Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts • Hacker News Board

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#571

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

sumedh wrote: post #518

raincole wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a di…

> they don't because Chrome is better. That was because of marketing not because Chrome was better. The Google.com homepage telling you to use Chrome is one of the best marketing campaign in the world.

No doubt that Google using their mainpage as a megaphone for the first time in the company's history made a difference.

... but that only got people in the door. What kept them in the door was this image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

... or, rather, the word-changing technology underpinning that image: the ability to sandbox individual page rendering instances into subprocesses so that a failure on one page didn't crash the entire browser. I think people sometimes forget how fundamentally unstable browsers were in 2008, and how easy it was to trip over one bad page that would bring down your bank tab, your email tab, your document tab, the three tabs of source code you had open, the seven tabs of unread blogposts... Hugely disruptive. Just didn't happen in Chrome.

Firefox popularized tabs, Chrome let us have a hundred of them open.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#572

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

BrenBarn wrote: post #499

r0m4n0 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds nice but many companies cannot exist in tiny pieces, Google included. So if you force that it will cease to exist. Which I believe to be a net negative to the US, and world, some may disagree though Disclosure: Google employee, words are my own

> Which I believe to be a net negative to the US, and world, some may disagree though Yes, I disagree. If we can't have Google without monopolism then we should have neither. Treating Google as essential in this situation is like a druggie saying he "needs" his next hit. People only "need" Google because Google has used its monopoly position to try to make people addicted to it. It should never have been allowed to h…

Or, perhaps, it should be nationalized. If it's such a critical piece of infrastructure that dissolving it would be unthinkable, but it also can't be competed with in the marketplace... It could be removed from the marketplace.

This isn't unheard of for communications technology. Postal service in England was exclusively a Crown privilege, then the monarchy realized there were benefits to the Empire if everyone could use the system, and that was such a good idea that when the US Constitution was written it asserted the government had to provide a postal service. There is past precedent for a government-oversight private enterprise in the US.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#573

Post by ajross » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

socksy wrote: post #280

ajross wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you not see ChatGPT and Claude as viable alternatives to search? This subthread is classic HN. Huge depth of replies all chiming in to state some form of the original prior: that "AI is a threat to search"... ... without even a nod to the fact that by far the best LLM-assisted search experience today is available for free at the Google prompt. And it's not even close, really. People are so set in their positions…

What? The Google LLM assisted search experience is... not the best option by a long shot? It's laughably incorrect in many cases, and infuriatingly incorrect in the others. It forces itself into your queries above the fold without being asked, and then bullshits to you. A recentish example, I was trying to remember which cities' buses were in Thessaloniki before they got a new batch recently. They used to rent from a…

It's so frustrating the way AI argumentation goes. People will cherry pick outrageously specific items and extend to crazy generalization. I mean... your phrasing was 100% ambiguous! There's no such thing as a "Stockholm bus", or "Stockholm rolling stock".

There are buses in Stockholm, and buses in Thessoloniki, and buses manufactured in Sweden, and buses previously used in Stockholm that are now in operation in Thessoloniki. And one LLM took one path through the question, answering it correctly and completely. And the other took a different one[1]. As it happened your (poorly phrased) intended question was answered by one and not the other.

If I ask the same question with a more careful phrasing that (I think!) matches what you wanted to know: "Where did buses used in Thessoloniki come from originally?"

...I get correct and clear answers from both. But the Google result also has the Wikipedia page for the transit operator and its own web page immediately to the right.

Again, cherry picking notwithstanding I think in general the integrated experience of "I need an AI to help me with this problem" works much better at google.com, it just does.

[1] It's worth pointing out that the result actually told you that your question didn't make sense, and why. I suspect you think this was a bug since the other LLM guessed instead, but it smells like a feature to me.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#574

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

wraptile wrote: post #395

lunarboy wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet was better via what metric? Your rose tinted nostalgia bar? And what's stopping anyone from making a better non-gameable search index that's driven by purely charitable intentions?

> And what's stopping anyone from making a better non-gameable search index The party that was found _guilty_ in this lawsuit?

I don't think so. Remove Google from the story and search is still a problem involving massive amounts of storage, massive amounts of fast compute, and a clever way to index results.

The only part of that story Google impacts is that their clever way to index results is by mining traffic on their site and the larger web to decide based on user behavior whether their search query was satisfied. Since users can't spend active time on two sites at once, Google consumes a finite resource there. But do we believe Google's behavior tracking really is the final, best form that indexing can possibly take?

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#575

Post by attendant3446 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #469

attendant3446 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most popular != the best. The days when Chrome was the best browser are long gone.

It depends on the criteria for "best" though, to be pedantic. Chrome and Edge are for example "the best" in synthetic benchmarks.

Can I install the original uBlock in Chrome? No? It can't possibly be the best.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#576

Post by _heimdall » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:02 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #472

Hard_Space wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read right in the story. I presume that this falls under the same consideration as direct links to science papers in articles that are covering those releases. Far as I can tell, the central tactic for lowering bounce rate and increasing 'engagement' is…

They didn't cited papers directly even before the web. It's not a bounce or engagement issue. Journalists don't make it easy for you to access primary sources because of a mentality and culture issue. They see themselves as gatekeepers of information and convince themselves that readers can't handle the raw material. From their perspective, making it easy to read primary sources is pure downside: • Most readers don't…

It seems more malicious or intentional than only trying to gate keep. More often then not when I dig deeper into a news article referencing a scientific paper or study, the details they pull out are very much out of context and don't tell the same story as the research.

I have to assume the journalist writing such an article knows that they are misrepresenting the research to make a broader point they want to make.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#577

Post by CamperBob2 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:10 PM UTC

Chinjut wrote: post #362

CamperBob2 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow is dead because its rules are nonsensical and many of its users are dicks. It's going to be a real problem going forward, because if AI hadn't killed them something else would have, and now it's questionable whether that "something else" will ever emerge. The need for something like SO is never going to go away as long as new technologies, algorithms, languages and libraries continue to be created.

A scary (if not particularly original) thought: If people become utterly reliant on LLMs and no longer embrace any new language etc for which there is insufficient LLM training, new languages etc will no longer continue to be created.

If languages stop being created, it will be because there won't be a need for them. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Think of programming languages as you currently think of CPU ISAs. We only need so many of those. And at this point, machine-instruction architecture has diverged so far from traditional ISAs that it no longer gets called that. Instead of x86 and ARM and RISC-V we talk about PTX and SASS and RDNA. Or rather, hardly anyone talks about them, because the interesting stuff happens at a higher level of abstraction.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#578

Post by troyvit » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #59

stackskipton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under good Monopoly law, you would remedy the situation that got them to this point, not worry about their future. Chrome + Deals got to them to this point so that's what you unwind. If it causes Google to get weakened and AI finishes them off, that's just creative destruction at work and oh well.

The ease with which a total newcomer was able to steal share from Google is real-world evidence that there wasn't really a monopoly and that Google competitors (Bing, etc.) just sucked and didn't want to spend the money to be better.

They stole share from Google because search is becoming obsolete, not because a new search engine came to town. It's like saying 5G stole market share from AOL's dial-up business. Search still has a use, and Google still takes > 90% of all search, so it's still a monopoly, and I'll add that Google is trying to leverage that monopoly to expand Gemini.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#579

Post by cvhc » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

OvbiousError wrote: post #448

raincole wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a di…

The regularly flood youtube with advertisments for chrome, I've yet to see my first youtube ad for firefox.

I have quite opposite experience. I've never seen ads for Chrome but frequently see Apple (including Safari). And when I search for "chrome" or "browser" in Play Store, Firefox/DDG/Opera come before the true Google Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/LJiUX4m

I just don't think Mozilla have spare money to film a nice commercial...

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#580

Post by CamperBob2 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

balder1991 wrote: post #352

CamperBob2 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow is dead because its rules are nonsensical and many of its users are dicks. It's going to be a real problem going forward, because if AI hadn't killed them something else would have, and now it's questionable whether that "something else" will ever emerge. The need for something like SO is never going to go away as long as new technologies, algorithms, languages and libraries continue to be created.

Besides the issue of repetitive beginner questions, which today could be answered with an LLM, was a significant driver of low-quality content, requiring substantial intervention from StackOverflow. However, your point stands: as new technologies develop, StackOverflow will be the main platform where relevant questions gain visibility through upvotes.

If it were just a matter of upvotes and downvotes, that would be one thing, but voting to close a question for being a "duplicate," forcibly terminating an emerging discussion because somebody asked something vaguely similar 10 years ago for a completely different platform or language, is just nuts.

Or closing a general question because in the opinion of Someone Important, it runs afoul of some poorly-defined rule regarding product recommendations.

A StackOverflow that wasn't run like a stereotypical HOA would be very useful. The goal should be to complement AI rather than compete with it.