71–80 of 101 posts
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The EU just followed what the US courts said during Clinton. Clinton turned MS into a whipping boy. In retrospect, the courts were wrong. Netscape's profit model made no sense. People didn't want to pay for commodity software like a web browser. MS had every right to release a free one bundled with their platform. The web isn't some optional thing. A browser is part of every OS now. On top of it, the deal MS signed d…
@drzaiusapelord, I honestly don't know where to start with you, but I'll try. > Clinton turned MS into a whipping boy. No, he didn't. Bill Gates and Co got away with what amounted to a misdemeanor, when they could easily have been nailed with multiple felonies. Bill Gates once bragged openly that MS got away with a slap on the wrist. He knew what he was talking about. > the deal MS signed didn't let it control OEMs W…
> Tech is generally a meritocracy. People can just migrate
to whatever software they life.
That and the test of the last paragraph of your comment is
proof that you're a paid shrill.
I may agree with you on the content -- the ideal of the meritocratic technological society has not been achieved yet, and the field is not level. But personal attacks are not needed here, they are not useful for the discussion.
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They don't go after Apple, because bundling by itself is not prohibited, only if you have an overwhelming control of the market, which Windows had but iOS doesn't. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if the EU started pressuring Google on the Android front in the near future - they're already talking about splitting up the company. (Again, not advocating, just explaining)
The EU has no control over splitting up Google or the ability to make that happen. As far as Android goes, Google has no monopoly on the phone business.
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The fact that Chrome is open source doesn't helps me, a Firefox/Safari user, when I see the site that works correctly only on Chrome. Open source or not, I don't want to use Chrome. There was a time when Chrome was lean, now Chrome is a pig. Not to mention blatant Chrome push from Google - the last one is Inbox, "it works only on Chrome". Set Safari user agent to Chrome? Everything works well. Shame on you, Google. T…
This is a developer of the site problem, not a Chrome or Firefox problem. No self respecting web developer would ever make any site work only in one browser.
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There should be no fear. IE6 held the web back. Chrome pushed it forward.
You're looking at things from the perspective of IE6 in 2014, not IE6 in 2001. Of course it seems shitty today, but that's because browsers from then are shitty compared to browsers today. It's only a victim of its success and the fact that rolling updates weren't a plausible model then. If the contemporaneous Netscape 6 had been anywhere near as successful as IE6, you'd be cursing it now. Almost certainly more than…
I remember seeing this on TV and not understanding why microsoft was threatened with a fine if they ship IE by default on their products. Actually I still don't. Nobody ever stopped me from downloading another browser on windows, anyone who wants to do it will do it. So people did have a choice, they just didn't know they had it, and it's their problem, not microsoft's! Could someone explain this to me?
The EU just followed what the US courts said during Clinton. Clinton turned MS into a whipping boy. In retrospect, the courts were wrong. Netscape's profit model made no sense. People didn't want to pay for commodity software like a web browser. MS had every right to release a free one bundled with their platform. The web isn't some optional thing. A browser is part of every OS now. On top of it, the deal MS signed d…
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But the same is true for the calculator app, or the file manager. Granted, the web is used for a lot more than those... but I don't see why the browser is singled out as something needing special legal treatment.
Under anti-trust law, it is illegal for a company to use their monopoly power in one business as a competitive edge in another separate market. Therefore, the entire argument turns on two things: (1) was Windows a monopoly (2) was IE an integral part of Windows (hence not a product competing in another market). Since Windows, for all intents and purposes, was a monopoly, a huge part of the discussion was about whethe…
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I'm less scared because at least Chrome (or rather Blink / webkit) is open source so can (and is) implemented in other browsers. However I do agree with you that it isn't healthy for any single rendering engine to monopolise the internet.
The fact that Chrome is open source doesn't helps me, a Firefox/Safari user, when I see the site that works correctly only on Chrome. Open source or not, I don't want to use Chrome. There was a time when Chrome was lean, now Chrome is a pig. Not to mention blatant Chrome push from Google - the last one is Inbox, "it works only on Chrome". Set Safari user agent to Chrome? Everything works well. Shame on you, Google. T…
$ pacman -Ss webkit browser
extra/epiphany 3.14.2-1 (gnome) [installed]
A GNOME web browser based on the WebKit rendering engine.
extra/kwebkitpart 1.3.4-3
A WebKit browser component for KDE
extra/qtwebkit 2.3.4-1 [installed]
An open source web browser engine (Qt port)
community/dwb 2014.03.07-2 [installed]
A webkit web browser with vi-like keyboard shortcuts, stable snapshot
community/luakit 2012.09.13.r1-7
Fast, small, Webkit based browser framework extensible by Lua
community/qupzilla 1.8.5-1
Cross-platform QtWebKit browser (Qt5)
community/qupzilla-qt4 1.8.5-1
Cross-platform QtWebKit browser (Qt4)
community/rekonq 2.4.2-3
A WebKit based web browser for KDE
community/surf 0.6-2 [installed]
A simple web browser based on WebKit/GTK+.
So while I do agree that more variety of rendering engines is better (on the provision that they do follow HTML standards to minimize wasted developer time), things aren't quite so bad with -Chrome- webkit as the de facto standard as they were with Internet Explorer as webkit is open source so you're not tied to any specific browser.
What's more, Internet Explorer actively pushed technologies that were not only tied to IE, but to Windows as an OS (ActiveX controls, being the biggy. But that wasn't the only IE-exclusive technology). At least with Chrome, the technologies are platform agnostic so non-webkit browsers could still support them if they wanted to / had the developer resources.
I'm not trying to stick up for Google nor Chrome here. In fact aside Chromes developer tools, I don't like it much either. But pragmatically, a Chrome monopoly is less dangerous to the web than Microsoft / Internet Explorer ever was simply because all the parts of Chrome that matter are already open source and have already been forked and/or ported to other (new) browsers.
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The fact that Chrome is open source doesn't helps me, a Firefox/Safari user, when I see the site that works correctly only on Chrome. Open source or not, I don't want to use Chrome. There was a time when Chrome was lean, now Chrome is a pig. Not to mention blatant Chrome push from Google - the last one is Inbox, "it works only on Chrome". Set Safari user agent to Chrome? Everything works well. Shame on you, Google. T…
My point is that you can still have Chrome (well, Chromium) compatibility without having to run Chrome, as demonstrated by the amount of webkit browsers in ArchLinux's repos: $ pacman -Ss webkit browser extra/epiphany 3.14.2-1 (gnome) [installed] A GNOME web browser based on the WebKit rendering engine. extra/kwebkitpart 1.3.4-3 A WebKit browser component for KDE extra/qtwebkit 2.3.4-1 [installed] An open source web…