Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/google-s-chrome-becomes-web-gatekeeper-and-rivals-complain

by naktinis • 7 years ago

367 234 7 years ago

ishan11212• 7 years ago

Google is a clear monopoly, there's no doubt about it. It has a 70% browser market share, 70% market share in the search ecosystem. Even though their service is good and people are happy, I think they need to be broken down for the sake of keeping an open internet. Even Facebook for that matter. That's my opinion

jayd162• 7 years ago

Has this course of action ever actually worked? I can't say US telecoms are a great example of competition. I'm not anti-regulation but it seems like simply enforcing open standards might be more effective.

zaarn5• 7 years ago

I hope your joking because US Telcos are the result of a monopoly broken up (AT&T). And even then it's not the healthiest telco market due to the rise of local monopolies and market entrenchment.

dTal7• 7 years ago

Those 70% numbers undersell it. It's basically impossible to use the internet today without touching Google servers. Even if you, personally, completely eschew all Google services, almost everyone you want to communicate with will be on a Google service. Sending an email? Watching a video? Reading a blog? Chances are good that Google's involved.

fouc2• 7 years ago

Not sure why you were downvoted. I think you raise a good point, chrome + adwords + dns + etc + etc.. is concerning.

ishan11212• 7 years ago

I agree...I am talking about the data releaed by Google to prove its not a Monopoly. The only reason Google is not considered a Monopoly in laws eyes is that people have the option but they are not shifting. Like chrome supports changing of Search engines. The only argument can be raised against is Google is on Chrome, that everyone is using Chrome and Google products are not working properly on non-Chrome based browsers

c0vfefe• 7 years ago

Upvoted for ending with a rhyming couplet.

Watching a video? Reading a blog?
Chances are good that Google's involved.

WilliamEdward• 7 years ago

Im surprised facebook was an afterthought for you. I immediately think of facebook whenever i think of bad things involving the internet. Google doesn't even really cross my mind, it's just the most prominent internet thing so of course it's bad in some ways, that's just entropy.

Kaiyou2• 7 years ago

Probably because it's trivial to cut facebook out of your Internet experience. Google,... not so much.

bduerst8• 7 years ago

Just having dominant marketshare, especially in the presence of easily-accessible competitors (e.g. Safari, Mozilla, Opera, etc.), is definitively not a monopoly.

Illniyar• 7 years ago

It more or less is, from a legal stand point, or atleast when referring to anti-trust laws.

That doesn't mean that they are doing anti-competitive stuff and are viable for enforcement, being a monopoly in an open market is not illegal, it does mean that with that level of marketshare they have some legal limitations that their competitors don't have. Usually it's a limit on merges, acquisitions, price setting and bundling.

krageon3• 7 years ago

Your argument would be easier to receive if you enlightened your reader with what you think a monopoly is, rather than just framing it as something it is not.

ilaksh• 7 years ago

I don't know what you can do about browsers besides use Firefox.

But as far as other stuff, I hope people will give distributed p2p possibilities some consideration in terms of usage or development.

For example YaCy works pretty well as a p2p search engine. There are some others that I haven't tried.

Back to the browser stuff. The problem is the browser has a full operating system in it at this point. There are too many APIs to compete.

What could make competing browsers viable might be something like the following. Imagine a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Instead it emphasize fast rendering, has a state of the art web assembly implementation, and some kind of ABI/API for things like UI, UDP, etc. such as OpenGL (or a simpler UI system). It only allows a subset of CSS and HTML, maybe only Flexbox or something. It it could be just restricted to old-fashioned HTML rendering. But anyway it won't be able to have the scope of Firefox and Chrome.

I guess the biggest problem is if you don't support the whole ginourmous HTML5 featureset (starting with JavaScript) then most websites will not work at all. They either will not load or will be totally scrambled.

Maybe some kind of p2p content-centric web could become popular and have it's own streamlined and simplified browser.

Or maybe there could be a new browser tailored for augmented reality that could become popular and compete with Chrome.

zaarn5• 7 years ago

YaCy works and in my experience that's pretty much the extend of it. I never (not a single time) found what I was looking for, vital sites like StackOverflow and Wikipedia aren't properly indexed, the pages that are, are wildly out of date. That plus it's incredibly slow.

dosy• 7 years ago

Your proposal for an alternate browser universe sounds sort of like a project I'm working on.

It makes use of a regular browser (Chrome, Firefox) in the backend but provides a customized experience to the user and over the final hop to the user.

It supports a plugin development where you can use plugins to change the page before it is sent over the final hop to the user, and the JavaScript on the page is never executed on the user's machine, but only run in the cloud backend.

I actually built it for webcasting and scraping, and then needed a lower bandwidth access over my 4G connection while oversees so added a plugin to remove everything except for the essential HTML.

I'm actually looking for feedback right now on what to improve next, as I've got 50 issues I found myself but not sure what's most important to others. You can try it on https://staging.litewait.io and use a stripe test card number.

Mail me for issues and I'll try to help you. In profile.

andrewla• 7 years ago

I've been putting some design work into a minimalist browser like you describe, but starting from a different angle, namely starting with javascript as a first-class citizen, and a React-style virtual DOM as the rendering model. Javascript (or, I could be convinced, web assembly) is the primary interaction model with the browser, with HTML and CSS supported via polyfills.

The additional HTML5 suite of APIs would theoretically be supported by a plugin model, but given the depth of integration of some of the APIs, this might be a great deal more work than it sounds, and even more difficult to prevent the proliferation of questionable plugins to this backend. It would probably have to resemble something closer to the Linux distribution model; where an installed instance of the browser would come with a set of whitelisted plugins, with no real ability for the non-expert user to add plugins.

More important to me is the idea of making use of client certificates to attest identity more strongly, together with masking the use of those certificates over third-party channels. So if I went to facebook.com I would present a cert "abcd" (a self-signed certificate), and if I went to yelp.com I would present "bcde". If yelp loaded content from facebook.com, I would present "cdef". Similarly for cookie handling, at least initially.

My hope would be that websites would associate multiple client certs with a given "user" on their site, but unless the user explicitly associates a cert with an identity there's no way (outside of fingerprinting, etc.) to make that association; all third-party interactions show as incognito sessions. Eventually the goal would be that (if this technique is widely adopted) that cookies become kind of useless in favor of strongly attested server-side identity (rather than using bearer tokens in the form of cookies) that can be associated with session data.

partiallypro• 7 years ago

AdWords and other Google platforms have more reach than that, even Microsoft serves up Adsense ads on MSN. Analytics is so heavily tied to AdWords, it's practically impossible to run an effective campaign without it. I'm more concerned about the advertising market Google has a strangle on. Analytics is everywhere, they have so much behavioral data that everyone pales in comparison, and no one can give as much insight into the ad market.

kmlx4• 7 years ago

as a software dev, not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing. countless hours wasted on debugging various browsers gets massively reduced. second point, moving the conversation from "<browser x> hasn't caught up" to "everyone's caught up" helps the web focus on technologies more so than before. discussions should now concentrate almost exclusively around the next web technologies, no more competition regarding web engines, more competition regarding web technologies. clear win imo.

as a biz dev, it's a bit saddening to see a lot of browser competitors go down the drain. but this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?

Causality1• 7 years ago

not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing.

So you just ignore the 30 percent of the market that isn't Chrome? Internet Explorer had 70+ percent of the market share until 2010. Was it good for consumers and the internet as a whole for devs to ignore non-IE browsers in 2009?

kmlx4• 7 years ago

it’s much easier to deal with the current 30% than it has been at any point in history with IE.

bad_user5• 7 years ago

As a software dev you probably don't remember, or haven't lived the days of Internet Explorer. Diversity and browser standards is what made the web a good platform to develop for.

Just to give a recent example, if Google would dictate what gets implemented, instead of WebAssembly, the standard, you would have gotten PNaCl.

this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?

I fail to see how the creation of a monopoly can be a win for business. For Google's business, for sure.

kmlx4• 7 years ago

IE was by far the worst browser. i was working as a front end dev durinh those days and got excited when google finally launched chrome, more-so than firefox. the hours and the energy spent on debugging IE is something we will never get back.

on your second point, monopolies create the setting for massive disruption.

kuu• 7 years ago

The problem is if Chrome finally wins it all (we're almost there) and at some point they decide to remove a functionality that we all love, or they stop improving as there is no competition, or they decide to make you pay a little fee for developing a website with an extra functionality, or they decide that Chrome does not run on Mac anymore....

The problem with monopolies is that they control all the power, for the good or the bad decisions, and without competition they are not forced to look for the costumers benefit...

tikkabhuna• 7 years ago

As Chromium is open source, wouldn't someone then fork it and re-add those features or maintain Mac support?

It seems like there is little motivation to maintain a separate browser at the moment, but one day Google may do something that motivates people to fork/create a new one. That could be a big bang moment or just a slow crawl that opens up a niche that a new browser could fill.

sfink2• 7 years ago

Initially, I'm more worried about plain bugs that creep in, get depended on, and can no longer be fixed because of web compatibility.

Next after that would be web API additions or extensions that make sense to Google but interfere with or prevent other things from being pursued (eg more pro privacy directions). They may try hard to play nice with standards bodies, but a quarterly goal can be a strong influence...

https://blog.mozilla.org/sfink/2013/02/14/browser-wars-the-g...

azangru• 7 years ago

Agreed. As a web developer, I want browsers to adhere to the same specs and I want them evergreen. I do not want to deal with browser inconsistencies. Catering to different browsers quirks takes a lot of joy out of the work.

sfink2• 7 years ago

Specs cease to matter once a player gets too dominant. It becomes added work and not following the spec costs nothing.

If we're really headed to a single-browser future, enjoy those specs while they last.

https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-l...

bad_user5• 7 years ago

In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.

However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.

Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open source nature, is the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser.

At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari.

I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.

writepub• 7 years ago

I do not trust Google, but I do not trust Mozilla either. An overwhelming majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google, Microsoft, and other giants it directly competes with. Added to that, many of it's battles (at the W3C and like) prioritize philosophy over customer satisfaction and ease of use.

99.9% of browser users don't care or don't even know if their browser is open source - what they want is convenience and ease of use. I hope Mozilla prioritizes the ones that actually matter - the users, over whatever philosophy it claims to live by, that often times isn't rooted in customer centricity.

TAForObvReasons2• 7 years ago

Mozilla really hasn't helped their cause with various privacy-related issues over the last few years, like the Booking.com ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800360).

The obfuscatory language around it are arguably more insulting than the ads themselves. As John Gruber so eloquently wrote:

If you want to sell ads, sell ads. Own it. Don’t try to coat it with a layer of frosting and tell me it’s a fucking cupcake.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/02/16/mozilla

bad_user5• 7 years ago

Yes, but they also made moves that are against Google's interests, repeatedly. If you have better ideas on how to monetize a browser, I'm sure they are open to suggestions.

As for their "battles at the W3C", you mean DRM and H.264, the patent-encumbered video codec?

The philosophy you're talking about is probably why they still have that 5% of the market, otherwise they would be irrelevant ;-)

syshum4• 7 years ago

I dont believe Mozilla prioritizes their philosophy enough, they are tooo quick to cave in in the name of "customer centricity" instead of standing up for the Open Web which is and should be the SOLE reason they exist

Mozilla Foundation is a Non-profit foundation who mission to the ensure the web is open and accessible to all, not to make the most commercially successful web browser

emn132• 7 years ago

As an individual, I want "convenience and ease of use". But I'm not blind to the fact that you're going to get shafted because my negotiating position - as an individual - is poor. So I 100% want an organization like mozilla, that does have at least some influence (but let's not get too hopeful here), to prioritize also the longer term benefits you describe as "philosophy".

Otherwise you're basically giving in to eternal serfdom; letting large corporations dictate the terms, knowing that individuals will never be able to extract the long-term compromises needed for a good deal. It's basic negotiating 101 that the party holding all the cards is going to get most of the value.

dTal7• 7 years ago

In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.

Where "did some marketing" equals "unethically abused monopoly position to aggressively push through dark patterns", sure. I think I can still blame them for that.

bad_user5• 7 years ago

I've seen dark patterns from Google, but in the case of Chrome I have a hard time remembering any.

Do you mean that they advertised for Chrome on their properties? Advertising on your own property is legitimate in my book. And simple advertising isn't a "dark pattern".

Or do you mean something else?

amelius2• 7 years ago

Yes, also see e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

CaptainZapp3• 7 years ago

Google invested a shit ton into marketing when they launched Chrome.

I have pictures from 2012 (I think) when they had the entire grand hall of Paris' Gare de Lyon hung with dozens of huge Chrome banners.

That alone must have cost them tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Euros.

That said I think the web's under Google's thumb screws (AMP, mail, DNS, browser-almost monopoly, etc) is in a bad place. But they did invest a hell of a lot in pushing Chrome.

jjeaff• 7 years ago

"Some marketing", ha. It was prominently advertised with a message that almost made it seem required, all by itself, on the otherwise almost blank Google search page. One of the most, if not the most visited pages on the planet.

josteink2• 7 years ago

Yes I remember that too, worded with scummy, deceiving wording, like most other malware/spyware at the time.

Instead of “Virus detected! Click here for free scan” it was “Old browser detected. Click here to upgrade”.

It was literally 100% out of the malware deployment hand guide.

dageshi• 7 years ago

The web is a mature platform at this point, it's not really surprising everything has consolidated towards a single implementation, the economics of actually producing websites dictates that's an inevitability.

josteink2• 7 years ago

In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing...

And paid lots of third party software vendors to bundle it as a drive-by installation 100% malware style.

There’s a good reason many of my technically inclined friends still today don’t trust Chrome.

It’s malware after all.

dalbasal8• 7 years ago

"They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular."

They did make a good browser. However, their market share is not down to better browser or "some advertising." They use their other assets (search, youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome the "default" option.

It's a dominance breeds dominance cycle... a hallmark of modern monopoly.

Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without leveraging google's greater web dominance.

There was a time when IE was a good browser and the default one. They dominated. A few years later, Mozilla had the better browser. Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.

IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was at its highest. Much bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is far more dominant than FF or anything ever was... except IE in its monopoly day.

tuxt• 7 years ago

So they make good product.

Bing can be Edge only too.

anewhnaccount2• 7 years ago

If you search for Firefox, Google says "did you mean Chrome?"

Edited to add: This has actually happened to me when setting up a new Windows PC for someone.

creato• 7 years ago

IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was at its highest. Much bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is far more dominant than FF ever was... except IE in its monopoly day.

The benefit needs to be worth the effort. Early on, in the days you refer to, browsers were often crappy and motivated switching often. I bounced between IE and FF a lot (and later chrome), because things were often broken/bad, or various websites I wanted to use didn't work in one or the other. However, in the last few+ years, that's not really true (in any way I notice) now.

Basically, I think the only improvements that can be made are incremental/marginal, and aren't enough to make switching browsers worth it. They're all pretty good now. So, I expect market share for browsers to change much more slowly now.

wguaa2• 7 years ago

Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good.

It is not only good. When it came out it wiped the floor with the alternatives. Firefox 3, from that time, was absolutely pathetic in terms of performance. I remember sticking to 2 for a while. Even today Chrome is still the best, even if the margin has narrowed. Other browsers are having to adopt Blink to catch up.

Krasnol4• 7 years ago

They use their other assets (search, youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome "default" option.

Don't forget their annoying bundling with freeware...

macspoofing2• 7 years ago

However, their market share is not down to better browser or "some advertising."

No. Their market share is wholly due to being a better browser. That is an absolutely true statement when it comes to Windows and PC. It gets muddled with Android, because there you can make a case that they push Chrome as a default browser.

Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.

It was a different time. FF did wonderful work with moving to a standards-based web and breaking IE hegemony, but they got blindsided by Chrome's relentless drive to squeeze every frame of performance out of JavaScript and WebKit. That's the thing with Chrome, they were not only pushing web standards forward, but more importantly they were pushing performance and security in a way that FF could not follow. Around the time that Chrome came out, FF was starting to struggle with a legacy architecture and that made it impossible for them to keep up with Chrome.

tragicpapercut• 7 years ago

My personal experience is not what you are advertising here. I like Chrome because of the features unrelated to performance on Google's own assets - it simply has been the better browser. Yubikey support. Enterprise management capabilities. A robust extension ecosystem. Security. Better memory management for multiple tabs. Some of these are no longer a differentiator for Chrome, but Chrome got there first.

Firefox, IE, Opera have all been way late to the game on some or all of these features.

In the past I have been in the position to help make decisions on browser support at my company. We easily decided on Chrome because it was faster and more secure than IE, but more manageable than Firefox at an Enterprise level. Firefox is just starting to catch up to these feature sets. IE gave up. Safari is a literal running joke even amongst the most ardent of MacOS supporters at my company - features are simply non comparable.

I never once saw an incompatibility problem in Firefox that made me open Chrome. I currently run 2 browser sessions on my main computer - one in Firefox for personal use and one in Chrome for work use. I like and use Firefox, but Chrome has momentum.

KirinDave• 7 years ago

And Firefox might be in a very different place if it wasn't tragically mismanaged to the point where every rational adviser for new computer users didn't have to say, "You can use Firefox, but these days it's slow and it's got terrible security problems."

They've turned the corner on that but it was very true for a long time, and during that time Chrome or Chromium became the default.

It is true that Google is pretty pushy with Chrome, but it's also true that FFox had years of time where it wasn't just obviously slower, it was obviously more dangerous.

I can't help but think this played a major factor in the resulting global bias towards Chrome.

vanilla_nut2• 7 years ago

Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without leveraging google's greater web dominance.

Google's marketing for Chrome was (and is) so aggressive that literally every single Google-owned web property asks you to install it for the "best experience." And more often than not, because Googlers never test for other browsers, Chrome does offer the best experience on Google sites. But that doesn't mean it's the best browser experience, which is a totally subjective metric based on an individual's preferences.

Regardless, Google pushed it so hard, bundled it with so much software, and threw it in users faces so much that most non-technical users probably would have ended up with it installed -- probably set to the default browser, because of more nagging -- regardless of Chrome's quality. Even now, as Google makes steps to neuter adblockers, the average user continues to use it. Why? Because they just don't know any better or care. And I can't blame them: it takes immense effort to even use Firefox now because of random sites based on Google tech that break in every other browser. Chrome is certainly the easy way out.

adito• 7 years ago

Well, even for Edge that use chromium, this situation can happen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/btz1lc/youtube_mat...

duiker101• 7 years ago

A lot of "third party browsers" like Opera, Vivaldi and Brave choose to go for Chromium as their engine, would they be able to use Firefox's engine the same way? If yes, why does it seem that no one actually does it? I personally don't particularly enjoy Firefox as a browser, but I don't have anything against their engine. If there was a version of Vivaldi that implemented that I would probably choose it over the Chromium version.

syshum4• 7 years ago

At the time they made those choices there were 3 main reasons to choose chromium over FF as a base

1. Smaller Size, chromium was just a smaller foot print with less legacy code

2. Better Performance. There was no doubt the before firefox quantum Chromium was the performance leader, Bink and V8 where superior then, today not soo much

3. Better rendering support. Like IE6 in the 90's today there are many many sites that ONLY work correctly on chrome, so if you use chrome's render you have less work to do, and will have less complaints by users blaming your browser for some websites poor code

icebraining8• 7 years ago

There are browsers using Firefox's engine; most are forks of Firefox itself, but there was Camino, Conkeror, and Galeon, plus K-Meleon which is still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon

noname120• 7 years ago

competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser

This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.

However, they are not willing to anymore, which is a huge concern for future innovations in that domain.

thrower123• 7 years ago

Edge working great is quite an exageration, in my experience. Barely workable, with it's own host of weird bugs, that Microsoft did their typical slow-rolling and prevarication on handling. Tying it to a specific operating system version was also a poor decision if they wanted adoption.

The_rationalist• 7 years ago

"they are not willing to anymore" wtf does this mean? Have you looked at chromium commits activity? Microsoft is actively working on improving chromium, especially improving it's integration with windows 10. Convergence create synergies instead of reinventing the wheel and make Google no longer the only player in the development of chromium. Firefox has ~600000 commits Chrome has ~700000. Do you realize the order of magnitude of improvements that we users should have, if mozilla devs had worked in improving chrome instead?? No those numbers are far too much to realize for a human brain, but at least we can realize that we don't realize.

Btw hello double standards, why shouldn't QT, WPF or GTK have redundant implementations?

Andrex• 7 years ago

It is correct, but it hinges on your interpretation of the phrase "modern browser." Edge was falling behind on implementing the web spec compared to Chrome (among other things.)

This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.

If Edge had all those things but could only render HTML4 and below, would it be considered a "modern browser" still? I would say no. That's an extreme hypothetical but it was similar to the future Microsoft saw for Edge, and a major factor in the switch to Chromium.

gingabriska• 7 years ago

They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular

In initial days of chrome, it wasn't that better. It grew in popularity because of the bundle model of advertising they employed which was initially used to distribute spyware and the browser started growing.

All the nice things came later.

icebraining8• 7 years ago

It had an uncluttered UI, multi-process tabs, sandboxing, V8, Incognito, and a few more. Some of these were available in other browsers, but the mix was rather new.

akerro• 7 years ago

Purposely slowing down websites on competing browsers, breaking web-standards on cutting edge tech, abusing their other products, using slower codecs on other browsers on YT, not allowing some websites use certain features of google-doc, constantly showing popups to switch to Google Chrome on google docs - this all anti-competitive behavior to squeeze more data from your life and browsing habits.

jakeogh2• 7 years ago

Surf works excellent: https://surf.suckless.org/

sascha_sl• 7 years ago

yes, because "compile webkit yourself" is super suckless

macspoofing2• 7 years ago

However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.

Are they though?

Adherence to standards is very good across the board. It isn't like it was in the 90s when standards were seen as mere guidelines and suggestions.

Safari is going strong. FF is going to be around but they are certainly struggling - and it's their fault. They have had the uncanny ability to make the wrong decision every time. They are hamstrung by their legacy architecture that they are just starting to break out of. Their side projects (Firefox OS, Pocket, Reality) were/are a total waste of time. And of course, they promoted and then fired Eich over nothing - which leads one to wonder what kind of a circus they run internally.

Microsoft is interesting and for now they are using a packaged version of Chromium - but I could see them do a hard-fork in the same way that Google forked WebKit because at some point a trillion-dollar company won't want to be tied to another trillion-dollar company's roadmap.

reitanqild3• 7 years ago

In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.

They spammed it massively as in

- adding it to other popular downloads

- ads everywhere on their properties, including on the front page where no one else has ever been allowed to buy ad spots

- lies: would shamelessly present itself as a better browser not just for users of old IE versions but also for users of Firefox and probably Opera as well.

lunchables• 7 years ago

I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.

Agreed. Firefox is really fast, and I love it. Been using it for a couple years now. But even if Chrome was demonstrably, objectively faster, I would still use Firefox.

holtalanm2• 7 years ago

i tried firefox, and loved the experience, but ran into a few minor bugs related to css that just made absolutely no sense.

also, it regularly ran my cpu at max throttle when doing anything video-related within the browser (watching netflix, on a video chat, etc), while chrome is much more cpu-friendly with those things (don't know why that is).

I tried Opera, as well, and ran it as my main browser for months (almost a year, actually), but there is a wierd bug in windows related to the browser bar expanding when the machine wakes up from sleep, where the only way to fix it is to restart the browser entirely.

skybrian• 7 years ago

Microsoft has the resources to fork Chromium if necessary, much like Google forked WebKit (after sending patches upstream for a while) and Apple forked KHTML. This is just how open source works and isn't a problem in itself.

By doing this, Microsoft gets compatibility with the world's websites on day one, and they can take it from there. It's a smart move that many people seem to be misinterpreting.

throwaway808080• 7 years ago

It’s a money move. Ms sunk billions in Edge. With chredge bing ads makes profits. It will come installed in windows by default.

If google’s killing ad block extensions, Microsoft will most definitely follow suite.

Your only best bet is Firefox right now.

Chrome is a Trojan horse and Google most definitely doesn’t give a shit about your privacy.

gfosco• 7 years ago

I really don't like how browser vendors have become extension gatekeepers, strongly discouraging any integration they disapprove of. I like what Gab has done with the Dissenter Browser (fork of Brave) after being removed from the Google/Firefox stores.

stephenr3• 7 years ago

Imagine being so convinced that nazis and white supremacists are "right" that literally fork your own browser.

collyw• 7 years ago

Can you explain your comment, as it sounds like hyperbole to me.

scarejunba2• 7 years ago

What's the steelman argument for Google withholding Widevine from Samuel Maddock? Electron packaging with Widevine is a thing so this seems unusual. If you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this?

martin_a2• 7 years ago

If you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this?

What if you aren't actually the good guy?

ovi256• 7 years ago

He's basically asking if there's any reasonable theory fitting the fact that Google withheld Widevine and the hypothesis that Google is a good guy.

The jump to the null hypothesis that you've stated is made too soon without doing this first.

onli• 7 years ago

With that decision they aimed a very big gun straight at their foot and pulled the trigger. They proved:

1. That they are in a monopoly-like position where they have the power to decide over other web tech projects

2. That they have a very hostile process, not getting properly back to the developer for months. That alone is sabotaging of other projects.

3. That they make the wrong decision, seemingly only protecting their own position, without providing a proper reasoning.

Hear that? That was the antitrust investigator laughing. You can do that if it's about some random tech. You can't do that if the tech is linked to a browser controlling how 60% of internet users access the web, and worse, getting full access to popular stuff/success qualifying content like Netflix for all browser. They wanted that monopoly position when they pushed for DRM, now they have to handle it. Big mistake.

repolfx2• 7 years ago

The steelman is that Widevine is a DRM platform; to tell the difference between a browser and a ripper application it needs a lot of knowledge about the context in which it's meant to run, and how to tell the difference between a 'real' Chrome that follows the licensing rules and a fork of Chrome that doesn't. It should have been obvious to Maddock that he wouldn't be allowed to do this: I'm not sure why it's come up as an issue as a result.

As for Electron, are you sure? I found this page:

https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm

It says:

To enable video playback with this new restriction, castLabs has created a fork that has implemented the necessary changes to enable Widevine to be played in an Electron application if one has obtained the necessary licenses from widevine.

So there's a fork of Electron that enables you to embed Widevine, if and only if you have the necessary licenses (otherwise presumably your Electron fork would be detected as a stream ripper).

Thus I'm not sure you're right about that. At any rate, if Electron became a back door to extract content, it'd be remotely detected and disabled. That's the entire point of the Widevine system.

As for "the good guy", gah, please, are we all 10 years old here? Content licensing and copyright enforcement is not a good vs evil fight. Some content producers choose to upload their video as WebM files to free hosting providers and let anyone who wants to watch them. Others stick it on YouTube and ask YT to monetize (means, no ad blocking). Still others want viewers to pay for the content (means, no content ripping). All these are valid economic models that are widely used, and Google obviously wants to support them because otherwise the answer is not "no DRM", it's "no in-browser Netflix".

scarejunba2• 7 years ago

Cool. Thanks.

smaddock• 7 years ago

The issue I ran into was in acquiring the necessary licenses that you mentioned. Verified Media Path (VMP) can be used to verify the authenticity of the browser platform. I believe it uses public key cryptography for identification by Widevine's license servers.

It seems like it would be trivial for Widevine to revoke access if there were ever abuse.

I have more details in a blog post I wrote last month. https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...

dalbasal8• 7 years ago

Antitrust law is, I suspect, hopelessly outdated... both the laws and the understanding of monopolies/trusts that are baked into them.

These laws were based on 19th-century competition. The problems att were price fixing, predatory pricing (eg price low to kill competition then raise prices), supply chain bottlenecking (how you gonna sell your ore without my trains) ... industrial era trust stuff.

The precedents and laws are hair-splitting and specific. It's just not the kind of system that can "think" high level and apply abstract principles to totally new problems.

Google & Facebook mostly have no prices to fix. The ad markets where they make their money are competitive bid-based, ostensibly the opposite of a "monopolistic pricing" structure.

The economic/theory just doesn't match the pratices anymore. For example: Facebooks' revenue.

Imagine that tomorrow morning BMW's revenues are cut in half. BMW would need to produce fewer cars. Cars cost X to produce. Cut X in half, and you can expect half the volume.

What would happen if we did the same to FB. My guess is that they'd still make the same FB. If you take path dependency^ out of the mix (that it's hard to fire people and adjust downward), It's scary to think how big a company is required to make FB. Doesn't seem like a stretch to speculate that it can be done on a $5-$10bn budget... 1/10th of their current revenue. After all, Facebook was Facebook on that budget not long ago.

^By path dependency I mean imagine that FB's revenue had just never gotten to $80bn in the first place, the sahare price had never gotten so high. Etc.

IDK what exactly that implies about what antitrust laws should be, but it does mean that the theoretical foundation for the current ruleset is totally off. The way monopolistic power conerts to money in 2019 is fundamentally different from 1891... I mean genuinely fundamental, I'm not using it as a superlative. The definition of monopoly, benefits of owning one, the reasons why they're bad (or not).

chii4• 7 years ago

Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society, and it's adverse effects can't be fixed via markets due to reasons like size and reach.

Monopoly in its own is neither good nor bad.

Facebook has a monopoly in social network. Is that bad? What is the effect of the monopoly? Is Facebook's monopoly having an adverse effect, or is the adverse effect inherent in the way social networks work (and breaking the monopoly won't help).

Simply being a monopoly is an unreasonable reason to break it up.

dalbasal8• 7 years ago

Those are exactly the types of questions that I think we have outdated laws regarding.

Outdated laws and outdated economic theory embedded in them. There is only so far that you can extend a railroads, mining and foundries analogy.

I'm sure we could have lively back-and-forth about the impact of these monopolies, but the only legal and legislatively pertinent parts of that discussion are those that can be massaged into an analogy to the late industrial examples that the current legal framework (including, legislation, legal precedents and regulatory bodies) was designed around.

fauigerzigerk• 7 years ago

You could say that monopolies are inherently bad because they stifle innovation even if they don't lead to higher prices. An unassailable monopolist has no reason to innovate because competitors are effectively locked out.

But it appears to me that there is a psychological bias towards an exceedingly narrow definition of substitution goods and therefore markets, especially in digital technologies.

For instance, Microsoft clearly has an extremely dominant position in PC operating systems. The market for PC operating systems used to be synonymous with personal computing, but that is no longer true. Mobile devices now dominate personal computing.

So Microsoft has lost most of its monopolistic power without ever losing its dominance in the market as it was originally defined by regulators and users.

Similarly, search used to be synonymous with using a web search engine and Google clearly has a monopoly there. But now we search Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, etc for various specific things in different contexts and Google has to pay billions to buy users from Apple.

So my point is that yes, monopolies are inherently bad, but they are also inherently unstable in ways that are not adequately reflected in the current thinking around anti-trust regulation.

__HYde• 7 years ago

Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society

This has not been true historically. Standard Oil was not "bad for society".

icebraining8• 7 years ago

Facebook was Facebook on that budget not long ago.

Facebook was Facebook, but it wasn't Facebook+Whatsapp+Instagram, and "mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce market competition" have been impermissible under the US anti-trust law for over 100 years, since the Clayton Act, and I'm not sure you need more than that.

dalbasal8• 7 years ago

Ok. Good example.

To deal with that, the legal system needs to define market & dominance. The "markets" FB is dominating are far squishier and unstable than the markets of 100 years ago. The market for coal or steel or intercontinental shipping are easy to define. Photo sharing? Social Networking?

How do you define competitiveness. What effect does FB's dominance of photo sharing have on consumer prices? Barriers to entry? Anyone can launch a chat or photo sharing app. Substitutes? Plenty. Those are the types of questions the old laws and precedents will try to deal with. It's like an alien biologist trying to prod orifices that we don't have.

How does this harm consumers or the economy? The economics underlying the legal framework are just as outdated. They're looking for prices and outputs and stuff that FB doesn't have.

masswerk10• 7 years ago

Anecdotal observation: A few years ago, I made a video game for an early 1960s computer, the PDP-1, running in an homegrown emulator in web technology. [1] Amazingly, the game runs at 60 frames per second (yes, you could do this with early 1960s tech), and, amazingly, browsers were able to render the emulation, including a rather complex simulation of the dual-phosphor screen, at 60 fps (you could do this in 2016). Admittedly, Chrome wasn't the fastest browser then, skipping a frame now and then, but caught up with others browsers over the next year. That is, until a few revisions ago, when something inside Chrome went terribly wrong, causing the browser to grind over the emulation in single-digits frame rates. Other browsers, like Firefox and Safari, are still running the emulation (which is as of 2012) happily at 60 fps, but these combine just about 15% of the intended desktop audiences. So for all measure and market concentration, the project is dead by now, due to a bug in the dominant browser. More importantly, it fails to deliver the proof it was intended to provide, namely that you could do a video game at 60 fps around 1960, because you randomly can't do so today.

[1] https://www.masswerk.at/icss/

masswerk10• 7 years ago

P.S.: For details on the project, see the blog at https://www.masswerk.at/rc2016/10/

(And for a description of Computer Space, see https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html)

inflatableDodo4• 7 years ago

Thanks for that, I have just been thoroughly massacred by aliens.

dTal7• 7 years ago

Well that just cries out for some snarky user-agent-sniffing "upgrade your browser" overlay.

reitanqild3• 7 years ago

Would love that: some really funny message that would make people stop and think.

shawabawa3• 7 years ago

fyi that works for me at 60fps in chrome 74 on a 2018 macbook pro

masswerk10• 7 years ago

Interesting. So it may be related to hardware acceleration (GPU)? Or even processor type (think side channel attack mitigations.)

sjs382• 7 years ago

Is there a FPS display option that I don't see?

Nonetheless, it runs smoothly on Chrome 76.0.3807.0 (Canary) on a Late 2013 iMac.

BartBoch• 7 years ago

Same here, working just fine on Windows. I have hardware acceleration disabled though.

mikehodgson• 7 years ago

Works fine on Windows as well, also Chrome 74.

milesokeefe• 7 years ago

Do you know what changed in Chrome that caused the slow down?

masswerk10• 7 years ago

I had a number of theories (involving arrays newly allocated, where they should have been reused in a managed stack, and extensive heap allocation, clamped array implementation, side channel attack mitigations running wild, etc). However, as it turns out, it's apparently about hardware acceleration (and probably about some overoptimistic assumptions made).

I.e., I just tried on an old MacPro (late 2008) with hardware acceleration disabled (Settings -> Advanced -> System -> Hardware acceleration + restart) and it runs smoothly.

Edit: Just updated the page accordingly. Thanks to everyone who helped in focusing on the matter of hardware acceleration!

N3cr0ph4g1st• 7 years ago

Works for me too windows 10 and chrome beta

masswerk10• 7 years ago

Update: Apparently, the problem is related to hardware acceleration. At least, disabling it works fine for me. The page in question has been updated to include a note on this.

Thanks to everyone who reported their experiences and helped to track down the issue!

On a more general level, the argument about all the eggs and a single basket still stands. (Knowing why a particular basket fails doesn't help the eggs.)

mothsonasloth• 7 years ago

To those who don't see an issue here, go an read up about ActiveX and NPAPI.

lprd2• 7 years ago

I installed Firefox as my daily driver last year and have been completely happy with it. Great dev tools, good performance, and I agree with Mozilla's stance on privacy. All wins for me. I'll still occasionally open up Chrome for dev purposes -- but for the sake of browser diversity and maintaining an open internet, I encourage all my friends to give Firefox a try.

huy-nguyen• 7 years ago

The main problem with Firefox is high memory usage.

joaobeno• 7 years ago

Did you mean "Chrome"?

holtalanm2• 7 years ago

i had a opposite experience. memory usage was great in firefox, but it pegged my CPU.

lprd2• 7 years ago

Energy usage would be my only complaint with Firefox. When I'm on my MBP, it does drain a bit faster (not horribly) when I have a few FF browser tabs open.

I suppose I should just use Safari when I'm not plugged in.

SmellyGeekBoy2• 7 years ago

Just wanted to add a +1. I use FF with strict content blocking enabled which means that things like YouTube videos and captchas are often randomly missing from pages, as are images hotlinked from third-party servers. I see this as a feature rather than a bug and it's easily temporarily disabled if it causes an issue.

Of course, I use uBlock Origin as well.

Performance-wise I have no complaints and the sync across devices works just as well as it does in Chrome.

b-3-n• 7 years ago

The real problem is that regardless how much we trust Google and Chrome nobody can make guarantees about future government or corporate politics so it should be really important to us to keep the browser market competitive.

majkinetor2• 7 years ago

Great time for Microsoft to open source its Edge engine. It sure seems like it works great and has no Google related problems so it can form base for future foss adventures.

javagram3• 7 years ago

Considering Edge is just an evolved Trident engine, open sourcing it would probably be very difficult. A 24-year-old proprietary software project may have commercially licensed parts inside it that aren't subject to open sourcing; MS has certainly made such deals in the past like the ZIP support in Windows Explorer being licensed from a third party.

majkinetor2• 7 years ago

I think they could manage, given that they open sourced bunch of stuff that probably had the same problems.

What is shame is for such valuable effort to die. Tech dying is a shame and you can see it everywhere, from folks experimenting with TempleOs to 8bit game emulators...

snazz• 7 years ago

As well as the spellchecker in Word, if I remember correctly.

cletus• 7 years ago

It's hard to believe what a behemoth Chrome has become when it was only announced in 2008. What makes this even more amazing is it did this when IE/Edge ships as standard on Windows (which seems to be ~80% marketshare) and Safari ships as standard on OSX/iOS. It wasn't until Android 4.1 (2012) that Chrome even shipped on Android.

Chrome did several things really well out of the gate:

- Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want.

- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me.

- N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar

- This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance issues. This was huge at the time.

- Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and everyone else.

- Chrome was standards compliant.

- Chrome ran across multiple platforms

- (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient.

- (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking.

Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can disappear or cease to be relevant.

I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been unable or unwilling to replicate.

Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support).

All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes people numb.

notlukesky• 7 years ago

Chrome was and unbelievably still is the most developer friendly. Our Opera extension has been languishing for 7 months for approval or a response to our emails (we gave up) and snooty FireFox put us through the ringer to get our extension (they call it an add-on) approved and more than 2 months. Chrome is amazing for developers. Maybe unless you are an adblocker. That might be the opportunity for MS Edge Chromium.

javagram3• 7 years ago

- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me.

Privacy. Google doesn't worry about privacy, of course, but firefox tries to avoid sending all the URLs you ever type to google or your alternate search suggestion provider.

mft_• 7 years ago

Isn't that just a bit of code to fix?

if (s matches possibly valid URL pattern) then try to open it else send s to search provider

bwat49• 7 years ago

Regarding your first 2 points, it sounds like you haven't used firefox in a long time...

1. Firefox does automatically download and apply updates like chrome does (at least on Windows), and has for some time.

It notifies you when update is downloaded and applied (I think it's just a notification badge on the hamburger menu), but user interaction is not required... the update would automatically get applied the next time the user happens to restart the browser, just like chrome.

2. Firefox has the equivalent of Chrome's omnibar for some time now... you can still add the second search box via the customize screen, but it's optional and is no longer the default...

woranl• 7 years ago

Firefox made a lot of strategic error mostly because they were arrogant. Not implementing the Filesystem API is one of many. The world will simply move on without you. It’s very unfortunate how bad decisions screwed up the web.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-f...

Theodores• 7 years ago

My problem with Chrome extends to Google's general stewardship of the web, including search.

I wish to qualify my complaint by acknowledging that Google have done tonnes of brilliant stuff, Chrome included. However, one can be over-awed by the brilliance and not see what is being missed.

A few years ago HTML5 came along with better elements than the humble div to describe content in a page. These new elements, e.g. section, aside, article, main, header, footer and nav, are what web pages should be written with. But Google are okay not really caring about HTML elements. They can sift through tag soup for search and therefore how well a page is written is of no consequence for them.

Chrome does support the new elements absolutely fine but the dev tools that we use and the things like Lighthouse are about metrics that matter to Google and don't concern quality HTML. This enforces a cargo cult mentality and we have 99% of the web bloated by markup that is quite hard to write and to debug. If Lighthouse audit reminded you that the div element was 'element of last resort' according to the spec and knocked a few percentage points off your score for accessibility if your page only used divs then that would encourage people to write decent HTML using the full element vocabulary.

Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

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