Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so will Google.
In Microsoft's case what they wanted was nothing. They weren't a web business, saw it as a threat to their platform leverage, and so just left it abandoned and stagnant for years.
Google is simultaneously better and worse: they won't leave it stagnant because the web is their platform, but on the other hand they have a lot more to gain by abusing control of it.
Edit: well, that and ActiveX, but that's not a good thing...
We already have a number of Chromium based browsers that go against some of Google's most fundamental interests (e.g Brave).
It's perfectly possible for Google to be engaging in similar behavior to Microsoft during IE era, while websites decide to support more than one browser for the moment. In the long run, Google's behavior could contribute to more websites deciding to support fewer browsers.
I'm already seeing the occasional website that doesn't work properly on Firefox - for the moment this is rare, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more common.
Ironically, Safari is more similar to IE in that regard. The web isn't Apple's platform, either, so they're not too interested in continuing to develop it.
modern DOM, Ajax, modern CSS, bunch of other small details of JS, all iirc came from IE.
Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match.
Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, might pose an alternative.
That's where Firefox is right now, unfortunately.
Open source is that option. The economics of starting from scratch vs starting from Chromium's latest commit are fundamentally different.
I'm not saying that it's easy, only that it is not remotely comparable to the IE situation.
Safari definitely does not just follow suit (see https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareC... for example).
Many of those features can be used to comprehensively fingerprint your device allowing advertisers to track you across sites even without cookies. Forget about any laws or privacy efforts it would all be moot. And many of us value privacy far too much.
Apple even implemented the "do not track" API and advertisers completely ignored it.
MSIE was bypassed not by a code fork of MSIE (itself originally based on the Spyglass browser, which was a fork of the NSCA's Mosaic codebase), but by independent implementations of an HTML-standard parser. Microsoft had some influence over Web development (noteably through ActiveX) but far less than Google has now.
My point is that Open Source of itself is not sufficient, and moreover simply is not viable. Glibly asserting that it is ... is utterly unrealistic.
Though the alternative of forking a Web-like markup and transport, as Gemini is attempting to do, is one option. For other technologies which have become sufficiently baroque, similar worse-is-better alternate paths have been pursued.
Otherwise, this is an antitrust issue, and Google very badly need busting.
Call me when I can install Safari on linux (or any platform other than macOS/iOS).
Until then - the ugly truth is that Apple intentionally underfunds and underdevelops the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their control and revenue from the App store.
It's there because "they have to have a browser" not because they're doing anything novel or clever. And many of the things they refuse to implement aren't related to ads or Google's control at all - they're things that would have narrowed the gap between what a website can do on iOS, and what the App store apps could do.
Again - Apple is acting EXACTLY like microsoft here. Underinvesting in the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their best revenue stream - much like how MS ignored IE when the focus was all on local apps (the king of which was still MS office).
Oh and early on they had URL prefetching, but that led to badly written web interfaces from executing operations that shouldn't happen.
I don’t think they are. That fork then immediately finds itself in the same position as other engines, where now the fork is going to need to keep up with whatever Google is adding to Chromium.
You might then think, “Then the fork can just pull from upstream.”
Okay, so then:
a) Your fork probably isn’t differentiated enough to matter; and more importantly
b) Google is still effectively calling all the shots!
That's not a truth that's an opinion. And one I would definitely disagree with.
When it comes to speed, privacy and battery life I am always choosing Safari over Chrome. And many of us care about those three things over new features that often just make the web worse.
Even more so the fact that Brave was able to build an alternative ad network on top of Chromium.
The same thing has happened to Linux which was ok as long as it was chasing commercial Unix, spawning POSIX even; but look what happened with systemd, wayland, snaps/flatpacks, Docker, k8s, and all the other erratic developments - all the while not a single end-user app was created in the last decade.
Call me when a Chromium fork displaces Chromium.
I disagree that Apple is underinvesting: their slower, more deliberate pace can be an advantage: you can see the pitfalls of implementations in other browsers. I am not disagreeing that Apple has had their own share of bugs, though.
And I didn't claim that it was. My point was merely that Chromium being open source changes the equation pretty fundamentally compared to the IE situation.
Whether it's enough to make a Chromium monopoly consistent with an open web, I really don't know. There are very good reasons to be sceptical.
Where things went off the rails was the things Microsoft refused to implement due to their monopoly position. They had a binary component architecture, but it wasn't sufficient to run Java. They had Java, but it was a vestigial and crippled version. Their HTML/CSS engine was just "odd", incompatible not only with emerging standards but with any published standard at all.
Basically "the problem" with IE wasn't that Microsoft "did whatever it wants", it was that it did (or didn't do) very specific things intended to prevent users from wanting to use IE at all, in a vain attempt to favor desktop applications or IE-specific implementations.
So you’re not claiming open source is sufficient but you are seemingly defending it is a better situation.
While I and some other commenters are signaling we don’t think the situation is better.
To me the fundamental part of the equation is outsized power and influence. Being open source or not is part of the equation, but not as close to as fundamental as the core issues with this. This is made much much worse now than 20 years ago with the costs to get your own browser going so much higher. Which leads back to the outsized power being the fundamental issue.
Open source can even be argued to be a benefit to Google retaining power. Having enough attention diverted to the possibilities of open source when Google has only monumentally gained from open source with paltry benefits that are usually brought up as defenses against its power. Like AOSP mattering because China doesn’t use Google’s Android and some other irrelevant projects.
Any fundamental differences so far are giving Google and any other major central powers more power.
You wrote:
> The fact that both Brave and Vivaldi were able to disable Google's FlOC within a very short period of time
Okay, they disabled some stuff. That isn’t a fundamental divergence from the upstream project.
The original argument was that Google wouldn’t control the web in a Chromium monoculture because anybody can just fork it.
I disagree. My argument has two prongs:
1. A Chromium fork can only sever itself from Google’s control if it is not taking patches from upstream (ie, Google). I’m particularly thinking about the most consequential pieces: web APIs, not Google ad tech. That’s going to require an army of developers who now are immediately thrust onto the web API treadmill.
2. If a Chromium fork’s market share is tiny, how is it going to displace Google’s influence on the direction of the web? It isn’t. Everybody will still be coding against Google’s Chromium.
These sorts of arguments probably help cement Google’s power. By giving the guise that the open source part of the equation can be the key to usurping Google’s power. Instead of it mostly being the other way around.
It would not be surprising if Google loves these tiny changes from Chrome and Android. So the discussions and sentiment never get close to how bad it got for IE or other monopolies and dangers of power.
Yes, that's exactly right. I think Chromium being open source changes the equation for the better compared to the IE situation. Whether it is sufficiently better to make it work, I'm not sure. I do see Google's outsized influence as a significant problem. I'm not denying that at all.
The fact that browsers like Brave have made changes that go against Google's interests is cause for some optimism though.
It is very permissively licensed, and Microsoft’s Edge is so successful and Microsoft is contributing a ton upstream. In a few years time they will have de-facto equal say over where the codebase goes. If Google disagrees too much, we will in fact see a fork.
This hasn't happened with Chromium, but it did happen with WebKit.
These APIs are one of the big areas where chrome/google have tried to expand the remit of what's possible with web apps, for example the file system api can be used by a web app to access files directly on a users machine.
It's generally far easier to turn APIs off than add new things. Keeping a fork up to date with upstream while maintaining a list of Chromium platform additions that are disabled is exactly what we're talking about here, no?
They created a new ad model where users are paid for their attention.
Furthermore, from what I can tell, Edge users are predominantly former IE users (rather than coming from other browsers), and combined IE + Edge use is still declining over time.
I'm not seeing your more recent statement as consistent with the first, given my own response: "Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little."
Again: Microsoft's locus of control was not based on source code or standards, but on its control over the PC desktop market. MSIE shipped by default with that desktop, and any other browser, including Chrome, had to find its way to that desktop.
Microsoft has now ceded its own browser engine (Trident, I believe) for Google's (Blink), with Microsoft Edge. As this browser still ships by default with Windows, Chrome owns that platform by default.
Google also controls its own operating systems, Android (mobile and tablets) and ChromeOS (Chromebooks). Given Android's overwhelming numerical advantage in overall devices,[1] Google effecitely have Microsoft's previous leverage mechanism to themselves.
Google as the dominant search provider have an advertising advantage in advocating their browser, both within search and on Google properties with "works best with Chrome" or equivalent.
And again, Google effecitvely dominate both development of Chrome and Chromium, including gatekeeping over what code makes it in to each project, and through its own browser development, dominance within WHATWG, and ranking preferences withing Google Web Search, as well as compatibility favouritism through popular Google properties such as YouTube, Web standards themselves.
Microsoft's monopoly lock-in had a single peg, Google has four (OS, promotion, Chrome development, Web standards).
I do have to admit though, yes: It is a completely different situation. Microsoft's advantage was far weaker than Google's now is.
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Notes:
1. "As of April 2022, Android, an operating system using the Linux kernel, is the world's most-used operating system when judged by web use. It has 43% of the global market, followed by Windows with 30%, Apple iOS with 17%, macOS with 6%, then (desktop) Linux at 0.98% also using the Linux kernel." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
My point was merely that Chromium being open source changes the equation pretty fundamentally compared to the IE situation
Of course market share has to be part of the discussion. But the way in which you used it seems tautological. Also, market share affects alternative browser engines just as much as Chromium based browsers.
>The original argument was that Google wouldn’t control the web in a Chromium monoculture because anybody can just fork it.
That wasn't my argument though. I don't know if Google wouldn't control the web in a Chromium monoculture. It very well might. My argument was that the IE era does not serve as a valid historical precedent because the fact that Chromium is open source changes the situation in very significant ways.
>A Chromium fork can only sever itself from Google’s control if it is not taking patches from upstream (ie, Google)
I don't think Chromium based browsers can completely extricate themselves from Google's control. But this is not a black and white question. Alternative browser engines cannot do that either.
You make a good point that web APIs are a better test for Google's control than ad tech. But this kind of control affects independent browser engines just as much as Chromium based ones. If Chrome doesn't implement a particular web API then the API is dead in the water. That's where market share matters.
Because market share can change. Its a statement of the past when we are talking about the future.
Put another way, would Google have had an easier time building Chrome and Chromium if IE had been 100% open source when Chrome was started?
Remember, it wasn't that long ago that IE dominated, and MS still has many of the same advantages now that they had back then.
This is the tragedy of the Linux Desktop. The problem with F/OSS is the "Free" part (as in "Beer"); as long as users resist paying for software, you will never have a rich enough ecosystem to develop that very software. The problems you list with "systemd, wayland, snaps/flatpacks, Docker, k8s, and all the other erratic developments" is that they are largely meant to solve corporate problems.
Yes, and I stand by that. Chromium being open source changes the situation completely. It makes no sense to compare the IE era to any Chromium monopoly without even mentioning that Chromium is open source.
>I'm not seeing your more recent statement as consistent with the first, given my own response: "Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little."
I don't see any inconsistency. I simply disagree with you. It matters a great deal that Chromium is open source. It changes the politics in the industry. It changes the economics. It changes the regulatory situation. It changes the facts on the ground in terms of available browsers.
I do get your point though, and it's not that I disagree with everything you're saying. I just disagree with the claim that open source Chromium "means very little".
I've told some people to switch to Firefox. A lot of them switch back to Chrome after a while, simply because it's faster.
For users, IE6 was an era of unrivaled simplicity where the essential hypertext purpose was already fulfilled. Trident (its layout engine) wasn't great but it got the job done. And that same era spawned alternative browsers around that engine, the same way we have Chromium derivatives today, where the real innovation happened. Tabs, ad/popup blocking, easy per-site searching, auto-cookie cleaning, etc. were all present in browsers like NetCaptor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCaptor) or Maxthon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon), which all used IE. Nobody had to worry about "will this page work in my browser".
For devs, IE6 was the closest thing to a real standard the Web ever saw... more than at any time before or since. Its monopoly created a much stronger de facto web standard than anything the W3C has tried to coerce or the WHATWG has tried to suggest. It allowed innovation around a common web layout, in terms of browser features, instead of overloading the DOM with flashy interactives that nobody asked for.
Then ActiveX came and went, competed with Java applets, Flash took over, Firefox and Webkit started taking off, Javascript got more powerful... and Microsoft's beautiful walled garden collapsed. What do we have to show for it, two decades later? Slower pages with unnecessary complexity, written in transpiled languages ten layers deep, with a UX more focused on dark patterns than getting to the point. What's your typical complex web app... Gmail? It's good, sure, but in replacing Eudora, we ended up with the messiest, jankiest, hackiest ecosystem in the history of consumer computing.
It was really too bad Microsoft was the one who got away with IE6's monopoly. If it had been a proper browser vendor who took (and maintained) control from the early days, the web would be a much cleaner ecosystem, like the walled garden app stores we have today.
Even today, we're back in the same situation with on iOS, where every browser is just WebKit underneath. iOS web browsing is thus a lot cleaner than than crapfest on Android, where every browser ships their own renderer and no two cheap Android phones ever render the same website the same way.
<old man yells at cloud>Frankly, I'm just not sure it's worth it? Twenty years of web dev later, and honestly I think it's just gotten worse. Most people still just want to look up restaurant hours or send a message to their friends or whatever. The rest is crust.</old man rant>
To make matters worse, Google has put in place some legal roadblocks against device vendors using AOSP in markets where others can fill in for some of the proprietary Google parts.
These requirements are subject to regulatory action and I'm almost 100% certain that they will be deemed anticompetitive and therefore illegal.
Strongly disagree. Desktop Linux is better than it's ever been before, and not at all comparable to the degenerate hellhole that is the modern web.
systemd isn't perfect, but I think it's an improvement from traditional init. If you prefer the simplicity of traditional init systems, then you're free to use a non-systemd distro. Wayland is a much-needed modernization and simplification of the graphics stack, and again, nobody's forcing you to use it - X11 won't disappear any time soon. Snap, Flatpak, Docker, etc aren't exactly my cup of tea either, but again, nobody's forcing us to use them. Debian, Arch, etc are chugging along just fine. Meanwhile, PipeWire is a significant improvement compared to bare ALSA or Pulse+Jack, and iwd is a significant improvement compared to wpa_supplicant+NetworkManager.
As for new end-user applications, how about Sway?
I do use a MBP daily, and the software there is amazing. But seeing that their software barely works outside of their platform, it's a miracle they have any customers at all.
Linux itself is at least not a proprietary and commercial entity, though quite arguably its development has largely been captured by a set of proprietary and commercial entities. There's enough multilaterality in that group that fixed loci of control don't seem overwhelmingly apparent, but I'd definitely watch for those.
I've been concerned over numerous elements of Linux development (including viewpoints expressed by senior developers) for a decade or so. I think you'll find some level of concern expressed by others, including some very senior former Linux devs. (I'm not positive A.C. has said as much, though that's a vibe I get.)
This is just a ridiculous assertion. Blink being Open Source does not change what Google does with the engine. If the web was Blink with a handful of irrelevant Blink forks then the web is Blink. That means whatever stupid specs Google puts forward like WebBluetooth or WebFacialTrackingAttentionMonitor become de facto web technologies.
No one outside of Google will affect the direction of Blink. Even if Microsoft tried, Google still has an overwhelming number of deployments and overwhelming influence with search and advertising.
Part of the problem of IE dominating the web was Microsoft using that domination to push their ecosystem and nudge out competitors. If things like ActiveX and VBScript had been more popular there would have been no room for Firefox to make inroads against IE.
Google's Web* specs they push are their equivalent of Microsoft's proprietary extensions of the web. No browser written from scratch can hope to catch up to Blink without billions of dollars of investment. A Blink fork disabling the most privacy invading Web* specs can't meaningfully compete with Google's install base and promotion.
What you're missing is the fact a project is Open Source doesn't mean it's governance is in any way open. The governance of Blink is not meaningfully open. Nothing a non-Google contributor says means anything to Google. They already add in half-baked and poorly thought out Web* specs to Blink with little concern for standards processes and there's at least some competition from Firefox and Safari. If Google doesn't care now it's ridiculous to assume they would care if Blink completely dominated in the browser space.
I don't think very many of their customers run any of their software anywhere other than on Macs and iDevices, so I expect that doesn't have much effect. Aside from the apple TV app on Roku and various TV operating systems and such. And still, none of this makes Safari not an "actual browser".
That's absolutely right, but it's not the point.
What matters is how much investment is required to offer an alternative to Google's Chrome. Does it take billions or does it take mere millions?
Building on top of Chromium means that it takes mere millions. And that changes the situation.
For that to be true, it is not necessary to wrest power from Google when it comes to deciding what does or does not go into Chromium as Google doesn't get to decide what goes into any forks.
Does any of this negate the power that Google currently has over web standards by way of Chrome's overwhelming market share? Certainly not.
What it changes is Google's margin of safety when it comes to imposing truly user hostile technology on everybody or stop investing in the technology.
And I don't mean "user hostile" in the sense that it enrages the HN crowd. I mean user hostile in the sense that many normal users will actually look for better alternatives on their own accord, not for political/advocacy reasons.
The fact that open source Chromium exist makes Google's dominance over the web far less assured than it would otherwise be.
> Building on top of Chromium means that it takes mere millions. And that changes the situation.
This simply does not follow. If you're building on the back of Blink you're still chasing whatever Google unilaterally decides to include in Blink. You need to do extra work to merge stuff you want and keep stuff you don't want properly disabled. Google has no impetus to make it easy or even possible for third parties to disable features in Blink. The cost to maintain a defanged Blink can very easily go from "mere" millions to billions if Google makes it difficult to merge upstream changes in defanged forks.
If web developers readily adopt whatever Google throws out, and lets be honest it's adtech companies adopting "features" to better fingerprint users without cookies, then a Blink-based alternative to Chrome will get zero uptake. If the top sites on the Web require Google's version of Blink/Chrome with all of Google's handy dandy anti-privacy features then it does not matter in the slightest that a non-Google Blink browser can exist.
You're pretending that Blink being Open Source is somehow going to affect the decisions of web developers (adtech companies). They are going to chase Google's version of Blink/Chrome because that's how they make the most money. Right this second Apple and Mozilla are just barely keeping Chrome from fully dominating the web.
Google is never going to make Chrome overtly user hostile. They're just going to continue to making Chrome an advertiser's dream browser because they are an advertiser. While WebEyeTracking might have some non-advertising use 99% of the user cases will be to make sure people looked at an advertisement long enough. If Google controls the specifications that define the web and sites adopt those technologies, there's no room for alternatives that aren't Google's Blink. Not only can defanged Blink not be practical but neither are non-Blink browser engines.