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There are so many angles. So many angles. Before chrome there where a lot more competing browser engines, so that is already a solid YES. Then you have the hand

by josefx 3y ago

There are so many angles. So many angles. Before chrome there where a lot more competing browser engines, so that is already a solid YES. Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market. > at a fraction of the cost Microsoft gave IE away for free and there where dozens of IE clones build on top of its engine, you just never had a reason to use any of them because in the end they where still IE clones.

smoldesu 3y ago
> Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market. "Then you have the UNIX market that was a lot more diverse before Red Hat Linux hit the market." I think it will be trivial to prove that Google is actively harming the internet. Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission. If the market decides that a terrible, buggy and enormous runtime is the best way to freely distribute content, then that's what we'll settle on. It's hardly surprising that things got this way, too; locked-down platforms are becoming so normalized that browsers are the only window of freedom users and developers have. It's not like Google or Apple made it any easier to ship native, cross-platform apps in that time, either. So of course users will gravitate to a browser that has more features than their own OS. So... implicating Google is easy. Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely.
- deleted 3y ago
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- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely. What would winning this battle look like/achieve?
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    It's hard to say. My theory is that the demand for complicated browsers is largely reciprocal to the power of your OS. If you have a Chromebook, then your browser is probably less locked-down than your root system. Same thing would happen if Chrome's Blink engine got put on iOS. Winning that battle would probably look like one of two things: - Browsers go back to their original goal of being document renderers, and a new wave of local and online APIs fills in the gaps. - Browsers stay the way they are, but with broken tooling that forces developers into native APIs whether they want it or not.

by josefx 3y ago

smoldesu 3y ago

> Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market. "Then you have the UNIX market that was a lot more diverse before Red Hat Linux hit the market." I think it will be trivial to prove that Google is actively harming the internet. Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission. If the market decides that a terrible, buggy and enormous runtime is the best way to freely distribute content, then that's what we'll settle on. It's hardly surprising that things got this way, too; locked-down platforms are becoming so normalized that browsers are the only window of freedom users and developers have. It's not like Google or Apple made it any easier to ship native, cross-platform apps in that time, either. So of course users will gravitate to a browser that has more features than their own OS. So... implicating Google is easy. Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
robertlagrant 3y ago
> Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely. What would winning this battle look like/achieve?
- smoldesu 3y ago
  It's hard to say. My theory is that the demand for complicated browsers is largely reciprocal to the power of your OS. If you have a Chromebook, then your browser is probably less locked-down than your root system. Same thing would happen if Chrome's Blink engine got put on iOS. Winning that battle would probably look like one of two things: - Browsers go back to their original goal of being document renderers, and a new wave of local and online APIs fills in the gaps. - Browsers stay the way they are, but with broken tooling that forces developers into native APIs whether they want it or not.