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Web by Google (TM)

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Re: Web by Google (TM)

#221

Post by coding123 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #103

A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-ma…

Very weird for me to hear this considering I've never been logged into Facebook in my entire life.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#222

Post by flowerlad »

emptyparadise wrote: post #123

Chromium should be taken away from Google and put in the hands of some truly neutral non-profit entity.

Use Edge instead of Chrome. If Edge's market share increases at the expense of Chrome then eventually Microsoft will have equal control over Chromium.

Microsoft is not a better company in any way, but two companies controlling the most widely used browsing platform is better than one company controlling it.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#223

Post by d3nj4l »

izacus wrote: post #176
lol768 wrote: 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…

Majority of Android devices in western world actually ship with Samsung Browser as default browser, not Chrome. The rest of the market ships with Safari as unchangeable default and rather small part of mobile market is the one with Chrome

Samsung only has ~50% market share of Android phones in the US (https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...), and ~40% in Europe (https://www.counterpointresearch.com/covid-19-weighs-europea...). Chrome isn't a "rather small" part of the mobile maker in the West.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#224

Post by fractionalhare »

noahmasur wrote: post #218
fractionalhare wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh. Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago: https://imgur.com/a/gQ2mxOM Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers: https://imgur.com/a…

I wonder if mobile Safari domination is partly because iOS apps themselves use "Safari" when displaying webpages. If I tap an article using the Octal HN app, it opens in an internal "browser view" that is just an instance of Safari.

That's a really good point. Though on the other hand, any of the browsers on iOS are actually just the mobile Safari engine under the hood anyway, regardless of what the user agent says. To be rigorous, these statistics would need further decomposition.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#225

Post by krm01 »

> Looking at Mozilla’s finances, it’s reasonable to conclude that Google is keeping them on life support to keep the anti-trust hounds at bay.

This insight seems highly plausible and sad at the same time.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#226

Post by d3nj4l »

lol768 wrote: post #213
izacus wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Majority of Android devices in western world actually ship with Samsung Browser as default browser, not Chrome. The rest of the market ships with Safari as unchangeable default and rather small part of mobile market is the one with Chrome

This is a good point, I've never really looked much at the breakdown of device popularity by manufacturer. All the devices I've purchased have been Nexus/Pixel devices, so Chrome is a given there. I assume at the end of the day Samsung Browser is just a reskinned Blink, though?

It's based on Chromium, but it has extensions and a bunch of additional features.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#227

Post by wott »

GordonS wrote: post #163
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOL at least was pretty strictly a US phenomenon. Here in Canada it wasn't a thing, and it wasn't a thing in Europe or Asia. FB's tendril's are international. What's worse is it's very walled off, it's not really searchable or properly indexed. FB's search facilities are a joke, such as they are, but they are only available to FB users. Information that goes in there is basically available to FB and to nobody else.

Back in the day, Compuserve was quite popular in the UK, and I had understood the rest of the Europe too. I never used AOL, but I believe it was similar to Compuserve - a walled garden with forums, file downloads, instant messaging and such. Like AOL, Compuserve reached popularity during the infancy of the web - the web, viewed through Netscape Navigator at the time, was really rather basic, and comparatively empty,…

I am not sure but I think I used Compuserve too, in France. AOL came, but later and more as one Internet provider in many, and much like the others.

It was a bit difficult for us to understand the image and all the memes about AOL, so you had to learn that it meant "Internet for noobs / Joe Six-Pack" in American texts.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#228

Post by sanitycheck »

coding123 wrote: post #221
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #103

A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-ma…

Very weird for me to hear this considering I've never been logged into Facebook in my entire life.

I suspect if you did, they would already know who you are.
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