Comment by kmeisthax
5 days ago
While this excuse works today, we should not forget that this policy also meant disinviting Mozilla from the mobile browser party about a decade ago. I'd argue a good chunk of Mozilla's downfall was them chasing the pipe dream of Boot2Gecko, and that was specifically because they couldn't ship Gecko on iOS.
The reason why we have a Chrome/Safari hegemony is because Apple insisted on everything being Safari on their device platforms. This combined with Android shipping WebKit for years meant that the only mobile browser engine that mattered was WebKit. Chrome is a different engine now, but it was forked from WebKit, and it used to have a lot of the same quirks. Hell, Microsoft switched to Blink specifically because Electron - their own web app shell - couldn't run on EdgeHTML.
The fact that this change practically means Chrome displacing Safari is... not really all that meaningful. They're both forks of the same code. The single-engine dystopia you worry about is already here. I daily-drive Firefox, and the amount of shit Google deliberately breaks on Gecko is obvious. Like, YouTube tabs freeze up every few hours because they get stuck in garbage collection, and I have to manually kill whatever processes are running YouTube before I can watch another video. That sort of thing.
I would argue that the root of the problem is that Google was not broken up.
I don’t think one company should own all the stuff that Google does. It gives them way too many perverse incentives over the web.
I’m not saying it’s smart we got here. I’m not saying it’s good we got here. I’m not saying we should be here.
All I’m saying is we ARE here. And given that (effective screw up) I fear this will make things drastically worse.
> I don’t think one company should own all the stuff that Google does. It gives them way too many perverse incentives over the web.
Does it? It might give them perverse incentives in some cases, but in others it perfectly aligns their incentives by letting them internalize their externalities. The whole selling point of Chrome to executives, and the reason it's introduced so many nice features, is that consolidating means they have an incentive to invest in things that make their websites work better (a better Chrome means a better Google/Gmail/YouTube/Drive).
We all think of them as Google but let’s face it, they’re DoubleClick.
Google feeds DoubleClick. Gmail does too. YouTube is a pure ad play.
Drive/Docs/etc. I’d say drives Chrome and undercuts competitors.
And Chrome? It drives Google. And Google also helps drive YouTube.
They all end in ads.
If Chrome wasn’t owned by an ad company that owned all that other stuff I wouldn’t be as worried. I still don’t like the idea of a Chrome monoculture. But if it was independent I’d be less alarmed.