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Web by Google (TM)

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51–60 of 496 posts

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#51
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So another large company will take them over. We need to legislate this now to avoid this endless cycle

Why?

Because monocultures are intrensically unhealthy. Ironically though they're very profitable for as long as they last.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#52
post #33
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they will be inclined to not use that device and use one that does not ask weird questions.

> No, they will be inclined to not use that device and use one that does not ask weird questions. Weird questions that they got asked already on their Windows machine as part of BrowserChoice.eu? They're only "weird" because this practice of forcing your own browser (IE, Edge, Chrome, Safari) down the throat of your users has become commonplace.

I have literally never seen that prompt, and I have turned hundreds of computers on for the first time. So yeah, just like that weird, never seen dialog.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#53
Didn't we do this to ourselves, though? The tech community did decide that vendor lock-in is okay, walled gardens are okay and also that a browser monopoly is okay.

My impression is that this is what's different this time: it was chosen by developers themselves

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#54
post #10

> And let’s not forget that most people now access the web via mobile devices, 75% of which run Google’s Android. Which is a good thing, because these devices can actually run different browser rendering engines. Perhaps the bigger problem is that devices ship with Chrome pre-installed instead of asking the user at device set-up time what browser they want to use. I imagine if you told the user they could have a brow…

> Which is a good thing, because these devices can actually run different browser rendering engines.

In theory yeah, in practise it looks a bit murky to me right now due to the state of the web. Apple is under a lot of fire right now (quite rightly) but I have a suspicion if other browser engines are allowed to run on iOS there will effectively be no incentives to develop for any other browser engine and we'll start seeing "Works best / only in Chromium" type websites and apps (I've already experienced this a fair bit using Firefox).

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#55

AMP still makes no sense. On iOS, Android and Windows it’s completely broken and friction increasing to grab a link to send to a friend in another medium. Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes. For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse…

Disable JavaScript (eg, with uMatrix)

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#56

AMP still makes no sense. On iOS, Android and Windows it’s completely broken and friction increasing to grab a link to send to a friend in another medium. Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes. For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse…

> how do you turn the damn AMP off? Use DuckDuckGo.

For a lot of us DDG isn't a viable alternative --- the quality just isn't there. (No, I am no talking about English or other European language result -- Japanese, Thai, etc. are all terrible)

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#57
post #2

It does look pretty tragic at this point. But it’s worth noting that every tech business so far was talked about as if it’s taken over the world, forever, and without 5-10-20 years they were overtaken. IBM, Intel, Microsoft. I think google is overplaying their hand in many areas, and this will inevitably lead to the downfall of their dominance. Just like most other large businesses in history.

Microsoft is overtaken by who exactly? In desktop & laptop Windows still holds a 87% market share.

Back then Windows is >90% of all consumer computing devices. Right now it's 87% of just desktop & laptop.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#58

The issue is not the fact that Google owns the web. It is that the web itself has become decimated to the point where a company like Mozilla does not have a future. Facebook, Uber, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. None of them are optimized for Google index. Most top consumer internet applications don't take place in your browser.

You could make a case that all the 'social' platforms serve a fundamentally different need than the Web. Those are all more about immediate communication of lots of relatively ephemeral, low-information messages. The Web is more suited to publishing more enduring, long form and complete information. Fusing the two never seems to work well. See blog comments for an example.

You could make a case that most internet platforms are increasingly social.

Think about what would be left if you took away all "social" apps from the internet.

Even if we don't go that far, think about non-social online apps that don't use the "web".

For example, iCloud, Dropbox, Microsoft Office, Adobe creative cloud, etc. Most users of these apps use native apps instead of a clunky browser.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#59
post #5

> Google’s capture of the Web is a fait accompli. Only legislation will keep the World Wide Web from finally becoming Web by Google (TM). I really hope it's not the case, because then Google will cancel it. /s Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. If when performing a search I could ask my contacts to look in their history if they have something matching…

Re: fair acompli Respectfully, not really. Arguably search is much worse now than in 2010. What if someone could come up with a simple search that could easily understand “hey this is a paywall” or “hey this is a paywall but somehow securely and with privacy I checked and you have a login to this site in your password manager” or it could do time based searches better than “last day / last week / etc”. Consumers have…

Fair enough, but I didn't base my argument on just search. They hold a commanding position in just about every significant area of the Web. A better product is not enough to dislodge them.

And lets not forget that a very large portion of the population would need to hear about that product on an AMP page in their Chrome browser on their Android phone, probably following a Google search or noticing a story on Google news.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#60
post #5

> Google’s capture of the Web is a fait accompli. Only legislation will keep the World Wide Web from finally becoming Web by Google (TM). I really hope it's not the case, because then Google will cancel it. /s Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. If when performing a search I could ask my contacts to look in their history if they have something matching…

Re: fair acompli Respectfully, not really. Arguably search is much worse now than in 2010. What if someone could come up with a simple search that could easily understand “hey this is a paywall” or “hey this is a paywall but somehow securely and with privacy I checked and you have a login to this site in your password manager” or it could do time based searches better than “last day / last week / etc”. Consumers have…

The new competitor would have to be so much better than Google that any given user has a >10% chance of switching, for the competitor to capture a remotely relevant marketshare.

That seems fairly unlikely to me. Google gives you what you're looking for immediately for the average query, and anything beyond that is a power user detail not relevant to most people.

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