Comment by fauigerzigerk
2 years ago
The EU has designated the following Google services as gatekeepers:
Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, YouTube, Android, Alphabet's online advertising service.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
And here's what that designation means for them:
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
I am aware but that does nothing to prevent total dominance of Chrome as the primary browser on all platforms moving forward. The EU is not calling for a random subset of the population to forcibly run Firefox. With the power of Google they will corner the market incredibly fast, and it will all be “user choice”.
What it means is that it's going to be difficult for Google to give Chrome an unfair advantage by leveraging their other services.
If Chrome wins on merit and Chromium remains a viable option to build competing browsers then that is fine.
I don't want Apple to prevent that by forcing an inferior browser down peoples' throats to make sure the web can't win against native apps.
Google has already given Chrome an unfair advantage by leveraging their other services. I suspect the browser market is an unstable system where absent outside intervention Chrome’s 65% market share naturally becomes 100%.
Chrome is such a complicated piece of software that the “forks” are highly dependent on Google and when Google unilaterally makes decisions they have to follow suit. Brendan Eich explains that Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 as long as Google doesn’t remove the underlying code paths: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152
I think a lot of people don’t appreciate how delicate the balance of web standards is right now. We have it so good (three high-quality implementations of an open spec) and I’m not willing to throw that away just to run Chrome on my iPhone.
Maybe, but I doubt it, and who will prosecute them? I doubt EU will keep good track of their entire portfolio and their push for dominance, I could be wrong of course.
Isn’t chromium still bloated with tracking? Last time I read about it, it was far from a “clean Chrome” at least, now if it was truly open sourced and not mainly controlled by Google I would be much more hopeful.
As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all, different sports altogether, but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.
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