Ask HN: How do you feel about Chrome becoming a browser monopoly?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31138993

by tribejri • 4 years ago

40 42 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

With Firefox losing more and more ground with each passing year, how do you feel about Chrome getting (even more) of a monopoly worldwide?

Should we start pushing harder for people to use Firefox?

trinovantes• 4 years ago

Not great. When standards become whatever Google feels like it is due to their market share, you end up breaking the web for users outside of Chromium

I've recently found out that Firefox/Chrome treats viewport sizes differently when zooming in/out. Which one is correct behavior? I have no idea nor am I interested in digging through pages of RFCs so I just ended up doing a user-agent check and use logic per browser.

Shadonototra2• 4 years ago

firefox had its chance, they decided to raise the salary of their CEO instead of investing in the browser

at least google improves chrome year after year

KSPAtlas• 4 years ago

*chromium

Google chrome itself does not

Shadonototra2• 4 years ago

yeah my bad, i meant chromium

joshxyz• 4 years ago

This lol. Chromium has better features than firefox.

ranguna2• 4 years ago

No multi account containers in chrome, want to guess why?

wetpaws• 4 years ago

I'm not afraid of Google, but I'm afraid of inevitable monoculture and stagnation

alwayslikethis3• 4 years ago

It's already happening. They are using their power to effect change, such as being language police.

McLaren_Ferrari3• 4 years ago

Same as I felt when the government said Microsoft had a browser monopoly.

They (Microsoft and Google) both got to this point fair and square by providing ease of use and quality of life to the consumer.

Monopolies happening due to competence, great execution or even luck are not a problem.

People should be not alarmed by corporate monopolies as long as Federal govt. retains monopoly of B2 bombers (and violence in general) the latter always retains the capability to disrupt a corporate monopoly.

runjake• 4 years ago

Microsoft’s monopoly was anything but fair. They did all sorts of shady, anti-competitive things WRT browsers, Windows, and Linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

McLaren_Ferrari3• 4 years ago

"The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Windows operating system".

Netscape wanted to make money selling the browser, time has proved they were way wrong in their calculus as consumers are not willing to pay for a browser.

Hence it comes with the OS to give to the consumer the capability to go on the internet as soon as they turn on their computer for the first time.

Time also proved that browsers are not where the money is, search and social media is. Netscape missed search and made Microsoft miss search too due to he DOJ lawsuit, but it's a poor consolation given where Microsoft is today and where Netscape is today.

So Netscape was completely delusional, they went to cry to the feds, Microsoft got distracted defending themselves from the aforementioned feds and Google and Facebook benefited the dispute.

tomohawk• 4 years ago

According to antitrust law, it is illegal for a monopoly to do things that are perfectly fine for normal companies to do.

For example, it is not legal to use dominance in one thing as leverage to achieve dominance in another thing.

Microsoft used their monopoly (> 70% market share) in OS to go for a monopoly in many other things, includind web browser.

We are still living with the aftremath of this today, as the software ecosystem is much more constrained than it aught to be.

Back then, the FTC actually did things about monopolists breaking the law, so they set MS back on their heels.

And MS employed many anti-competitive practices to beat the competition. Things like buying their way onto the boards of banks, which happened to hold loans for their competitors. And then calling the notes or cancelling lines of credit.

McLaren_Ferrari3• 4 years ago

Microsoft used their monopoly (> 70% market share) in OS to go for a monopoly in many other things, includind web browser.

A monopoly in a market where the price of the product is zero /s .

It's incredible to me that people still think Netscape was wronged even though the market has shown for decades now that consumers are not willing to pay for browsers.

Consumers want to be able to get on the internet as soon as they start their brand new computer.

Microsoft saw that and provided a solution, whereas Netscape went to cry to the feds as opposed to recognize that their business model was flawed and pivot.

If you are stubborn not even the feds can save you, and in fact fast forward Microsoft is a company which makes 50B dollar profit/yr and where is Netscape?

Also we are back to square one with a monopoly in the browser , only now it's Google and not Microsoft. The consumer thinks Chrome is a better browser so it doesn't matter that Edge is pre-installed, they all download Chrome within the first week of buying a new PC.

Google managed to win marketshare on WIndows even though evil Microsoft pre-installed Edge because unlike Netscape they were smart enough to realize what the customer wants (a free and fast browser) instead of going to the feds to cry out of laziness or inability to pivot:

rossdavidh• 4 years ago

I still use Firefox primarily, and Brave on my phone, but I don't like the way things are headed. I don't know if "pushing" will change much. Firefox probably needs to be better on data security and adblocking in a way which Google is unwilling to match?

alwayslikethis3• 4 years ago

This sounds untenable considering Mozilla's main revenue source is Google itself.

Mozilla is also to blame for this. They seem to have turned into a corrupt company, promoting censorship [1], laying off development staff [2] while the CEO receiving millions in salary [3].

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

emptysongglass• 4 years ago

Why does the board continue to reward Baker after all these years of plummeting value to the company? That is a question I haven't been able to square.

aaaaaaaaata2• 4 years ago

Brave is Chromium.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

llimos• 4 years ago

Generally not great, but there are advantages to using something different to everyone else. For example, a lot of paywalled sites can be bypassed using Firefox's reader mode, and it's not worth the sites' effort to try and block it.

kurupt213• 4 years ago

Chrome is malware

zamadatix• 4 years ago

Pushing more on the basis it's becoming less popular isn't going to work. People were getting pushed from IE to Firefox and stayed there because IE was an all around pile of stagnant hot dog shit in comparison, not because a few evangelists were worried about percentages.

Unfortunately the differences between Firefox and Chrome are nowhere near as great as the differences between Firefox and IE were. At the same time there isn't another non-Chromium based browser that fits the bill either, especially with MS throwing in the towel and Apple not caring about other OS's.

sys_64738• 4 years ago

I used Safari and Chrome based derivatives like Vivaldi and The Edge. Firefox's ship has sailed for me so I don't use it other than for financial needs to isolate from regular browser usage.

alwayslikethis3• 4 years ago

The Web is essentially a lost cause by this point.

https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

Firefox can barely keep up. Without some Herculean effort, no one will be able to write a new web browser from scratch.

phillipseamore• 4 years ago

Shouldn't the question be: why are users selecting Chromium/Chrome instead of other browsers? The only real contender is Safari, but from the numbers that seems to be mostly from iOS and iPadOS where Apple has their own, enforced, browser monopoly.

aaaaaaaaata2• 4 years ago

Security. Speed. No delays in PWA feature adoption.

ranguna2• 4 years ago

Then why did most people stay in IE back in the day?

johnny_b_g• 4 years ago

For me, on a Mac, I consider Safari dead in the water ever since they crippled its extension support, so that's a no-go.

Chrome is made by whom I consider a privacy rapist, so I refuse to use that. As for any Chromium derivatives - well, given its origins, I consider them tainted, so no-go as well on those.

That leaves only Firefox, which to me is quite capable and fast, and I really have no issues using it.

I do think governments should look closely at Chrome's monopoly, since it's Google's (or Alphabet, or whatever name-du-jour) power play in vertical integration/takeover for its own advantage, and way to crush competition.

vimy• 4 years ago

Safari uses Web Extensions now. You can import a Chrome/Firefox extension’s source code into xcode and you have a Safari extension. Doesn’t work for everything yet, I expect they’ll add more APIs this year at WWDC.

SxC97• 4 years ago

FWIW, I’ve been using the Orion beta on my Mac and it’s great. It’s a WebKit based browser with a built in ad blocker and tree style tabs and can run most Firefox and chrome extensions while having lower resource usage and better battery life than safari.

A nearly perfect browser for me with only a few downsides.

- Not available on windows or Linux yet

- No open tabs sync across apple devices (yet, planned)

- Doesn’t support all extensions (yet, also planned)

CincinnatiMan• 4 years ago

I use MS Edge on my Mac for its vertical tabs, and it's been fine. Maybe check it out.

khedoros1• 4 years ago

Edge...which is based on Chromium. They said they don't want to use any Chromium derivatives.

sqwrell• 4 years ago

Brave started out fine, but they keep adding un-needed stuff

chillpenguin• 4 years ago

I use and recommend Brave. People should definitely stop using Chrome imo due to the privacy concerns.

Edit: the reason I use Brave over firefox is largely because firefox drained my battery and always turned on the fans on my macbook last time I tried it. Things might be better now but I've settled in on Brave and am happy with it.

str3wer• 4 years ago

brave is still chromium based and also had a lot of controversy, like the refferal thing

sieabahlpark• 4 years ago

It has so much you barely mentioned any of them! What a low effort attempt at shilling for Firefox.

Mozilla doesn't care about your privacy or security.

ilaksh2• 4 years ago

We should be working on an alternative paradigm. https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

DangitBobby• 4 years ago

"JavaScript Free" pretty tired of the JavaScript hate. It's not going away, and if you make a browser that doesn't support it, no one will use the browser.

ilaksh2• 4 years ago

I've been a JavaScript programmer (primarily) for about 10 years. I don't hate JavaScript. Just last night I was answering a question on reddit that involved refactoring some Node.js code. I spent two hours on it just for fun. https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/ua1ikb/comment/i5yarr...

However. There are a lot of people though who are tired of their browser freezing up when they are just trying to read an article. Or tired of ads on pages that are supposed to simply be information. And they associate a lot of that with JavaScript since it drives it.

That is one of the primary groups who might be interested in alternative types of browsers.

Maybe consider reading over the idea.

mekster• 4 years ago

Only if Edge took Gecko instead of Blink...

Apple isn't Google's friend and Mozilla depends on Google, so didn't look like split browser engine camp.

Ask HN: How do you feel about Chrome becoming a browser monopoly?

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