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Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

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Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#161

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

danielnesbitt wrote: post #154
anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you search for Firefox, Google says "did you mean Chrome?" Edited to add: This has actually happened to me when setting up a new Windows PC for someone.

That does not happen because you searched for Firefox. A dismissible popup suggesting you 'Switch to Chrome' appears if using IE to search with Google regardless of your search term. It seems Microsoft is bit more egregious in Bing. If you search for Chrome or Firefox you get "Promoted by Microsoft - Microsoft Edge is the recommended browser for Windows 10 and it’s already installed on your PC."

...and if you change your default browser to anything else, you'll get endless "Try Edge!" messages in your notifications and even on your lock screen.

Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#162

Post by masswerk »

StavrosK wrote: post #150
masswerk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Please downgrade your browser to Google Chrome 52"?

Yes! Why don't you do that? Every other website gives me flak for using Firefox, why are people reluctant to do the same when it's Chrome that doesn't work? "Due to a bug in modern versions of Chrome, this website only works with Firefox, Safari and Chrome 52 or earlier."

There's already a small section on this in the descriptive text. However, I think, in the broader picture this is more about aggressive optimization and nondeterministic behavior from the high level programming language point of view. Which may happen to any product. (E.g., at some point, Safari mobile had a problem, where some code it should have fallen back to in time critical moments was apparently already purged from memory.) The point is really, if you put all eggs into a single basket/browser, what may have been a minor trifle else is elevated to a completely different level.

Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#163

Post by huy-nguyen »

lprd wrote: post #75

I installed Firefox as my daily driver last year and have been completely happy with it. Great dev tools, good performance, and I agree with Mozilla's stance on privacy. All wins for me. I'll still occasionally open up Chrome for dev purposes -- but for the sake of browser diversity and maintaining an open internet, I encourage all my friends to give Firefox a try.

The main problem with Firefox is high memory usage.

Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#164

Post by shawabawa3 »

masswerk wrote: post #67

Anecdotal observation: A few years ago, I made a video game for an early 1960s computer, the PDP-1, running in an homegrown emulator in web technology. [1] Amazingly, the game runs at 60 frames per second (yes, you could do this with early 1960s tech), and, amazingly, browsers were able to render the emulation, including a rather complex simulation of the dual-phosphor screen, at 60 fps (you could do this in 2016). A…

fyi that works for me at 60fps in chrome 74 on a 2018 macbook pro

Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#165

Post by kvark »

creato wrote: post #64
dalbasal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular. " They did make a good browser. However, their market share is not down to better browser or "some advertising." They use their other assets (search, youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome the "default" option. It's a dominance breeds dominance cycle... a hallmark of modern monopoly. Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good brow…

> IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was at its highest. Much bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is far more dominant than FF ever was... except IE in its monopoly day. The benefit needs to be worth the effort. Early on, in the days you refer to, browsers were often crappy and motivated switching often. I bounced between IE and FF a lot (and later chrome), bec…

I'm afraid this time we'll need to switch before things start breaking, or otherwise less and less devs will bother testing on alternatives.

Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#166

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

lprd wrote: post #75

I installed Firefox as my daily driver last year and have been completely happy with it. Great dev tools, good performance, and I agree with Mozilla's stance on privacy. All wins for me. I'll still occasionally open up Chrome for dev purposes -- but for the sake of browser diversity and maintaining an open internet, I encourage all my friends to give Firefox a try.

Just wanted to add a +1. I use FF with strict content blocking enabled which means that things like YouTube videos and captchas are often randomly missing from pages, as are images hotlinked from third-party servers. I see this as a feature rather than a bug and it's easily temporarily disabled if it causes an issue.

Of course, I use uBlock Origin as well.

Performance-wise I have no complaints and the sync across devices works just as well as it does in Chrome.

Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#167

Post by __HYde »

chii wrote: post #101
dalbasal wrote: post #34

Antitrust law is, I suspect, hopelessly outdated... both the laws and the understanding of monopolies/trusts that are baked into them. These laws were based on 19th-century competition. The problems att were price fixing, predatory pricing (eg price low to kill competition then raise prices), supply chain bottlenecking (how you gonna sell your ore without my trains) ... industrial era trust stuff. The precedents and…

Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society, and it's adverse effects can't be fixed via markets due to reasons like size and reach. Monopoly in its own is neither good nor bad. Facebook has a monopoly in social network. Is that bad? What is the effect of the monopoly? Is Facebook's monopoly having an adverse effect, or is the adverse effect inherent in the way social networks work (and brea…

> Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society

This has not been true historically. Standard Oil was not "bad for society".

Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#168

Post by javagram »

mft_ wrote: post #160
javagram wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me. Privacy. Google doesn't worry about privacy, of course, but firefox tries to avoid sending all the URLs you ever type to google or your alternate search suggestion provider.

Isn't that just a bit of code to fix? if (s matches possibly valid URL pattern) then try to open it else send s to search provider

Searches are sent as you type, so it's not really that simple.

Firefox already does what you suggested when hitting enter in the default URL bar - if it's not a valid URL, it gets used as a search.

FWIW, I now see search bar has been off by default in firefox for the last 2 years (still grandfathered in for legacy users like me), so I think mozilla gave up on this. https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/09/firefox-57-search-bar-off-...

Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#169

Post by joaobeno »

huy-nguyen wrote: post #163
lprd wrote: post #75

I installed Firefox as my daily driver last year and have been completely happy with it. Great dev tools, good performance, and I agree with Mozilla's stance on privacy. All wins for me. I'll still occasionally open up Chrome for dev purposes -- but for the sake of browser diversity and maintaining an open internet, I encourage all my friends to give Firefox a try.

The main problem with Firefox is high memory usage.

Did you mean "Chrome"?

Re: Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

#170

Post by [deleted] »

reitanqild wrote: post #142
bad_user wrote: post #5

In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular. However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important. Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open source nature, is…

> In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular. They spammed it massively as in - adding it to other popular downloads - ads everywhere on their properties, including on the front page where no one else has ever been allowed to buy ad spots - lies: would shamelessly present itself as a better browser not just for users of old IE versions but also for u…

[deleted]
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