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Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?

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Re: Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?

#21

Post by [deleted] »

smoldesu wrote: post #18
josefx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many angles. So many angles. Before chrome there where a lot more competing browser engines, so that is already a solid YES. Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market. > at a fraction of the cost Microsoft gave IE away for free and there where dozens of IE clones build on top of its engine, you just never had a reason to use any of them…

> Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market. "Then you have the UNIX market that was a lot more diverse before Red Hat Linux hit the market." I think it will be trivial to prove that Google is actively harming the internet. Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission. If the market decides that a terr…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?

#22

Post by mirashii »

sansah wrote: post #20
madduci wrote: post #5

Because adblocking doesn't work on Chrome. Use Firefox.

I'm using uBlock https://ublockorigin.com/ . It works on chrome, edge and firefox. I dont see any extra ads on chrome over firefox.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... explains a variety of techniques uBlock Origin implements in Firefox that are not supported in Chrome, with some statistics about what percentage of ads those are.

Re: Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?

#23

Post by robertlagrant »

asadotzler wrote: post #17
robertlagrant wrote: post #7

Having an open source Chromium that allows competing browsers to be built at a fraction of the cost might make it hard to claim monopolistic practices. If Google never existed, would we have more browser choice now?

They aren't really competing if they're just another distribution for Google's web platform. Google doesn't care so much what Chromium browser you use as long as it helps them dictate how the web platform evolves to funnel more money into their coffers and every Chromium browser is doing just that, cementing Google's ultimate and long-term control.

But what does that mean? What is "Google's web platform" in this context, and how does it harm competition? What do you actually want? If Chromium didn't exist, would we have more competition in browsers?

Re: Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?

#24

Post by robertlagrant »

smoldesu wrote: post #18
josefx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many angles. So many angles. Before chrome there where a lot more competing browser engines, so that is already a solid YES. Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market. > at a fraction of the cost Microsoft gave IE away for free and there where dozens of IE clones build on top of its engine, you just never had a reason to use any of them…

> Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market. "Then you have the UNIX market that was a lot more diverse before Red Hat Linux hit the market." I think it will be trivial to prove that Google is actively harming the internet. Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission. If the market decides that a terr…

> Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely.

What would winning this battle look like/achieve?

Re: Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?

#25

Post by smoldesu »

robertlagrant wrote: post #24
smoldesu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market. "Then you have the UNIX market that was a lot more diverse before Red Hat Linux hit the market." I think it will be trivial to prove that Google is actively harming the internet. Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission. If the market decides that a terr…

> Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely. What would winning this battle look like/achieve?

It's hard to say. My theory is that the demand for complicated browsers is largely reciprocal to the power of your OS. If you have a Chromebook, then your browser is probably less locked-down than your root system. Same thing would happen if Chrome's Blink engine got put on iOS.

Winning that battle would probably look like one of two things:

- Browsers go back to their original goal of being document renderers, and a new wave of local and online APIs fills in the gaps.

- Browsers stay the way they are, but with broken tooling that forces developers into native APIs whether they want it or not.

Re: Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?

#26

Post by asadotzler »

robertlagrant wrote: post #23
asadotzler wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't really competing if they're just another distribution for Google's web platform. Google doesn't care so much what Chromium browser you use as long as it helps them dictate how the web platform evolves to funnel more money into their coffers and every Chromium browser is doing just that, cementing Google's ultimate and long-term control.

But what does that mean? What is "Google's web platform" in this context, and how does it harm competition? What do you actually want? If Chromium didn't exist, would we have more competition in browsers?

It means that everything about the web, but especially the critical parts like privacy vs surveillance is increasingly and sadly dictated by Google. If you distribute their vision for the web, their literal web platform, Blink, you are harming the web by increasing Google's stranglehold.

And yes, the web would be better served by people building their own, hard forking an existing, or using any of the two or three remaining not-Google solutions. The web would be far better if Google was the only Chromium distribution because we wouldn't have the illusion of a dozen choices that are all just Google's and we'd likely have more and more viable alternatives.

Re: Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?

#27

Post by hkt »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #11
hkt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently saw a "adblockers aren't allowed on youtube" gate from Firefox. I recommend using Minitube on Linux desktop now. Plus youtube-dl and NewPipe.

youtube-dl is broken now and barely updated for some byzantine reasons, no? yt-dlp is supposed to be the new hotness, though I've yet to try it. https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/

True. yt-dlp is symlinked to youtube-dl on my system and I forget that sometimes!
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