Comment by selckin
7 months ago
This Apple policy is the only thing stopping chrome from having a full monopoly, and we should be careful trying to remove it
7 months ago
This Apple policy is the only thing stopping chrome from having a full monopoly, and we should be careful trying to remove it
Monopolies are made illegal because they limit consumer choice and the role of competition in the free market, distorting incentives.
The status quo has all of the problems of a monopoly. Doing this or not doing this won't change that. But it will remove another barrier to consumers being able to do what they want.
I care about the web remaining a truly open platform based on standards rather than the whims of a singular software project. What matters is browser diversity, even if it's at the expense of browser choice. Because without healthy browser diversity, the web might as well be renamed the Chrome Protocol and you lose browser choice anyway.
Apple, with their iOS browser lock-in, is the greatest gift ever to the open web.
No, the status quo has the problems of a whole series of interconnected monopolies. More than one will need to be broken up before we are out of it, but one step at a time. I'd be surprised if chrome is still part of google when the politicians have reached a happy state.
Google has an incentive to make everything work through the web. Safari has the incentive to gatekeep the app store revenue, which is why PWAs are a joke on iOS.
Google also has bad incentives (Android, ads) but Safari is the IE6 of modern web.
Chrome is the IE6 of the modern Web. Devs are building hacky sites that only work in Chrome.
It's the browser we're FORCED to have installed for the occasional shitty flight or hotel booking that doesn't work in Firefox.
It depends on what you are looking at. Chrome is the IE6 of the modern web as far as it is often the only browser people care about, but it's very much the opposite of IE6 regarding developing new features and moving web tech forward. In order to have a productive conversation about which browser is the new IE6, I think it's important to state what you are measuring
it's the browser you need when your shitty default browser decided to spend their money elsewhere instead of building a proper browser that can compete against the app store lock in
1 reply →
If anyone is building using experimental features that are either flagged or unflagged in Chrome, that's NOT on Chrome. For example, if I built a feature based on Chrome's weird Observables, sure, I could do it... it would work nowhere else. If you're actually seeing this happen, who do you blame in this situation?
IE flat out refused to implement features that were agreed upon by standards bodies. They pushed for VML development and ignored SVG. They ignored CSS3 in favor of their DirectX filters. Chrome does indeed put experimental features out there AFTER they support the standards. Firefox also has agreed to a set of web standards and is simply behind on implementation.
Having lived(as a developer) through IE4 - IE9, I reserve that title of "the new IE" for the worst offenders.
Work? No. Google has an incredible incentive to make everything javascript so they can make money through spying. The web is HTML.
The web gives users a lot of control using extensions. That's why companies don't like it. Google tries to fight it by not supporting extensions in its mobile browser. Apple is more egregious, preventing people from doing many things using the web platform entirely, with no escape hatch.
Are PWA’s better and more popular on Android?
Biggest differences:
- You can fairly easily list them in the Google's app store, whereas they are basically banned from Apple's app store
- iOS/Safari is much more aggressive about deleting data from PWAs
Much better but only slightly more popular. Partly because the Play Store ecosystem treats wrapping PWAs as a first class use case and you don't even have to source APKs from the official store anyways - so there's not much to gain by delivering via "true" PWA. Apple goes more the route of the stick than carrot.
This is an understandable concern, but it's not actually supported by the data.
On MacOS, where there has long been engine choice, Safari market share is >50%. Defaults are powerful and many users are happy with the real and perceived benefits of the first-party brand.
Safari has >90% market share on iOS today. If engine competition were permitted, they might lose a few percent initially, but would be highly motivated to close any gaps.
There's no world in which WebKit usage among the world's wealthiest consumers drops low enough that web developers can target a chromium monoculture. The purpose of engine choice is to create real competition in order to motivate Apple to do better.
It is shame that this is true. However it should not mean that we need to accept this situation. Hopefully Google anti competitive practices with Chrome can be addressed at the same time.
Those popups I get multiple times a day about how this website works better on Chrome , which cover half my screen and which forward me to the App Store, are incredibly misleading. I have misclicked many times and then the App Store opens up. If you go back to the browser and hit the back button, it will again open the App Store. I have to press and hold the back button and skip multiple pages to get back to what I was doing.
Strange - I don't get this in Firefox. I wonder if its because I'm in the UK or perhaps Privacy Badger is blocking it.
2 replies →
Maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing. Maybe chrome capturing the majority of the iOS market would finally be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back and pushes regulators towards forcing Google to sell Chrome.
Or… Sundar Pichai has lunch with Trump, brings with him a few nice cigars and a Google-sponsored Yacht (I hear he’s still short on these), explains to him how that’s all just a liberal media fake news campaign against good American products, and they decide to axe regulatory bodies instead.
Maybe when all browsing is under one monopoly then we'll finally care to regulate it properly instead of sticking our fingers in our ears and saying we have a different monopoly for iOS users so everything is fine.
I don't disagree, but this is an "ends justifies the means" type of argument, which generally speaking I struggle with. I think sometimes the end does justify the means (within reason of course), but I try to be very cognizant when that is the position.
I do also think there are a lot of downsides to letting big tech companies exercise tight control over stuff, especially when it is anti-competitive. The slowing of Chrome is a good outcome, but there are plenty of other downsides that come along with allowing Apple (and others) to have these policies.
Unfortunately, the problem is that what's needed is for a massive special antitrust operation to address the tech sector as a whole, unravel all the various anticompetitive, bundling, and otherwise monopolistic behavior they all engage in, and implement remedies on all of them at once.
But the US's system certainly doesn't allow that (and, of course, there isn't going to be any serious antitrust in the US for the foreseeable future anymore). I have no idea if the EU's does, but I really don't think they have sufficient jurisdiction to do things like break up Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Which is definitely necessary to address these problems.
Make no mistake: the reason we are here is because of the morally- and intellectually-bankrupt shift to the Chicago School-backed philosophy of antitrust under Reagan, coupled with a government—at all levels, in all branches—that didn't understand technology, and collectively refused to learn, for decades.
If Chrome has a full monopoly, guess what's the next logical action...
Might as well get it over with quickly.
In case it's not obvious, these crutches should be removed.
Treat Google paying Apple for the use of Google's search engine and Mozilla for the same thing, as anti-competitive (they're token gestures propping up the monopoly).
And break Google up in multiple companies. Not sure along which lines but I would steer towards platforms (Android + Chrome + Search + Docs + Cloud; banned from entering advertising), Play Store, Ads.
The same thing should be done to Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Nobody has the guts anymore.
> Nobody has the guts anymore.
I think nobody has the manpower to deal with all the shit. The EU already regularly fines big companies, but for every fine they get away with so much.
I meant more in the US. I think they had a fairly aggressive head of FTC but she's been removed (Lina Khan?).
100%! Without the Safari walled garden, start ups won't bother considering cross platform testing.
We're very careful, it's not being removed even after blatantly illegal actions, and even then the mandate isn't global, and we've waited for many years.
[flagged]
It's a fairly obvious truth. Chrome has a 70% browser marketshare, with the only appreciable alternative being Safari. If Chrome (the actual Chrome and not just a skinned Safari) were allowed on Apple's platforms, overnight a crapload of websites would throw a "Made for Chrome" banner up, dismiss anyone on "unsupported" browsers, and we would rapidly move to a Chrome-only world.
We already went through this in the IE era, and it was an ugly period. We don't need to do that again. That isn't to say we need to endure the status quo, but we are in a dangerous situation where the fixes aren't easy or obvious.
There's nothing obvious about it.
You're literally defending a megacorporations monopoly and abuse of users so they can continue denying free choice to people using phones.
You're literally saying that the browser the users are right now forced to used by a megacorporation is so bad, they would refuse to use it in the future. And then you double down on the bootlicking by demanding that they continue forcing the use of their supposedly inferior product.
(After all, if the product is actually good, why would people switch?)
And with that you're entrenching megabillionare interests and outright banning creation of opensource.
Be better.
They’re bringing up a valid point that has no indication of heavy support one way or another and you call it corporate boot licking.
How can you say this nonsense so uncritically?
[flagged]
That is some wild moral coating.
It's the unfortunate truth. Nobody gives a shit about Firefox, not even Mozilla. Safari is the only major non chromium browser. You get rid of it and Google basically has full control of web standards and we've come full circle.
I use Firefox because it is the only mobile browser worth a damn. Mozilla screwed up by wasting resources on FirefoxOS and other projects that had no business case in the early days of mobile browser adoption, but they eventually got their act together and started supporting extensions and other differentiating features that people want. They're still slow-walking container support, but nobody else has that either.
Oh its 'true' but does the pain of having to use Safari make up for some sort of benefit of having a non-chrome browser?
I really appreciate that you sacrifice your happiness in favor of Apple profits so I can have multiple browsers competing against chrome.
Thank you.
3 replies →
I would not be surprised if Google is lobbying like the whole company depended on it.
We have to put more power in the hands of one organization that fights for our rights.
Consider adding this to your website:
This link does not exist right now, but it will allow EFF to take control when necessary. E.g. by nudging people away from Chrome if it becomes too powerful.
chrome could just block the script if they try this
Of course if a browser does not faithfully execute the code that it is given, that will be a next level of anti-user behavior and might cause an uproar that will make people walk away even faster.