15 ms·

I don't think the IE comparison is apt. IE shipped on (almost) every machine, had a ton of lock in features like ActiveX, etc. MS actively abused their monopol

• Melatonic 4y ago
  Lets face it - IE always just sucked. A lot. Whereas Chrome does not. Here on HN we might rail on it mainly for ideological reasons but the user experience is pretty solid. This is coming from a Firefox user.
  • toast0 4y ago
    IE 4 and 6 were decent to good compared to competitors when released (although, IIRC, neither had ftp support?). What sucked was that they stagnated at that point in time while also becoming dominant. IE 5 for mac was well regarded, but I don't have personal memories. None of the future IEs were very good though, IMHO.
    • MBCook 4y ago
      That’s my memory. I remember IE being a great browser. It’s only what MS let happen later that turned IE into the pariah it is today.
    • saratogacx 4y ago
      At the time you didn't need to ship ftp with IE. You could load up an FTP site by opening up an FTP address in explorer. You didn't get the familiar html-netscape-like interface but you could navigate an FTP site like it was just a network folder.
  • icedchai 4y ago
    Do you remember the early 2000's? IE was your only choice for a decent browser. Netscape was bordering obsolescence (bad CSS support, generally unstable, slow rendering.) Even Apple was shipping it on the Mac! It wasn't until the 2.0 release of Firefox in 2006 that there was finally a decent alternative.
    • larusso 4y ago
      I started using Firefox in the 0. versions mainly because someone wrote an extension to have tabs with websites in one window. That was it for me and I use Firefox ever since. I managed to survive the memory bloat phase. I was super happy when the quantum version was released and Firefox was suddenly on par again with chrome. At least for a short moment. I‘m an iOS user because I try to keep google out of my live (need to get rid of YouTube though). I also use the Firefox app but only since iOS supports the feature to set a different default browser app. Before that it was useless to use a different browser app when any link from other apps always open Safari.
• cute_boi 4y ago
  Chrome is installed by default in android. The choice won't be preferred choice if website starts to put message like "Works best with Google Chrome".
  • smoldesu 4y ago
    Websites already have to do that, because Safari still lacks a number of web technologies that get picked up faster on Chrome and Firefox.
    • jeromegv 4y ago
      But they can’t on mobile. Which is now a bigger part of the web.
      • jensensbutton 4y ago
        They can on Android.
      • smoldesu 4y ago
        Sure they can. "The Reddit experience isn't complete in your browser. Please download the official app to continue:"
  • googlryas 4y ago
    No it isn't - that is a choice made by phone vendors to include it, but they are perfectly free to ship their phones with firefox, or opera, or no browser at all. The android OS has no knowledge of chrome and it doesn't get any special handling or abilities like iOS/Safari.
    • pdpi 4y ago
      The Android OS has no knowledge of Chrome, but AIUI the licencing for Play Services basically forces you into installing it
    • jcranberry 4y ago
• freedomben 4y ago
  Indeed. can you imagine if Microsoft had made it so that IE was the only browser you were allowed to install on Windows so you couldn't install Netscape even if you wanted to?
  • AlexandrB 4y ago
    This would have been fine if Windows wasn't 95+% of desktop computer market share at the time. The regulatory argument was that Microsoft was abusing their desktop OS monopoly to give themselves an unfair advantage in another market (browsers). By contrast iOS is ~50% of mobile OS market share (in the US, I think it's less elsewhere). Hardly a monopoly. If using a different mobile browser is important to you, there's a competing, popular mobile OS that can provide that.
    • warning26 4y ago
      People always say "oh you can just switch mobile OSes" as if that's as simple as walking into a Target instead of a Walmart. Ecosystems exist. Throw away your phone and every piece of software you've ever bought for it just so you can install a particular app? Ridiculous.
    • stale2002 4y ago
      > Hardly a monopoly The specific term here would be duopoly. And a duopoly still has a large ability to engage in anti-competitive practices that harm the market. 50% of a market is with the realm where you can cause significant harm to competition.
    • fauigerzigerk 4y ago
      This logic doesn't work with just two competitors globally. What if choosing my browser isn't the only thing important to me? If governments give corporations with such overwhelming market dominance completely free rein then developers are nothing more than sharecroppers and consumers are going to pay the price either financially, in terms of privacy or through limited choice.
    • Nullabillity 4y ago
• silvestrov 4y ago
  Also: It was bad for Microsoft if browsers became too good as the Windows OS then could too easily be replaced by cheaper platforms. So Microsoft wanted to keep browsers back as much as possible. It's good for Google when Chrome is good. So Google has a great incitament to improve Chrome. The only drawbacks would be proprietary functionality others can't use.
  • AlexandrB 4y ago
    The other drawback is that Google is an advertising company that has an incentive to track users across the web. In a Chrome monopoly how easy would it be to avoid being tracked? Especially by Google. Recently, Chrome was the only major browser to adopt Google's FLoC[1]. If Chrome was even more dominant would it have mattered if Edge/Safari/Firefox didn't adopt this tracking technology? [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/724441/what-is-googles-floc-and-how-will-it-track-you-online/ https://www.howtogeek.com/724441/what-is-googles-floc-and-ho...
    • IX-103 4y ago
      Google is an advertising company, but that's not the main reason for their privacy sandbox and it's ad-friendly features. Google needs the open web to survive as a search provider. If everything turns into a paywall or cookie/privacy wall then Google can't index that content. They already can't see the content on Facebook and Twitter. Google makes most of their money from search ads -- I've heard upwards of 80% -- and search ads supposedly don't even use targeting information.
  • Mikeb85 4y ago
    > The only drawbacks would be proprietary functionality others can't use. And what proprietary functionality is that? Chromium exists and does all the same things.
• sitkack 4y ago
  This is a pedantic and uncharitable take.
  • dang 4y ago
    Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive (or name-calling) comments to HN. If you want to say specifically what you think is correct or incorrect, that would of course be great. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• kennywinker 4y ago
  If you use firefox or safari, you routinely encounter sites that don't work without chrome.
  • depressedpanda 4y ago
    I keep hearing people say this, but it's not my experience at all. I have no idea what kind of web sites they're visiting.
• GrabbinD33ze69 4y ago
  Pretending that just cause chrome doesn't come installed with the android open src project, means it isn't a "default" for android is silly; yes, google play services isn't required for android, but an overwhelming majority of android users will see chrome as the default for the OS. You claim they are making a choice, but for the average user it doesn't seem like much of a choice. It's easier for most android apps just to use chrome as an "in app browser", while the users have the option to use a different browser, most won't.
  • Raymonf 4y ago
    What? The "majority of Android users" are Samsung users, where Samsung Internet is the default. Sure, it's Chromium-based, but not Chrome.
• dmitriid 4y ago
  > Chrome is something users install because it's their preferred choice. Ah yes. The preferred choice advertised by dominant web search. The preferred choice that is forced by Google apps when clicking on links that actually conveniently forget about said choice. The preferred choice when Google sabotages competition across its dominant platforms https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686 And so on
• artdigital 4y ago
  > Chrome is something users install because it's their preferred choice. We can argue as to why it's their preferred choice but the point remains that users actively download and install Chrome - usually as one of the first things they do when they purchase a new computer. Chrome is getting bundled with a buttload of software. So many software that comes with an ‘installer’ has a hidden checkbox somewhere that if you don’t uncheck it, it will install Chrome on your windows machine. Also Edge is now the default on Windows which is also Chromium. So a Chromium-only future doesn’t sound so distant anymore.
  • jpgvm 4y ago
    I think there is a big difference between engine monopoly vs browser monopoly, however that does depend on how well governance works for the Chromium project (I really don't know enough to assert anything concrete). Namely an engine isn't a product and most value-add is in the porcelain of the browser, implementation of web standards -shouldn't- be a competitive advantage because doing leads the the sort of fragmentation that we don't want. If all the major browsers shared and worked on a single engine collaboratively (similar to PostgreSQL and Linux) I think the web would be a -much- better place as a result for a number of reasons. 1. Aforementioned standards could be relied on by developers. 2. Browser vendors could spend less time duplicating efforts on low level standards implementation that aren't product differentiation. 3. Platform specific performance optimisation could be shared across browsers instead, i.e Safari like energy performance for everyone. 4. Plugin architecture could potentially be shared across all available browsers which would help plugin authors out significantly. 5. The engine could be linked as a dynamic library so that multiple browsers could be installed without duplicating the engine binaries if they are using the same version (probably only viable on Linux distributions but would be nice) 6. Fuzzing and security efforts wouldn't need to be duplicated across engines. This is important because of just how gnarly the sorts of code you see in browsers. Namely XML/SGML parsers, JS runtimes/isolation, etc. Also with every vendor chipping in this infrastructure could likely be greatly expanded. This is a utopian view and most of this probably wouldn't come to pass because the world sucks at doing the "right" thing but the potential is there. On the other hand the downsides mostly amount to Chromium governance could be bad and Google could abuse their position to make it hard to create new browsers based on Chromium/Blink. However they would be incentivised not to in order to prevent a return to the current fragmented situation.