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 the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser.
At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari.
I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.
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 browser. It is good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without leveraging google's greater web dominance.
There was a time when IE was a good browser and the default one. They dominated. A few years later, Mozilla had the better browser. Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.
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 or anything ever was... except IE in its monopoly day.
Google's marketing for Chrome was (and is) so aggressive that literally every single Google-owned web property asks you to install it for the "best experience." And more often than not, because Googlers never test for other browsers, Chrome does offer the best experience on Google sites. But that doesn't mean it's the best browser experience, which is a totally subjective metric based on an individual's preferences.
Regardless, Google pushed it so hard, bundled it with so much software, and threw it in users faces so much that most non-technical users probably would have ended up with it installed -- probably set to the default browser, because of more nagging -- regardless of Chrome's quality. Even now, as Google makes steps to neuter adblockers, the average user continues to use it. Why? Because they just don't know any better or care. And I can't blame them: it takes immense effort to even use Firefox now because of random sites based on Google tech that break in every other browser. Chrome is certainly the easy way out.
Edited to add: This has actually happened to me when setting up a new Windows PC for someone.
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), because things were often broken/bad, or various websites I wanted to use didn't work in one or the other. However, in the last few+ years, that's not really true (in any way I notice) now.
Basically, I think the only improvements that can be made are incremental/marginal, and aren't enough to make switching browsers worth it. They're all pretty good now. So, I expect market share for browsers to change much more slowly now.
Don't forget their annoying bundling with freeware...
Firefox, IE, Opera have all been way late to the game on some or all of these features.
In the past I have been in the position to help make decisions on browser support at my company. We easily decided on Chrome because it was faster and more secure than IE, but more manageable than Firefox at an Enterprise level. Firefox is just starting to catch up to these feature sets. IE gave up. Safari is a literal running joke even amongst the most ardent of MacOS supporters at my company - features are simply non comparable.
I never once saw an incompatibility problem in Firefox that made me open Chrome. I currently run 2 browser sessions on my main computer - one in Firefox for personal use and one in Chrome for work use. I like and use Firefox, but Chrome has momentum.
They've turned the corner on that but it was very true for a long time, and during that time Chrome or Chromium became the default.
It is true that Google is pretty pushy with Chrome, but it's also true that FFox had years of time where it wasn't just obviously slower, it was obviously more dangerous.
I can't help but think this played a major factor in the resulting global bias towards Chrome.
It is not only good. When it came out it wiped the floor with the alternatives. Firefox 3, from that time, was absolutely pathetic in terms of performance. I remember sticking to 2 for a while. Even today Chrome is still the best, even if the margin has narrowed. Other browsers are having to adopt Blink to catch up.
Bing can be Edge only too.
No. Their market share is wholly due to being a better browser. That is an absolutely true statement when it comes to Windows and PC. It gets muddled with Android, because there you can make a case that they push Chrome as a default browser.
>Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.
It was a different time. FF did wonderful work with moving to a standards-based web and breaking IE hegemony, but they got blindsided by Chrome's relentless drive to squeeze every frame of performance out of JavaScript and WebKit. That's the thing with Chrome, they were not only pushing web standards forward, but more importantly they were pushing performance and security in a way that FF could not follow. Around the time that Chrome came out, FF was starting to struggle with a legacy architecture and that made it impossible for them to keep up with Chrome.
Where "did some marketing" equals "unethically abused monopoly position to aggressively push through dark patterns", sure. I think I can still blame them for that.
I have pictures from 2012 (I think) when they had the entire grand hall of Paris' Gare de Lyon hung with dozens of huge Chrome banners.
That alone must have cost them tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Euros.
That said I think the web's under Google's thumb screws (AMP, mail, DNS, browser-almost monopoly, etc) is in a bad place. But they did invest a hell of a lot in pushing Chrome.
Do you mean that they advertised for Chrome on their properties? Advertising on your own property is legitimate in my book. And simple advertising isn't a "dark pattern".
Or do you mean something else?
Instead of “Virus detected! Click here for free scan” it was “Old browser detected. Click here to upgrade”.
It was literally 100% out of the malware deployment hand guide.
This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.
However, they are not willing to anymore, which is a huge concern for future innovations in that domain.
> This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.
If Edge had all those things but could only render HTML4 and below, would it be considered a "modern browser" still? I would say no. That's an extreme hypothetical but it was similar to the future Microsoft saw for Edge, and a major factor in the switch to Chromium.
Btw hello double standards, why shouldn't QT, WPF or GTK have redundant implementations?
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 users of Firefox and probably Opera as well.
And paid lots of third party software vendors to bundle it as a drive-by installation 100% malware style.
There’s a good reason many of my technically inclined friends still today don’t trust Chrome.
It’s malware after all.
Agreed. Firefox is really fast, and I love it. Been using it for a couple years now. But even if Chrome was demonstrably, objectively faster, I would still use Firefox.
By doing this, Microsoft gets compatibility with the world's websites on day one, and they can take it from there. It's a smart move that many people seem to be misinterpreting.
If google’s killing ad block extensions, Microsoft will most definitely follow suite.
Your only best bet is Firefox right now.
Chrome is a Trojan horse and Google most definitely doesn’t give a shit about your privacy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/btz1lc/youtube_mat...
1. Smaller Size, chromium was just a smaller foot print with less legacy code
2. Better Performance. There was no doubt the before firefox quantum Chromium was the performance leader, Bink and V8 where superior then, today not soo much
3. Better rendering support. Like IE6 in the 90's today there are many many sites that ONLY work correctly on chrome, so if you use chrome's render you have less work to do, and will have less complaints by users blaming your browser for some websites poor code
In initial days of chrome, it wasn't that better. It grew in popularity because of the bundle model of advertising they employed which was initially used to distribute spyware and the browser started growing.
All the nice things came later.
also, it regularly ran my cpu at max throttle when doing anything video-related within the browser (watching netflix, on a video chat, etc), while chrome is much more cpu-friendly with those things (don't know why that is).
I tried Opera, as well, and ran it as my main browser for months (almost a year, actually), but there is a wierd bug in windows related to the browser bar expanding when the machine wakes up from sleep, where the only way to fix it is to restart the browser entirely.
Are they though?
Adherence to standards is very good across the board. It isn't like it was in the 90s when standards were seen as mere guidelines and suggestions.
Safari is going strong. FF is going to be around but they are certainly struggling - and it's their fault. They have had the uncanny ability to make the wrong decision every time. They are hamstrung by their legacy architecture that they are just starting to break out of. Their side projects (Firefox OS, Pocket, Reality) were/are a total waste of time. And of course, they promoted and then fired Eich over nothing - which leads one to wonder what kind of a circus they run internally.
Microsoft is interesting and for now they are using a packaged version of Chromium - but I could see them do a hard-fork in the same way that Google forked WebKit because at some point a trillion-dollar company won't want to be tied to another trillion-dollar company's roadmap.
99.9% of browser users don't care or don't even know if their browser is open source - what they want is convenience and ease of use. I hope Mozilla prioritizes the ones that actually matter - the users, over whatever philosophy it claims to live by, that often times isn't rooted in customer centricity.
As for their "battles at the W3C", you mean DRM and H.264, the patent-encumbered video codec?
The philosophy you're talking about is probably why they still have that 5% of the market, otherwise they would be irrelevant ;-)
Otherwise you're basically giving in to eternal serfdom; letting large corporations dictate the terms, knowing that individuals will never be able to extract the long-term compromises needed for a good deal. It's basic negotiating 101 that the party holding all the cards is going to get most of the value.
Mozilla Foundation is a Non-profit foundation who mission to the ensure the web is open and accessible to all, not to make the most commercially successful web browser
The obfuscatory language around it are arguably more insulting than the ads themselves. As John Gruber so eloquently wrote:
> If you want to sell ads, sell ads. Own it. Don’t try to coat it with a layer of frosting and tell me it’s a fucking cupcake.
> Watching a video? Reading a blog?
> Chances are good that Google's involved.
But as far as other stuff, I hope people will give distributed p2p possibilities some consideration in terms of usage or development.
For example YaCy works pretty well as a p2p search engine. There are some others that I haven't tried.
Back to the browser stuff. The problem is the browser has a full operating system in it at this point. There are too many APIs to compete.
What could make competing browsers viable might be something like the following. Imagine a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Instead it emphasize fast rendering, has a state of the art web assembly implementation, and some kind of ABI/API for things like UI, UDP, etc. such as OpenGL (or a simpler UI system). It only allows a subset of CSS and HTML, maybe only Flexbox or something. It it could be just restricted to old-fashioned HTML rendering. But anyway it won't be able to have the scope of Firefox and Chrome.
I guess the biggest problem is if you don't support the whole ginourmous HTML5 featureset (starting with JavaScript) then most websites will not work at all. They either will not load or will be totally scrambled.
Maybe some kind of p2p content-centric web could become popular and have it's own streamlined and simplified browser.
Or maybe there could be a new browser tailored for augmented reality that could become popular and compete with Chrome.
The additional HTML5 suite of APIs would theoretically be supported by a plugin model, but given the depth of integration of some of the APIs, this might be a great deal more work than it sounds, and even more difficult to prevent the proliferation of questionable plugins to this backend. It would probably have to resemble something closer to the Linux distribution model; where an installed instance of the browser would come with a set of whitelisted plugins, with no real ability for the non-expert user to add plugins.
More important to me is the idea of making use of client certificates to attest identity more strongly, together with masking the use of those certificates over third-party channels. So if I went to facebook.com I would present a cert "abcd" (a self-signed certificate), and if I went to yelp.com I would present "bcde". If yelp loaded content from facebook.com, I would present "cdef". Similarly for cookie handling, at least initially.
My hope would be that websites would associate multiple client certs with a given "user" on their site, but unless the user explicitly associates a cert with an identity there's no way (outside of fingerprinting, etc.) to make that association; all third-party interactions show as incognito sessions. Eventually the goal would be that (if this technique is widely adopted) that cookies become kind of useless in favor of strongly attested server-side identity (rather than using bearer tokens in the form of cookies) that can be associated with session data.
It makes use of a regular browser (Chrome, Firefox) in the backend but provides a customized experience to the user and over the final hop to the user.
It supports a plugin development where you can use plugins to change the page before it is sent over the final hop to the user, and the JavaScript on the page is never executed on the user's machine, but only run in the cloud backend.
I actually built it for webcasting and scraping, and then needed a lower bandwidth access over my 4G connection while oversees so added a plugin to remove everything except for the essential HTML.
I'm actually looking for feedback right now on what to improve next, as I've got 50 issues I found myself but not sure what's most important to others. You can try it on https://staging.litewait.io and use a stripe test card number.
Mail me for issues and I'll try to help you. In profile.
That doesn't mean that they are doing anti-competitive stuff and are viable for enforcement, being a monopoly in an open market is not illegal, it does mean that with that level of marketshare they have some legal limitations that their competitors don't have. Usually it's a limit on merges, acquisitions, price setting and bundling.
Thanks to everyone who reported their experiences and helped to track down the issue!
On a more general level, the argument about all the eggs and a single basket still stands. (Knowing why a particular basket fails doesn't help the eggs.)
(And for a description of Computer Space, see https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html)
Nonetheless, it runs smoothly on Chrome 76.0.3807.0 (Canary) on a Late 2013 iMac.
I.e., I just tried on an old MacPro (late 2008) with hardware acceleration disabled (Settings -> Advanced -> System -> Hardware acceleration + restart) and it runs smoothly.
Edit: Just updated the page accordingly. Thanks to everyone who helped in focusing on the matter of hardware acceleration!
as a biz dev, it's a bit saddening to see a lot of browser competitors go down the drain. but this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?
Just to give a recent example, if Google would dictate what gets implemented, instead of WebAssembly, the standard, you would have gotten PNaCl.
> this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?
I fail to see how the creation of a monopoly can be a win for business. For Google's business, for sure.
on your second point, monopolies create the setting for massive disruption.
The problem with monopolies is that they control all the power, for the good or the bad decisions, and without competition they are not forced to look for the costumers benefit...
It seems like there is little motivation to maintain a separate browser at the moment, but one day Google may do something that motivates people to fork/create a new one. That could be a big bang moment or just a slow crawl that opens up a niche that a new browser could fill.
Next after that would be web API additions or extensions that make sense to Google but interfere with or prevent other things from being pursued (eg more pro privacy directions). They may try hard to play nice with standards bodies, but a quarterly goal can be a strong influence...
https://blog.mozilla.org/sfink/2013/02/14/browser-wars-the-g...
So you just ignore the 30 percent of the market that isn't Chrome? Internet Explorer had 70+ percent of the market share until 2010. Was it good for consumers and the internet as a whole for devs to ignore non-IE browsers in 2009?
If we're really headed to a single-browser future, enjoy those specs while they last.
https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-l...
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 laws are hair-splitting and specific. It's just not the kind of system that can "think" high level and apply abstract principles to totally new problems.
Google & Facebook mostly have no prices to fix. The ad markets where they make their money are competitive bid-based, ostensibly the opposite of a "monopolistic pricing" structure.
The economic/theory just doesn't match the pratices anymore. For example: Facebooks' revenue.
Imagine that tomorrow morning BMW's revenues are cut in half. BMW would need to produce fewer cars. Cars cost X to produce. Cut X in half, and you can expect half the volume.
What would happen if we did the same to FB. My guess is that they'd still make the same FB. If you take path dependency^ out of the mix (that it's hard to fire people and adjust downward), It's scary to think how big a company is required to make FB. Doesn't seem like a stretch to speculate that it can be done on a $5-$10bn budget... 1/10th of their current revenue. After all, Facebook was Facebook on that budget not long ago.
^By path dependency I mean imagine that FB's revenue had just never gotten to $80bn in the first place, the sahare price had never gotten so high. Etc.
IDK what exactly that implies about what antitrust laws should be, but it does mean that the theoretical foundation for the current ruleset is totally off. The way monopolistic power conerts to money in 2019 is fundamentally different from 1891... I mean genuinely fundamental, I'm not using it as a superlative. The definition of monopoly, benefits of owning one, the reasons why they're bad (or not).
Facebook was Facebook, but it wasn't Facebook+Whatsapp+Instagram, and "mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce market competition" have been impermissible under the US anti-trust law for over 100 years, since the Clayton Act, and I'm not sure you need more than that.
To deal with that, the legal system needs to define market & dominance. The "markets" FB is dominating are far squishier and unstable than the markets of 100 years ago. The market for coal or steel or intercontinental shipping are easy to define. Photo sharing? Social Networking?
How do you define competitiveness. What effect does FB's dominance of photo sharing have on consumer prices? Barriers to entry? Anyone can launch a chat or photo sharing app. Substitutes? Plenty. Those are the types of questions the old laws and precedents will try to deal with. It's like an alien biologist trying to prod orifices that we don't have.
How does this harm consumers or the economy? The economics underlying the legal framework are just as outdated. They're looking for prices and outputs and stuff that FB doesn't have.
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 breaking the monopoly won't help).
Simply being a monopoly is an unreasonable reason to break it up.
But it appears to me that there is a psychological bias towards an exceedingly narrow definition of substitution goods and therefore markets, especially in digital technologies.
For instance, Microsoft clearly has an extremely dominant position in PC operating systems. The market for PC operating systems used to be synonymous with personal computing, but that is no longer true. Mobile devices now dominate personal computing.
So Microsoft has lost most of its monopolistic power without ever losing its dominance in the market as it was originally defined by regulators and users.
Similarly, search used to be synonymous with using a web search engine and Google clearly has a monopoly there. But now we search Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, etc for various specific things in different contexts and Google has to pay billions to buy users from Apple.
So my point is that yes, monopolies are inherently bad, but they are also inherently unstable in ways that are not adequately reflected in the current thinking around anti-trust regulation.
Outdated laws and outdated economic theory embedded in them. There is only so far that you can extend a railroads, mining and foundries analogy.
I'm sure we could have lively back-and-forth about the impact of these monopolies, but the only legal and legislatively pertinent parts of that discussion are those that can be massaged into an analogy to the late industrial examples that the current legal framework (including, legislation, legal precedents and regulatory bodies) was designed around.
This has not been true historically. Standard Oil was not "bad for society".
1. That they are in a monopoly-like position where they have the power to decide over other web tech projects
2. That they have a very hostile process, not getting properly back to the developer for months. That alone is sabotaging of other projects.
3. That they make the wrong decision, seemingly only protecting their own position, without providing a proper reasoning.
Hear that? That was the antitrust investigator laughing. You can do that if it's about some random tech. You can't do that if the tech is linked to a browser controlling how 60% of internet users access the web, and worse, getting full access to popular stuff/success qualifying content like Netflix for all browser. They wanted that monopoly position when they pushed for DRM, now they have to handle it. Big mistake.
As for Electron, are you sure? I found this page:
https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm
It says:
To enable video playback with this new restriction, castLabs has created a fork that has implemented the necessary changes to enable Widevine to be played in an Electron application if one has obtained the necessary licenses from widevine.
So there's a fork of Electron that enables you to embed Widevine, if and only if you have the necessary licenses (otherwise presumably your Electron fork would be detected as a stream ripper).
Thus I'm not sure you're right about that. At any rate, if Electron became a back door to extract content, it'd be remotely detected and disabled. That's the entire point of the Widevine system.
As for "the good guy", gah, please, are we all 10 years old here? Content licensing and copyright enforcement is not a good vs evil fight. Some content producers choose to upload their video as WebM files to free hosting providers and let anyone who wants to watch them. Others stick it on YouTube and ask YT to monetize (means, no ad blocking). Still others want viewers to pay for the content (means, no content ripping). All these are valid economic models that are widely used, and Google obviously wants to support them because otherwise the answer is not "no DRM", it's "no in-browser Netflix".
It seems like it would be trivial for Widevine to revoke access if there were ever abuse.
I have more details in a blog post I wrote last month. https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
What if you aren't actually the good guy?
The jump to the null hypothesis that you've stated is made too soon without doing this first.
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.
I suppose I should just use Safari when I'm not plugged in.
Chrome did several things really well out of the gate:
- Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want.
- 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.
- N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar
- This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance issues. This was huge at the time.
- Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and everyone else.
- Chrome was standards compliant.
- Chrome ran across multiple platforms
- (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient.
- (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking.
Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can disappear or cease to be relevant.
I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been unable or unwilling to replicate.
Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support).
All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes people numb.
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.
if (s matches possibly valid URL pattern) then try to open it else send s to search provider
1. Firefox does automatically download and apply updates like chrome does (at least on Windows), and has for some time.
It notifies you when update is downloaded and applied (I think it's just a notification badge on the hamburger menu), but user interaction is not required... the update would automatically get applied the next time the user happens to restart the browser, just like chrome.
2. Firefox has the equivalent of Chrome's omnibar for some time now... you can still add the second search box via the customize screen, but it's optional and is no longer the default...
What is shame is for such valuable effort to die. Tech dying is a shame and you can see it everywhere, from folks experimenting with TempleOs to 8bit game emulators...
I wish to qualify my complaint by acknowledging that Google have done tonnes of brilliant stuff, Chrome included. However, one can be over-awed by the brilliance and not see what is being missed.
A few years ago HTML5 came along with better elements than the humble div to describe content in a page. These new elements, e.g. section, aside, article, main, header, footer and nav, are what web pages should be written with. But Google are okay not really caring about HTML elements. They can sift through tag soup for search and therefore how well a page is written is of no consequence for them.
Chrome does support the new elements absolutely fine but the dev tools that we use and the things like Lighthouse are about metrics that matter to Google and don't concern quality HTML. This enforces a cargo cult mentality and we have 99% of the web bloated by markup that is quite hard to write and to debug. If Lighthouse audit reminded you that the div element was 'element of last resort' according to the spec and knocked a few percentage points off your score for accessibility if your page only used divs then that would encourage people to write decent HTML using the full element vocabulary.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-f...
