501–510 of 524 posts
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I don't that Edge would survive without Chrome. I think it would be more fair to say that without Chrome, there will only be Safari, Firefox, Ladybird, and Verso. Yes, the latter two aren't ready yet, but I get they would gain fast traction in Chrome's absence.
You're forgetting Dillo, lynx, elinks and NetSurf.
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I'm a bit more hopeful about Mozilla. I think there would be a collapse of the business without the Google cash flow, but expect the browser itself would be continued by the community for its importance.
I have about as much faith in the open source community maintaining a machine as complicated as a full browser without significant corporate backing as I have in OpenOffice displacing Microsoft Office in my lifetime, but hope springs eternal.
Speaking from personal experience, I write my best code when I'm frustrated by the absence of something I need. I'm sure many others here are the same way. If a sufficient fire is lit under the community to make the web continue to work in the absence of the old guard, I'm pretty sure it'll happen.
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> because people choose to use it. Incorrect. Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults. And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of cho…
I used DDG for a long time, it's crap, I switched back to Google, I suspect a lot of people would do the same. There isn't a lot of competition. I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
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> the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately I love this but the act of indexing the web is both complex and ever-evolving (not to mention expensive), so the market needs to have natural incentives for the public crawler to continue being good at its job. Google is incentivized to have a great index because it feeds into its competitive advantage. If the index is a shared resour…
> what incentive does the indexing company have to keep improving it? A publicly owned asset doesn't need to be managed by a private entity. The incentive can be exactly the same incentive that the NHS and NASA operate on. It's a fun problem that you can make a career on making better that is ultimately a public good. Not everything needs to be operated with pure profits in mind. > And what guarantees that the indexi…
Sure like there's open street maps for maps, there could be something like that for search indices.
But I thought we were discussing the viability of making search indexing an independent, maybe even regulated natural monopoly as a way to democratize search and keep competition improving search itself.
And I think the answer is no because search companies will find alpha from maintaining their own secondary indices and use it as a competitive advantage, and the 3rd party index will be (and if not immediately, then over time become) inferior to what the search companies use to differentiate themselves due to natural pressures.
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The idea that we'd want any type of government entity running search is absurd on several dimensions.
It's only absurd if it's ran as a public-private cooperative. The government directly running something like this can be every bit as efficient as what any private entity could do. It's not as if the gov doesn't already employ in several sectors skilled software developers. It only goes haywire when Reagan/Clinton style "Send it to the private businesses" policies get in the way. When you start talking about a constr…
Supply and demand -- gov't doesn't pay as well, so top SWEs do not work for gov't. Stronger reward signals attract stronger performers. If you can get paid 2x-10x more to do the same work, who will you go work for?
> When you start talking about a constrained resource like this, it only makes sense to move it to the only entity without profit as its primary motivation.
If the goal is to give competitors a starting point to mitigate the negative effects of a monopoly, then sure it'd be nice to have an open index that anyone can get. However I'd argue this is an ineffectual strategy because it's likely to be too little to be helpful, and just have low overall quality.
Profit is a reward signal that typically signals a customer's demand / need. When organizations like gov't lose that signal, they typically end up optimizing for some far less effective target (someone's whim, political clout) and missing what the underlying need is in reality.
Additionally, gov't lacks of a lot of software infrastructure and tend to use outdated tech / must adhere to procurement procedures that don't always yield the right set of tools.
So in addition to being unable to understand constituent needs well, and being unable to hire good people, they also have the nasty privilege of working with worse infra when they do get funding.
> The government directly running something like this can be every bit as efficient as what any private entity could do.
I hope I've illustrated that the answer is no. Also, anecdotally I've worked with gov't on behalf of a big tech company and it was very enlightening to see the structural issues keeping them from succeeding at tasks of even moderate complexity. The US Digital Corps can only do so much :(
I'm not anti-gov't though -- gov't _can_ make private entities more efficient though by busting monopolies and enabling maximum competition in the markets. Big tech is certainly due for a shakeup.
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Well to push the point a little - Imagine that Microsofts anti-trust case was in 2008, not 1997 and the iPhone was out and clearly gaining traction. Suddenly Microsoft doesn't look like some perpetual juggernaut. That's where we are with Google today - we can see the product that's likely to displace it. Windows is still big today, but it's not anywhere near the strategic force it was in the early 2000s. In the same…
Microsoft still owns 70% of the PC market 15 years after your hypothetical and is still a "perpetual juggernaut" in that market. Because you don't care about that market and think smartphones are more important doesn't mean the rest of us stop caring about PCs and the harm Microsoft's ongoing monopoly in that market creates.
It'll likely be the same for Google -they'll continue to be the dominant search engine, but search engines will be significantly less structurally important going forward.
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I used DDG for a long time, it's crap, I switched back to Google, I suspect a lot of people would do the same. There isn't a lot of competition. I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
I'm 10x happier with Kagi than Google, and I was very skeptical (having followed Google's devs very closely as acquisition specialist for ~10+y). If you can afford Kagi, I'm curious to know why you don't stick with it. Or I'll assume that because the Google brand is just too strong, in which case we have a particular case of a monopoly.
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I read through some of the documents of the original complaint. This is mainly not about Google being the dominant search engine for consumers. It's more to do with their anti competitive behavior in the ad tech market. As a consumer, switching is easy. As a company that wants to advertise, switching is not easy if Google holds all the users. But also they've bought up all sides of the market, so what used to be comp…
Google doesn't have an advertising monopoly. Facebook all by itself does about half of Google's revenue in ads. Then you have twitter, amazon, snap, all kinds of stuff. Google would be lucky to have 40% of online ads, and then once you include all advertising they are way down, maybe 15-20% or something.
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> Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well And yet browser development costs money. If browsers cost money, you could make a better product and compete by selling it, but when an incumbent is giving theirs away for free?
How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? This goes back to the original point about Google search being superior to Bing, and not just because it’s free.
Google justified a huge investment in Blink by making effectively making it the application platform of their netbooks. They also justified such an investment because they are afraid of other companies owning the method they get their ads in front of people - Such as dramatically changing and increasing their investment in Android when they saw the first versions of iPhoneOS.
The ChromeBook is why Google has so many non-standardized API in Chrome (that people often refer to under the umbrella of "PWA".) No other browsers saw an urgent need to be able to e.g. scan for and talk to bluetooth devices from a webpage, and in fact the other browsers were somewhat appalled by the security implications.
Edge: Gave up, and now repackages Chromium. They spent over a decade as an incumbent with supposedly only a half dozen developers on the IE team, and that was because they were doing their own monopoly game (protecting the Windows platform from cross-platform applications). They couldn't overcome their lack of momentum, and quite frankly had an inability to attract experienced talent.
Safari: Does fine, but Apple never directly cares about market share - they want profit share. There's no profit maximization for free browsers; WebKit and Safari investment is about owning the best default browser on Apple platforms, and it has better system performance. It is certainly arguable that Safari is better than Chrome on Mac. And let's not forget part of how Chrome got such a quick start is that they are a fork of WebKit.
I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town. Google is a big ass company…
Google is offering a free browser, while making a good browser costs money. They are subsidising that by their huge ad-business. And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking. That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, becau…
Oh they didn't abandon the plans, they chose something worse. They are going to make it a user decision.
Advertising companies can still gain some value for people who have third party cookies enabled, applications which aren't well-maintained enough to remove a reliance on third-party cookies will fail (sometimes), and users will be pushed by things like work SaaS apps to re-enable third party cookies (as a global setting) to be able to use required services.