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Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

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Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Amazon - AWS Professional Services to be exact. They trusted their employees with admin access. You had to toggle an option and click on a box saying you would be responsible with admin access. I think AWS knows a little bit about defense in depth… Every blue badge employee at Amazon as far as I know has the ability to get Admin access by clicking on a button on the home built app. You also might be surpr…

> I think AWS knows a little bit about defense in depth… What you're telling me is that they do not . And that every mom and pop shop IT outfit is more qualified to secure a server than Amazon is.

I am suppose to believe a random HN poster knows more about governing a large internal IT department - actually the second largest employer in the US and the largest cloud provider?

If so, I still know some people inside AWS. I’m sure they will be willing to back up a shit ton of money to your doorstep to teach them the error of their ways.

Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think AWS knows a little bit about defense in depth… What you're telling me is that they do not . And that every mom and pop shop IT outfit is more qualified to secure a server than Amazon is.

I am suppose to believe a random HN poster knows more about governing a large internal IT department - actually the second largest employer in the US and the largest cloud provider? If so, I still know some people inside AWS. I’m sure they will be willing to back up a shit ton of money to your doorstep to teach them the error of their ways.

All I'm saying, is what you've told me is so foundationally bad that instead of being a sort of off-topic comment in this post, it should be the #1 headline on HN. I'm frankly stunned. I don't really care if I don't have enough authority to be believable to you or not, I never asked you to. But most community college professors for the IT trade degrees could explain it if you asked.

And oh, I'm sure Amazon folks would have some high buzzwordy reasons to suggest this is okay in their environment. Everyone bad at security does it.

Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am suppose to believe a random HN poster knows more about governing a large internal IT department - actually the second largest employer in the US and the largest cloud provider? If so, I still know some people inside AWS. I’m sure they will be willing to back up a shit ton of money to your doorstep to teach them the error of their ways.

All I'm saying, is what you've told me is so foundationally bad that instead of being a sort of off-topic comment in this post, it should be the #1 headline on HN. I'm frankly stunned. I don't really care if I don't have enough authority to be believable to you or not, I never asked you to. But most community college professors for the IT trade degrees could explain it if you asked. And oh, I'm sure Amazon folks woul…

Yes, because community college professors know the latest best practices from spending years in the industry working with large enterprises and managing employees at scale…

I would be shocked if most BigTech developers don’t have admin access to their computers and some type of MDM software that automatically disable disallowed apps.

When was the last time you heard about an exploit to AWS’s or GCPs internal systems based on employee installed software? It might shock you, that it started at Google with the zero trust initiative. But AWS was rapidly moving away from requiring VPNs to gain access to any of their internal systems.

Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s ultimately for the courts to decide but what’s at issue is not the control of Chrome itself but wether Google is allowed to offer a browser. Any browser. People on this site seem to forget that courts can compel companies. Open-source is not a magic bullet that invalidates consent decrees. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome and forbidden from offering a browser due to their monopoly in the ad market, they…

Are they going to compel Google to not allow people to go to their sites? Even when it’s not the default search engine (Windows), they still voluntarily go there. Who is going to fund the browser development? Is it going to be funded like Firefox dependent on Google ad revenue? The only product bundled with Chrome are ChromeOS notebooks and Android phones and neither has a majority market share in the US.

You're discussing the wrong thing; Google might have to sell Chrome because they have a monopoly on search and ads. Not on the browser.

Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they going to compel Google to not allow people to go to their sites? Even when it’s not the default search engine (Windows), they still voluntarily go there. Who is going to fund the browser development? Is it going to be funded like Firefox dependent on Google ad revenue? The only product bundled with Chrome are ChromeOS notebooks and Android phones and neither has a majority market share in the US.

You're discussing the wrong thing; Google might have to sell Chrome because they have a monopoly on search and ads. Not on the browser.

And getting rid of Chrome is not going to stop people from choosing to go to Google. The desktop with the largest market share neither comes with Chrome nor has Google as the default search engine and people still go there.

As far as ads, there are three trillion+ market cap companies with a thriving ad business - Google, Amazon and Meta.

Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#116
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a long time user of firefox (also around 20years). it still has many pain points especially if you're a tab hoarder. try closing a window with 400 mid to heavy tabs and see how long it takes, you can select the tabs individually and they will close way faster. (even on the best PC you can find) this is niche but I wish there was a watered down /minimalist version that dropped, bookmarks, history, sqlite (I know HN…

I currently have 8260 tabs open across 9 windows, and that's just on my main laptop, across all devices I probably have over 20k tabs, and I don't really have any issues regarding tab management. I used to have issues with Firefox randomly nuking my state on load and having to restore backups, but now I use Tab Session Manager for that and never think twice about it.

Is there some specific reason why you are doing this? What possible benefit could this have beyond some weird bragging rights?

Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#117

I dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise. Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3). Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they ca…

I personally don't think having the world's most popular web browser being in the hands of an advertising and surveillance company is all that great. One big reason being that they control captchas and lock content behind them, and they grant leniency to people using their browser, which is more permissive with dangerous ads and allow the company to make more money and further their dominance.

Ummm. You think that Google isn’t an advertising and surveillance company?

Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#118

I dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise. Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3). Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they ca…

I'm not sure I've read a comment I disagree with more on this site than this one.

Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#119
post #47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the benevolent dictator of the web Lol it's more like a death grip since nobody can compete with their ad business model. There is almost no innovation in the browser space outside of more and more tracking ...

I'd argue that depends on what you mean by "innovation" -- Google has been pretty busy, meaning specifically developers on their payroll, churning out more or less useful Web API implementations, certainly at a far more frantic pace than people traditionally _blamed_ browsers of yester-decade for. Nevermind that some of these APIs are more haphazardly designed than others, truth be told most of them are okay and are…

Web browsers from 90s can render html perfectly well.

> if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it

Ever heard of native applications? Those could always do the thing, there is not only no reason for web browsers to implement "web apis", but every one of those is actively harmful.

When "web developers" can finally implement a page where focus does not jump around and layouts do not shift around we can start talking about being allowed access to more than plain html.

Re: Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

#120
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that depends on what you mean by "innovation" -- Google has been pretty busy, meaning specifically developers on their payroll, churning out more or less useful Web API implementations, certainly at a far more frantic pace than people traditionally _blamed_ browsers of yester-decade for. Nevermind that some of these APIs are more haphazardly designed than others, truth be told most of them are okay and are…

Web browsers from 90s can render html perfectly well. > if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it Ever heard of native applications? Those could always do the thing, there is not only no reason for web browsers to implement "web apis", but every one of those is actively harmful. When "web developers" can finally implement a page where focus does not jump around and layouts…

Native applications is a relatively fragmented market of different hardware and OS for platform, made more complicated by relative lack of interest (which is because the market is fragmented, a catch-22), and factors like needing to learn another programming language when you already know JavaScript and how it works on the Web, which is taught to more people every year for obvious reasons. Which is all why Github Electron, essentially a Google Chrome married to Node.js, both _JavaScript_ platforms, made such an impact when it was released. There's zero-install on the Web, too -- just follow a link and you're surfing applications. Python+Qt applications have to be installed, even if that means downloading these -- there's plenty of hosts configured to deny the user the privileges of running software they downloaded, no matter how native and how well mannered it is otherwise. There's fewer pairs of hands on the job (part of catch-22), and there's more standards and APIs to deal with, due to the fragmentation, even for all the cross-platform offerings. All this no doubt contributes to the market staying behind the juggernaut that the Web has become.

Before you roll your eyes and label me a millennial who's not seen anything but the absolutely appalling Web applications of yesteryear, fresh off inexperienced hands of developers who think they invented caching and what not -- I started off with x86 assembler and C then C++ in early 90's, and I hold genuine interest in everything we learned since before Intel made 8088 -- but I am simply describing the reality I see, not necessarily reality I want.

You're drawing a border on water -- there's no need to "separate" the Web from native. The Web is an application platform developed from a hypertext network (the old Web I re-label for comparison's sake), and the platform has tremendous value. You need to have tunnel vision to want to put genie back into the bottle, but again -- I absolutely hear and understand your argument. Do you have realistic suggestions?

Drew DeVault suggested another protocol, Gemini, a while back, having become frustrated with much the same observation you did. Just text mark-up served with efficient text-based protocol -- essentially a regression back to HTTP and HTML anno 1995 (possibly with more semantic elements). I think it's not only a fantasy but also a poor idea -- not because it's a bad idea in itself but because it assumes there's no possibility to do any of it with today's Web, but there is -- it's just that everyone's reaching for the fancy and the flashy once they start coding. What you were referring to with "focus jump around" and "shifting layout". We're sacks of flesh driven by hormones -- that's the best reason I can give you why the same platform that allows you to slap [a HTML that's worth reading](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/), possibly [with a simple stylesheet that does the bare minimum to improve user's experience](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com) -- is _not enough_ for authors. I'd call it "author's prerogative" -- the person who pays for the domain and the hosting, wants to exercise their authoring power and gets carried away with all the bells and whistles they slap on their pages. Users pull their hair out, in silence (or mostly ignored because "do I paint the walls in your house?").

Anyway, this is getting long -- the gist of my argument is that technically the Web is capable of supporting all the static HTML without an ounce of "shitty" scripting that makes everything border on "unconsumable". You're making a "dictatorship" argument along "if you can't make good readable sites, we're going to neuter the platform". But the platform _is_ what drives adoption of the Web, I say, albeit now nearing some cancerous growth from a skeptic's perspective. And yet: fix the _content_, not the _platform_. "Native" is just a word -- there's no native, everything is translated or compiled one way or another, including JavaScript (which _I_ consider a relatively bad general purpose programming language, even under ECMA oversight which fixed a lot of its warts, admittedly). Unless you're one of those ["real programmers"](https://xkcd.com/378/).

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