← Back to context

Comment by fauigerzigerk

2 years ago

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.

  • >Isn’t chromium still bloated with tracking?

    I don't think Chromium based browsers such as Brave, Vivaldi or Edge have to send data to Google.

    Chromium development is highly dependent on Google of course. Google could theoretically do to Chromium what they have done to AOSP, i.e make sure it's not longer a viable platform for competitors. But I think that's exactly what the DMA could prevent.

    >As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all

    I think it's an empirical fact that they do compete. Almost all the installed apps I use could be web apps if it wasn't for arbitrary restrictions.

    >but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.

    How about not randomly deleting or arbitrarily restricting local data?