5 ms·

> Will everybody abandon Safari and give Google a total browser monopoly This one is scary. People who don't know history like to think that IE was a backward

by mrtksn 4y ago

> Will everybody abandon Safari and give Google a total browser monopoly This one is scary. People who don't know history like to think that IE was a backward browser and MS forced it upon people but what actually happened is that IE was very innovative until Microsoft diverged from the standards and lock people into it. When the ecosystem(websites) integrates enough that your platform(the browser) is the only way to run all that(through Google services for Chrome?), they stop innovating and start monetising. "Works with Chrome" is the new IE, not Safari.

warning26 4y ago
Sure, but forcing people to use Safari against their will isn't the right way to approach that problem. If Google is indeed leveraging their market position in an anticompetitive way to push Chrome, then they should be stopped from doing that.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  They surely can get a few billions of a fine in 10 years.
nicoburns 4y ago
The difference being that Chrome is open source (ok fine, Chrome is closed source but the important parts like the rendering engine are open source as Chromium). So they can't lock anyone into anything. If they try that they'll just get forked. Indeed we already have Edge as a well-maintained fork. Which isn't to say that Safari and especially Firefox aren't important drivers of competition. But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Of course they can, it's about the marketshare and not the code. They can make some part of the browser running in their cloud services and no matter how much you look into the Chromium code the websites which support this will run in Chrome only. Why would websites support this? Well, it can provide good rankings in search or some other goodie like speeding up the loading times through Google CDN or something and works for %90 of the people(because they use Chrome). Once enough websites integrate this, it's over.
- sbuk 4y ago
  Chrome uses the blink engine, which is a fork of Webkit, which is open source.
  - kimixa 4y ago
    Which in turn was a fork of khtml
    - sbuk 4y ago
      I don't see what relevance this has to the discussion.
      - dcow 4y ago
        You don't see how adding another parent node to browser engine code lineage is relevant in a subthread about browser engine code lineage?
        sbuk 4y ago
        I'm the OP. I'm questioning the relevance, which is in response to the assertion that "The difference being that Chrome is open source (ok fine, Chrome is closed source but the important parts like the rendering engine are open source as Chromium)". My aim is to point out that WebKit is also open source, and that the engine being touted by the GP is actually a fork of Webkit. Its provenance in this case irrelevant.
      - kimixa 4y ago
        Just pointing out there's a whole family of HTML engines, and Webkit wasn't the origin. It's also likely that it's the reason why Webkit is GPL, and we're able to have this discussion. In my experience, Apple haven't exactly been very open-source friendly - I know working with them there's a rejection of any GPL dependencies, even if well separated and unmodified, or even just tools used in the build process if they're GPL3+. I don't doubt if Apple developed a html engine from scratch it would use a different license, and the entire landscape of browsers would look very different today.
- ssss11 4y ago
  There is lock in it’s just more subtle than the IE situation. Have you seen the chromium codebase? It may be open source but no individuals or small teams would be able to manage a competing product, you’d need huge investment to compete. There’s a barrier to entry all the same. Plus keeping up with the constant updates while trying to build a competitor…
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    This point doesn't make any sense. The standards and functionality that are required in a modern browser are already far beyond what "an individual or small team" could build from scratch. The existence of Chromium absolutely makes it much, much more feasible to launch a Chrome competitor than if Chrome was entirely closed source.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      Anything forked from Chromium can’t be significantly different from Chromium, because any change of that nature increases divergence from Chromium and makes it more difficult to keep pace with the firehose of changes being pumped out daily by Google’s massive Chrome/Blink team. It means that forks can never be anything but mostly-cosmetic reskins unless the party forking sinks resources equally large as Google’s into the fork, which gives Google power to shape the web as they please unopposed.
      - cassianoleal 4y ago
        > unless the party forking sinks resources equally large as Google’s into the fork, which gives Google power to shape the web as they please unopposed. I imagine even this already very unlikely outcome would also depend on said fork having a big slice of market share before they even try to drift away from Chromium, otherwise it won't have any effect and will likely die exactly because of said differences.
        kitsunesoba 4y ago
        That's true. No matter the situation, the fact that Chromium/Blink is open source changes little due to the sheer amount of power Google wields.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Have you ever seen a serious "fork war"? Open Source may be possible to fork, but that isn't a guarantee that everything will be hunky dory after a hard fork. The drama and chaos of "we need a trustworthy fork" after a bad actor does something unsociable can be awful (especially if that bad actor remains in play). Security/safety/IP audits of past code pre-fork after a major fork has become necessary isn't free or cheap and takes resources. Drama can draw weird boundaries between project attempts and create a lot of internecine fighting among the "survivors" of the "upstream crash". There's so much sociopolitics that may be involved. Open source projects still involve a lot of people, at the end of the day, not just code. Open source applications have died in a fork war. The situation is different from IE, but there's still a lot of similarities and open source isn't necessarily the balm it appears to be. They code may still "be there", but code still needs people to believe in it/trust it/work on it.
- cptskippy 4y ago
  > But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE. Google isn't trying to kill the web and grow desktop App development, so yes it's different. And also people weren't complaining about Internet Explorer while it was innovative and competing against Netscape Navigator with annual releases. It was after 5 years of stagnation, not supporting new W3C standards, and unfixed bugs. Google learned from Microsoft's mistakes. They participated in standards, they update often, and resolve bugs quickly. Everything Microsoft didn't do. They also implement new features outside of standards but just as temporary experiments mind you. If developers happen to adopt them and implement them on their sites, well Google's hands are tied and y'all might as well make them standards (e.g. SPDY, QUIC). Or, because the control the standards process they can propose a change to a private list, push it to WHATWG and get representatives from Apple and Firefox to pull it into the "living" standard without any public discourse or feedback (e.g. removing alert();). This isn't to say everything they're doing is bad, but that doesn't mean they aren't working in their own self interest.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > If they try that they'll just get forked. "just" Will they also "just" fork search monopoly, and web's most visited properties like youtube? > Indeed we already have Edge as a well-maintained fork. Indeed we have a Chrome re-skin with very few differences because even Microsoft couldn't maintain a browser.
bityard 4y ago
> what actually happened is that IE was very innovative We remember things very differently, then. IE was hardly innovative, unless you count things like the <blink> and <marquee> tags, and the ActiveX which their blatant attempt to tie the web to Windows. The other thing IE was known for was missing, incomplete, or out-right broken support for extremely basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript functionality that other browsers had no issues with. Leaving web developers to scatter their code/markup with IE-specific workarounds. Compounding this problem was lack of regular releases and updates. Except for security fixes, Microsoft considered IE to be part of the OS and refused to issue updates for it between OS releases, for the most part, which is why IE stuck around so long. Nobody _wanted_ IE. It was just there as part of the OS at the same point in history that Internet access became a mainstream thing.
- tempestn 4y ago
  You're just talking about different time periods. IE was innovative back when it supplanted Netscape. Then it stagnated.
- sbuk 4y ago
  You used AJAX-based websites, right? That was first available in IE. Initially, IE unto version 6 was extremely innovative. Then Microsoft won, and they stopped trying.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  No, the innovation was things like XMLHttpRequest which allowed for the early "single pages web apps"
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Yes, and contenteditable which allowed for rich text editing.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      Also `box-sizing: border-box` was how IE designed CSS box sizing (to be simpler to math for the CSS writer rather than simpler math for the Renderer programmer). The fact that it is now just about "required" boilerplate in most CSS reset/normalization steps to throw in a `* { box-sizing: border-box; }` rule to opt in to "do it the IE way" is a massive, vestigial, lasting testament to IE's innovation in CSS in the early CSS standards.
dcow 4y ago
Safari is just as bad about not following standards though. I could sympathize a lot more if your argument was between Firefox and Chrome/Safari. In my mind Chrome/Safari are the hegemony.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  I agree that Safari should do better but Embrace, Extend then Exterminate is a real thing and lacking functions is not the same as having alternative "standards". "You need to download Chrome" is the scariest thing these days, especially if you see it in Firefox.
- klodolph 4y ago
  I don’t know why you think that, it certainly sounds wrong to me. Like, not just wrong in a technical sense, but like, crazy wrong. Did you live through the IE5 and IE6 days? Does the term “quirks mode” mean anything to you? Do you remember how Mac IE was completely different from Windows IE? Internet Explorer, back in the early 2000s, was a serious support burden for anyone doing web development at the time. Around 2010, Google dropped support for IE6 (in apps like GMail + Youtube) and a ton of other sites followed suit. It made a big splash across all the news sites and all the web developers breathed a sigh of relief, because they could say “we’re dropping IE6 support because Google did.” Meanwhile, there was a parallel world of IE-only sites. Some of them were built on future widespread web technologies like DHTML, others were built on stuff like ActiveX. ActiveX ended up in the trash bin (where it belongs) and DHTML became normalized. It was… common, and annoying, to deal with corporate sites that only worked in IE, and then build your own site and fight to get it working in IE. It was not a fun time to be a web developer. Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I remember that Safari was missing some of the newer features that Chrome or Firefox had, but when I investigated, it usually turned out that I was using some future/experimental feature in Chrome or Firefox, and it wasn’t a problem with the standards-compliance of Safari per se. Or sometimes I was relying on behavior that was not part of the standard at all). Nowadays, my sense is that Chrome tends to have more experimental stuff available and a better set of dev tools, but otherwise, most stuff works in Safari or Firefox with little to no modification.
  - 4y ago
jeroenhd 4y ago
Chrome got popular because IE grew to be terrible and Firefox became bloated and slow over time. Opera was a decent alternative but their alternative renderer couldn't keep up. If Apple keeps their browser compatible, I doubt they have much to fear. Linking users to the app store because your site doesn't work is a great way to drive them away from your website, I doubt there will be much push for installing Chrome. Currently, Chrome for iOS has a slither of the market share that Safari has. Most people don't even know you can install another browser at all. Unless Apple makes/keeps their browser uncompetitive, they won't lose a serious amount of market share.
- timeon 4y ago
  Firefox did not became bloated. It was plugin based. Chrome came with new concept (tab=process) and marketing. That is it.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    > and marketing. If I recall correctly, Google was paying 1$ per install, so everyone was promoting Chrome and Chrome was actually better than Firefox. Firefox then made a lot of missteps, tried to make a push open video and audio codecs for idealistic reasons and lost. They also failed to catch on Chrome's performance for quite a long time. They spent a lot of resources into experiments that went nowhere.
benced 4y ago
Allowing a dominant OS to foist a bad browser on all of us is not a good way to prevent a dominant internet search company from potentially foisting a bad browser on all of us.
summerlight 4y ago
Two different contexts here: Google still has a major dependency on the web so we cannot pull its money out of the platform that easily. Also, everyone nowadays understands how important platform control is and MS made a significant mistake before. If Google abandons the web then some other random corp will pick it up. Why would Google allow that? A market monopoly is not something passive which can be retained that easily.

by mrtksn 4y ago

warning26 4y ago

Sure, but forcing people to use Safari against their will isn't the right way to approach that problem. If Google is indeed leveraging their market position in an anticompetitive way to push Chrome, then they should be stopped from doing that.

mrtksn 4y ago
They surely can get a few billions of a fine in 10 years.

nicoburns 4y ago

The difference being that Chrome is open source (ok fine, Chrome is closed source but the important parts like the rendering engine are open source as Chromium). So they can't lock anyone into anything. If they try that they'll just get forked. Indeed we already have Edge as a well-maintained fork. Which isn't to say that Safari and especially Firefox aren't important drivers of competition. But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE.

mrtksn 4y ago
Of course they can, it's about the marketshare and not the code. They can make some part of the browser running in their cloud services and no matter how much you look into the Chromium code the websites which support this will run in Chrome only. Why would websites support this? Well, it can provide good rankings in search or some other goodie like speeding up the loading times through Google CDN or something and works for %90 of the people(because they use Chrome). Once enough websites integrate this, it's over.
sbuk 4y ago
Chrome uses the blink engine, which is a fork of Webkit, which is open source.
- kimixa 4y ago
  Which in turn was a fork of khtml
  - sbuk 4y ago
    I don't see what relevance this has to the discussion.
    - dcow 4y ago
      You don't see how adding another parent node to browser engine code lineage is relevant in a subthread about browser engine code lineage?
      - sbuk 4y ago
        I'm the OP. I'm questioning the relevance, which is in response to the assertion that "The difference being that Chrome is open source (ok fine, Chrome is closed source but the important parts like the rendering engine are open source as Chromium)". My aim is to point out that WebKit is also open source, and that the engine being touted by the GP is actually a fork of Webkit. Its provenance in this case irrelevant.
    - kimixa 4y ago
      Just pointing out there's a whole family of HTML engines, and Webkit wasn't the origin. It's also likely that it's the reason why Webkit is GPL, and we're able to have this discussion. In my experience, Apple haven't exactly been very open-source friendly - I know working with them there's a rejection of any GPL dependencies, even if well separated and unmodified, or even just tools used in the build process if they're GPL3+. I don't doubt if Apple developed a html engine from scratch it would use a different license, and the entire landscape of browsers would look very different today.
ssss11 4y ago
There is lock in it’s just more subtle than the IE situation. Have you seen the chromium codebase? It may be open source but no individuals or small teams would be able to manage a competing product, you’d need huge investment to compete. There’s a barrier to entry all the same. Plus keeping up with the constant updates while trying to build a competitor…
- shkkmo 4y ago
  This point doesn't make any sense. The standards and functionality that are required in a modern browser are already far beyond what "an individual or small team" could build from scratch. The existence of Chromium absolutely makes it much, much more feasible to launch a Chrome competitor than if Chrome was entirely closed source.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Anything forked from Chromium can’t be significantly different from Chromium, because any change of that nature increases divergence from Chromium and makes it more difficult to keep pace with the firehose of changes being pumped out daily by Google’s massive Chrome/Blink team. It means that forks can never be anything but mostly-cosmetic reskins unless the party forking sinks resources equally large as Google’s into the fork, which gives Google power to shape the web as they please unopposed.
    - cassianoleal 4y ago
      > unless the party forking sinks resources equally large as Google’s into the fork, which gives Google power to shape the web as they please unopposed. I imagine even this already very unlikely outcome would also depend on said fork having a big slice of market share before they even try to drift away from Chromium, otherwise it won't have any effect and will likely die exactly because of said differences.
      - kitsunesoba 4y ago
        That's true. No matter the situation, the fact that Chromium/Blink is open source changes little due to the sheer amount of power Google wields.
WorldMaker 4y ago
Have you ever seen a serious "fork war"? Open Source may be possible to fork, but that isn't a guarantee that everything will be hunky dory after a hard fork. The drama and chaos of "we need a trustworthy fork" after a bad actor does something unsociable can be awful (especially if that bad actor remains in play). Security/safety/IP audits of past code pre-fork after a major fork has become necessary isn't free or cheap and takes resources. Drama can draw weird boundaries between project attempts and create a lot of internecine fighting among the "survivors" of the "upstream crash". There's so much sociopolitics that may be involved. Open source projects still involve a lot of people, at the end of the day, not just code. Open source applications have died in a fork war. The situation is different from IE, but there's still a lot of similarities and open source isn't necessarily the balm it appears to be. They code may still "be there", but code still needs people to believe in it/trust it/work on it.
cptskippy 4y ago
> But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE. Google isn't trying to kill the web and grow desktop App development, so yes it's different. And also people weren't complaining about Internet Explorer while it was innovative and competing against Netscape Navigator with annual releases. It was after 5 years of stagnation, not supporting new W3C standards, and unfixed bugs. Google learned from Microsoft's mistakes. They participated in standards, they update often, and resolve bugs quickly. Everything Microsoft didn't do. They also implement new features outside of standards but just as temporary experiments mind you. If developers happen to adopt them and implement them on their sites, well Google's hands are tied and y'all might as well make them standards (e.g. SPDY, QUIC). Or, because the control the standards process they can propose a change to a private list, push it to WHATWG and get representatives from Apple and Firefox to pull it into the "living" standard without any public discourse or feedback (e.g. removing alert();). This isn't to say everything they're doing is bad, but that doesn't mean they aren't working in their own self interest.
dmitriid 4y ago
> If they try that they'll just get forked. "just" Will they also "just" fork search monopoly, and web's most visited properties like youtube? > Indeed we already have Edge as a well-maintained fork. Indeed we have a Chrome re-skin with very few differences because even Microsoft couldn't maintain a browser.

bityard 4y ago

> what actually happened is that IE was very innovative We remember things very differently, then. IE was hardly innovative, unless you count things like the <blink> and <marquee> tags, and the ActiveX which their blatant attempt to tie the web to Windows. The other thing IE was known for was missing, incomplete, or out-right broken support for extremely basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript functionality that other browsers had no issues with. Leaving web developers to scatter their code/markup with IE-specific workarounds. Compounding this problem was lack of regular releases and updates. Except for security fixes, Microsoft considered IE to be part of the OS and refused to issue updates for it between OS releases, for the most part, which is why IE stuck around so long. Nobody _wanted_ IE. It was just there as part of the OS at the same point in history that Internet access became a mainstream thing.

tempestn 4y ago
You're just talking about different time periods. IE was innovative back when it supplanted Netscape. Then it stagnated.
sbuk 4y ago
You used AJAX-based websites, right? That was first available in IE. Initially, IE unto version 6 was extremely innovative. Then Microsoft won, and they stopped trying.
mrtksn 4y ago
No, the innovation was things like XMLHttpRequest which allowed for the early "single pages web apps"
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Yes, and contenteditable which allowed for rich text editing.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Also `box-sizing: border-box` was how IE designed CSS box sizing (to be simpler to math for the CSS writer rather than simpler math for the Renderer programmer). The fact that it is now just about "required" boilerplate in most CSS reset/normalization steps to throw in a `* { box-sizing: border-box; }` rule to opt in to "do it the IE way" is a massive, vestigial, lasting testament to IE's innovation in CSS in the early CSS standards.

dcow 4y ago

Safari is just as bad about not following standards though. I could sympathize a lot more if your argument was between Firefox and Chrome/Safari. In my mind Chrome/Safari are the hegemony.

mrtksn 4y ago
I agree that Safari should do better but Embrace, Extend then Exterminate is a real thing and lacking functions is not the same as having alternative "standards". "You need to download Chrome" is the scariest thing these days, especially if you see it in Firefox.
klodolph 4y ago
I don’t know why you think that, it certainly sounds wrong to me. Like, not just wrong in a technical sense, but like, crazy wrong. Did you live through the IE5 and IE6 days? Does the term “quirks mode” mean anything to you? Do you remember how Mac IE was completely different from Windows IE? Internet Explorer, back in the early 2000s, was a serious support burden for anyone doing web development at the time. Around 2010, Google dropped support for IE6 (in apps like GMail + Youtube) and a ton of other sites followed suit. It made a big splash across all the news sites and all the web developers breathed a sigh of relief, because they could say “we’re dropping IE6 support because Google did.” Meanwhile, there was a parallel world of IE-only sites. Some of them were built on future widespread web technologies like DHTML, others were built on stuff like ActiveX. ActiveX ended up in the trash bin (where it belongs) and DHTML became normalized. It was… common, and annoying, to deal with corporate sites that only worked in IE, and then build your own site and fight to get it working in IE. It was not a fun time to be a web developer. Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I remember that Safari was missing some of the newer features that Chrome or Firefox had, but when I investigated, it usually turned out that I was using some future/experimental feature in Chrome or Firefox, and it wasn’t a problem with the standards-compliance of Safari per se. Or sometimes I was relying on behavior that was not part of the standard at all). Nowadays, my sense is that Chrome tends to have more experimental stuff available and a better set of dev tools, but otherwise, most stuff works in Safari or Firefox with little to no modification.
- 4y ago

jeroenhd 4y ago

Chrome got popular because IE grew to be terrible and Firefox became bloated and slow over time. Opera was a decent alternative but their alternative renderer couldn't keep up. If Apple keeps their browser compatible, I doubt they have much to fear. Linking users to the app store because your site doesn't work is a great way to drive them away from your website, I doubt there will be much push for installing Chrome. Currently, Chrome for iOS has a slither of the market share that Safari has. Most people don't even know you can install another browser at all. Unless Apple makes/keeps their browser uncompetitive, they won't lose a serious amount of market share.

timeon 4y ago
Firefox did not became bloated. It was plugin based. Chrome came with new concept (tab=process) and marketing. That is it.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  > and marketing. If I recall correctly, Google was paying 1$ per install, so everyone was promoting Chrome and Chrome was actually better than Firefox. Firefox then made a lot of missteps, tried to make a push open video and audio codecs for idealistic reasons and lost. They also failed to catch on Chrome's performance for quite a long time. They spent a lot of resources into experiments that went nowhere.

benced 4y ago

Allowing a dominant OS to foist a bad browser on all of us is not a good way to prevent a dominant internet search company from potentially foisting a bad browser on all of us.

summerlight 4y ago

Two different contexts here: Google still has a major dependency on the web so we cannot pull its money out of the platform that easily. Also, everyone nowadays understands how important platform control is and MS made a significant mistake before. If Google abandons the web then some other random corp will pick it up. Why would Google allow that? A market monopoly is not something passive which can be retained that easily.