281–290 of 345 posts
I agree. If Chrome is sold off, the new owners might think its uneconomic to maintain a (desktop) Linux port, keep it open source, or they might make it even less standards based than it is now.
Google is a web business, that’s their whole thing. They made a browser to invest in the web itself because what is good for the web is good for Google, and happens to be good for all of us. This is a panglossian take that belongs in the year 2005. Google is less a 'web business' than it is an 'advertising business', a 'surveillance business', and a 'finance business'. Consequently, it is false that 'what is good for…
Advertising is a monetization modal. That's like saying that resteraunts are just credit card swiping businesses. Chrome is similar to other apps like X, Instagram, or YouTube. You click on the app. You are given a way to discover content and ads are shown along side that content. When you click on a site / post there can also be ads. Maximizing engagement on the web, means people will discover more content, which me…
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The 400B in revenue is there to be paid out to shareholders not to pay for browser development when not needed. Apple only has a browser team because they need to keep up with parity for their OS.
That logic could be applied to every app team at Apple, or indeed every other publicly traded software company
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If Chrome cannot succeed on its own, but under Google it is an oppressive force taking over the vast majority of web marketshare, that is a textbook case for antitrust action. That is Google using its dominance in one market (search, advertising) to expand into and dominate another market (web browsers). If a hypothetical Chrome Corp. couldn't figure out how to use the exact same data Google is harvesting with the br…
> If a hypothetical Chrome Corp. couldn't figure out how to use the exact same data Google is harvesting with the browser to at least move in the direction of profitability, then they're hypothetically idiots. Selling that data to the government and other corporations is user hostile though, and that is exactly what is going to happen when Google is forced to sell. I can see why the government would love this though…
(It's probably a bit better, assuming the hypothetical sale is to all comers, but still...)
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The 'what is good for the web is good for Google' line certainly was true in 2005 when the greatest threat to the web was companies like microsoft using internet explorer to adjust the de-facto web standards and privatize it in the "EEE" fashion. Obviously the most visited websites would maintain the web better than OS vendors, their buisness depended on it being open. We have a similar situation now, but with google…
Re: your first paragraph, this is exactly what Google does now. They maintain such an incredible pace of development and such a unilateral attitude that nobody can stop them from developing web standards even if they want to. When was the last time anyone said no to a Chrome feature and expected it everywhere else? Developers treat it as the go to to the extent that some don't even bother testing in other browsers. G…
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> Arguably, Google divesting Chrome would be great for the web. Because then Chrome would slowly rot since there's no one to fund development, leading us to WebKit being the only engine, as Firefox is also defunded. I don't see how that's better.
Why do browsers need to be free?
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Yeah. I think that was the wrong decision. The problem was introducing features between IE and IIS and using that to extend their end user OS monopoly into a server OS monopoly. MS should have been blocked from the server OS market instead (or maybe some some of consent decree, I’m sceptical it would have been appropriately enforced though).
That's more or less also what Google does with Chrome in order to force folks to use it and only it. I know that well because I have Chromium installed for this reason alone.
IE had the opposite problem. Microsoft was moving too slow and was genuinely holding the web back. And obviously, that was intentional because Microsoft's business model at that time was entirely tied to locking users into Windows.
Its never been easier to write cross browser web apps. Some companies choose not to because they don't care enough to test in other browsers. And even then, there are a lot of apps that just happen to work in all the major browsers by chance. It wasn't nearly as easy to build a cross browser app for the IE6 dominated web.
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You can always use Chromium or dozens of others viable Chromium derivatives. Google at least gave you the option to do that.
> Google at least gave you the option ... Not sure if Google voluntarily gave users the option. Google was forced to give users the option since Blink is a derivative of the LGPL-licensed WebKit, which is itself a derivative of the LGPL-licensed KHTML. An argument can be made for open-sourcing the frontend of the browser. However, even the WebKit codebase has a test browser that runs on Windows (despite Safari droppi…
It's wild that the author points to all the Google people writing W3C specs as if that's a positive sign. I'm not quite pessimistic enough to say all those people are 100% corporate shills, but there's no reason to expect that the stuff that gets into the W3C via Google is somehow magically detached from Google's profit motives. Google's effect on web standards is largely just another form of icky "embrace and extend…
Apple did good things for the web with WebKit before iOS because it was in their interest to break the Windows desktop monopoly (and I'd argue that macOS has been a huge benefactor of Chrome taking down IE). They've been less than stellar post iOS now that they have a rent seeking business predicated on native apps locked away behind their app store.