Comment by junon
6 days ago
Not sure if this is an innocent comment or not but I'll answer earnestly.
They're not, technically. They're hegemons, which doesn't make them much better. In fact, I'd argue the situation is worse.
Chrome predominantly owns the web at this point. There are few contenders, and making a new browser is a lot of work (see the Verso browser). Google has the arguably unearned luxury of dictating what APIs and protocols the nebulous "web" should use, can throw a bunch of money at adding them quickly, and leave competitors struggling to keep up, effectively buying chrome's guaranteed superiority.
"But there are standards committees!" Yes, but it really doesn't matter when Chrome either uses its own APIs privately on its sites[0] or just adds new APIs without any committee consideration for people to use and fall in love with and demand that other vendors add them (or something similar, such as proposing a great idea at the committee, it's accepted, and the other vendors lagging for months or even years - see WebGPU as an example).
One might think "it's just a browser". Yes, but browsers are -for better or for worse - the global defacto for sending and receiving almost all of our sensitive data. Even "desktop apps" like Whatsapp, Signal, and Bitwarden all either use or have used Chromium to display their contents (via Electron).
Much of the community has asserted Google owns the web at this point, and I tend to agree. It's very, very hard for smaller vendors to have much of a day these days without Google getting theirs, too.
> Chrome predominantly owns the web at this point. There are few contenders, and making a new browser is a lot of work (see the Verso browser). Google has the arguably unearned luxury of dictating what APIs and protocols the nebulous "web" should use, can throw a bunch of money at adding them quickly, and leave competitors struggling to keep up, effectively buying chrome's guaranteed superiority.
As an example: Microsoft is building Edge on open source Chromium. Are you sure Microsoft is the little guy that needs protection? I'm fairly sure they have enough heft that they can fork Chromium and do their own thing, if Google does anything sinister.
But in any case, there's still Safari with a substantial market share, too.
> "But there are standards committees!" [...]
I agree with you here: commercial standards are more important than whatever a standards committee says.
I agree that Google has a large share in many markets. I just don't see the monopoly.
> I'm fairly sure they have enough heft that they can fork Chromium and do their own thing, if Google does anything sinister.
They were already doing their own thing and they couldn't keep up with Google. Although, starting from a Chromium fork, it could take longer for the code to diverge.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
It is not just 'a lot of work'. It is on the level where microsoft gave up..
I mean, in the world where chromium exists, maintaining your own entirely independent codebase of a full web browser does not make business sense. It's better and easier to reuse what you can and build on top of that.
Yes, and it's open source. So Microsoft can fork it, if they think Google is pulling a fast one.
I think what people fail to see is that this is the same as "owning the sea by the British Empire" or "owning the railroads/roads". The economical benefit is not direct monetary gain, but nonetheless absolutely huge, and basically plays outside the "normal" rules.
Google can use their web dominance to push another service of their, or cripple a competitor's in a completely different domain.