poster was talking about Firefox's quality instead of market share is more than a little presumptuous. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
justsomehnguy 5y ago
> I use FF every day and it works really well for my purposes Good for you, but the problem is what many other people don't use FF in any way, even if it worked well for their purposes.
- ahaseeb 5y ago
  Hard to get adoption purely based on privacy. Privacy is a super hard sell

sydbarrett74 5y ago

I respectfully disagree. If Mozilla can lessen its dependence on hush-money from Google, that is a /good/ thing. One may believe that Firefox/Gecko is an animated corpse, but it's the only realistic alternative to the Chromium ecosystem that we currently have. Other rendering engines are too obscure to matter and/or the hobbyist project of one person or at best a small team, including Palemoon and its ilk.