Slashdot Mirror
Opinion: Chrome is Turning Into the New Internet Explorer 6 (theverge.com)
Tom Warren, writing for The Verge: Chrome now has the type of dominance that Internet Explorer once did, and we're starting to see Google's own apps diverge from supporting web standards much in the same way Microsoft did a decade and a half ago. Whether you blame Google or the often slow moving World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the results have been particularly evident throughout 2017. Google has been at the center of a lot of "works best with Chrome" messages we're starting to see appear on the web. Google Meet, Allo, YouTube TV, Google Earth, and YouTube Studio Beta all block Windows 10's default browser, Microsoft Edge, from accessing them and they all point users to download Chrome instead. Some also block Firefox with messages to download Chrome. Hangouts, Inbox, and AdWords 3 were all in the same boat when they first debuted.
It's led to one developer at Microsoft to describe Google's behavior as a strategic pattern. "When the largest web company in the world blocks out competitors, it smells less like an accident and more like strategy," said a Microsoft developer in a now-deleted tweet. Google also controls the most popular site in the world, and it regularly uses it to push Chrome. If you visit Google.com in a non-Chrome browser you're prompted up to three times if you'd like to download Chrome. Google has also even extended that prompt to take over the entire page at times to really push Chrome in certain regions. Microsoft has been using similar tactics to convince Windows 10 users to stick with Edge. The troubling part for anyone who's invested in an open web is that Google is starting to ignore a principle it championed by making its own services Chrome-only -- even if it's only initially.
It's led to one developer at Microsoft to describe Google's behavior as a strategic pattern. "When the largest web company in the world blocks out competitors, it smells less like an accident and more like strategy," said a Microsoft developer in a now-deleted tweet. Google also controls the most popular site in the world, and it regularly uses it to push Chrome. If you visit Google.com in a non-Chrome browser you're prompted up to three times if you'd like to download Chrome. Google has also even extended that prompt to take over the entire page at times to really push Chrome in certain regions. Microsoft has been using similar tactics to convince Windows 10 users to stick with Edge. The troubling part for anyone who's invested in an open web is that Google is starting to ignore a principle it championed by making its own services Chrome-only -- even if it's only initially.
Chrome is Googles gateway drug, of course they're going to try and get you to use it, and then start getting you to use all other things Google.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If Microsoft wants to complain they might want to fix their crappy browser first. Every time I've tried to use Edge it stutters or freezes.
that Firefox 57 just broke a mountain of plugins (mine included) and makes fixing said plugins difficult if not impossible (still wrestling with that).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Chrome isn't quite IE6 at the height of its power, but its close. On the desktop, Microsoft was actually their main competitor. But then Microsoft launched Edge and it was a crushing blow to Microsoft's market share.
2 Years ago, MS still held an incredible 50% of desktop browser share:
https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=201/
Now, they are down to 20%:
https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0/
Despite being literally shoved into users faces, the introduction of Edge didn't draw users away from Chrome. No, it seemed to send IE users running to it instead.
Chrome now has a commanding presence on desktop and we've already seen Google start to flex their muscle a bit in the same way Microsoft did when they controlled the world with IE. Make no mistake, Google has nowhere near that level of stranglehold but since the vast majority of browsers are Chrome they are the big dog now and they can get away with a lot biting.
Even if you're convinced that Webkit is strictly speaking better than anything else, it's not like people don't have Webkit alternatives. In Windows-land, I've found that having Chromium installed is most likely an incidence of malware, as there are any number of pre-fucked Chrome-alikes, but there's always Vivaldi or Opera, which are both completely functional and IMO indistinguishable from Chrome.
Ironically, now that Edge has some level of Add-in support and there's both "mainstream" Chrome-like Firefox and Greybeard "Pry my addons from my cold, dead hands" Palemoon, it's not like there aren't any non-Webkit alternatives out in the world, either. It is a bit of a shame that for most web developers "mobile web" = Webkit, but that's also somewhat reasonable given the prevalence of Apple and Google devices.
I suppose the question comes down to whether the value of the actual Google services integration (profile sync, better Youtube experience, cloud print, desktop sharing) is worth ceding control of the whole browsing experience to Google. I don't really use any of that stuff so I can't say, but no, letting a giant ad company control my internet experience really isn't any better than when we were pissed a Microsoft for trying to do the same thing. I'm not really seeing how Google got to this point on the desktop. Firefox and Safari were never THAT bad. Is it really just a matter of marketing?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
""When the largest web company in the world blocks out competitors, it smells less like an accident and more like strategy," said a Microsoft developer"
As they say - What goes around, comes around.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Sure you can install Chrome, Firefox, Opera or whatever on macOS, but on iOS even the other browsers are just a GUI attached on top of Safari, i.e. WebKit.
#DeleteFacebook
It's also been horribly unstable for me since the 57 update. Not a crash for years before. Practically a daily occurrence when 57 first came out.
Works fine for me. Hasn't crashed once yet on me (and hasn't in years before that) and it's considerably faster than previous versions. I've run it on Windows, Macs and Linux on somewhere north of 20 machines. Color me dubious.
So far, Firefox 57 is somewhere around Windows 10 on the scale of new versions I don't want anywhere near my machines, but given security risks, staying on an older version is not practical in the long term.
Vague and unsupported assertions of instability from an Anonymous Coward. Very believable.
XUL and a non-Chrome UI already exists. It's called Palemoon. It has drawbacks of its own but if those are things you want, it's out there.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
that Firefox 57 just broke a mountain of plugins (mine included) and makes fixing said plugins difficult if not impossible (still wrestling with that).
Every plug in that I use still works fine and seemed to make the transition without any issue. Your mileage may very of course.
I was a web developer in the IE6 days. We're nowhere near where we were then. A few Google specific sites blocking Edge is hardly the horribleness that was IE6. With IE6, many, many, many companies thought of it as a software platform to develop software on. You also essentially HAD to have workarounds for IE6 because it didn't support standards.
I'm not in love with Google, and they can most certainly do wrong. But we aren't anywhere near what IE6 was, and I don't see the same thing happening with Chrome.
Also, Google's business model isn't the same as MS's. MS sees the web as a threat to its business model. The web IS Google's business model. They don't really have a huge interest in you using Chrome, they just want the web to grow in popularity. If other browsers adopt the same web standards, that's good for Google, not bad.
Now, that's not to say Chrome's popularity isn't an issue. We need more diversity and less centralization. But for a variety of reasons I find it hard for the same IE6 situation to repeat itself. The world in 2018 isn't the same at it was in 2002.
IMHO, it's particularly alarming when the Debian Stable version of Chromium is showing as "no longer supported" by Google Docs. I ran into this warning several times, and it's one of several reasons I had to break my addiction to Google Docs. I can understand Google's desire to add functionality to their Google Docs platform, but to break Docs' functionality in fairly recent versions of their own open-source browser baffles me. There are reasons I don't want to use Chrome, and prefer to use Chromium. When Google slaps limitations on my ability to use W3C standardized browsers and force me to use their non-standard browser, I get the feeling they're only going to do worse in the future - al la Microsoft.
And so, last year I decided to ditch Google Docs and go back to LibreOffice. The most painful aspect of this is the loss of world-wide, easy access to my documents. Leaving the cloud is a hassle, but it's better than vendor lock-in.
Definitely it's time for some anti-trust action on both sides of the Atlantic.
Washington and Brussels, I'm looking at you. More so Brussels at the current moment, since if Ajit Pai is anything to go by, this administration isn't going to do anything about the issue.
If Microsoft had an anti-trust case brought against it for its business practices, surely Google deserves the same treatment. They are doing the same things, if not worse.
This "new API, which Mozilla gave more then a year's notice of," launched without counterparts to several categories of functionality present in the old API. This was despite extension developers giving Mozilla "more then a year's notice of" the fact that these categories of functionality were missing in the new API.
Need a specific example? Let me know when the request for a way to rebind shortcuts becomes RESOLVED FIXED or even ASSIGNED. Right now, it's marked as "NEW" which means "will not be worked on by staff".
There's a difference.
Internet Explorer back then, locked you into a shit ton of closed source proprietary secret poorly documented stuff (embed OLE objects/ActiveX extensions night mare).
There was no sane way to make a web app specifically made for IE to run on anything else except the specific version of IE that it was made for.
Google Chrome mostly relies on open standard. Take another browser that complies with the same open standard, and you can more or less access the same web apps.
Chrome's source code is even accessible. When in doubt you can check how they've implemented some non-compliant stuff.
In practice, very few web apps run in Chrome but completely fail in Firefox, despite both using entirely different engines.
Yes, a lot of web apps fail in Microsoft Edge /Internet Explorer or in Safari, but has more to do with those being bullshit browser which aren't up to date with standard (microsoft's stuff even more so) than Chrome being a proprietary target.
And then, there's the whole anti-trust / profit angle.
Back during the internet explorer scandals, Microsoft was profitting from selling software. By making sure that as many websites and webapps only work exclusively with IE, Microsoft made sure that people desperately need to buy Windows from them in order to get the bundled in Internet Explorer.
Nowadays, Google doesn't profit at all from Chrome. Their hugest profit driver is matching *results* (though not the search results themselves in Google.com, mind you. But matching ads to serve best to end users. And matching content to keep youtube users hooked while they play ads. etc.)
They don't give a shit if you use their browser. They want to use *a* browser, *any* browser, might as well be Firefox if not Chrome (which they *also* finance - Google is pouring money and financing what some could wrongly consider their "main competition").
As long as you end up using this browser to go online, where they can thrown ads at you and sell your eyeballs to the highest bidding advertiser, and where they can monetize the shit out of all the online behaviour data they can gather about you.
Chrome isn't a product on which Google is making money (directly).
Chrome is just one of the possible tools that make their actual business (profiting of users going online) possible.
You can hardly suing them for antitrust violations, Chrome is free (i.e.: "gratis" as in beer) as well as major part free software (i.e.: "libre" as in freedom to look into it and build your own browser).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I think the parent was referring to free market from dictionary.com
Free market
noun
1. an economic system in which prices and wages are determined by unrestricted competition between businesses, without government regulation or fear of monopolies.
Once you get monopolies competition no longer works to set prices or drive efficiency.
We recently had a product forced on us by our state government that they had written by and outside contractor. Everything works fine in Firefox with a user agent switcher, but otherwise you are blocked with the message "Google Chrome is the only supported browser..." I get the feeling it's people who can't be bothered to test their code in anything other than Chrome.
How could you start an antitrust suit on the grounds of Google Chrome ?
They are modifying their websites to discourage or prevent the use of competing browser software.
Google Chrome is given away for free
The price of the product isn't actually relevant. Internet Explorer was given away "for free" too, but you paid for the OS.
In the case of Google Chrome: when you use the browser it feeds Google information about you, so in a sense Google
receives OTHER compensation than direct payment, but there's still a payment for the product in the form of lost privacy and
Ad Dollars gained from more-effective targeting; ALSO Chrome feeds into OTHER Google services by incorporating them directly.
Google doesn't make a single penny directly out of Chrome.
False. As explained Chrome has integrated Google products such as Search defaulting to Google's service, which Google is paid ad dollars for.
Chrome is able to track your browsing and what you type into the Title bar and share valuable info with Google that makes it DIFFICULT for other Ad agencies to compete with Google.
Google doesn't give a shit about which browser, as long as you use *A* browser, and go online,
Clearly that is false, otherwise Google would not be so often prompting users to use Chrome or making websites say they Work better in Chrome, or blocking access to Edge users and sometimes FF users, As explained in the original article.
I suppose the question comes down to whether the value of the actual Google services integration (profile sync, better Youtube experience, cloud print, desktop sharing) is worth ceding control of the whole browsing experience to Google. I don't really use any of that stuff so I can't say, but no, letting a giant ad company control my internet experience really isn't any better than when we were pissed a Microsoft for trying to do the same thing. I'm not really seeing how Google got to this point on the desktop. Firefox and Safari were never THAT bad. Is it really just a matter of marketing?
First let me say that I am no fan of Google's products outside of search and maps. I simply don't like their tracking. But I can certainly see how they got to where they are. They tackled and conquered amazing problems with their products. Earth, maps/streetview, search, android/play, docs, and drive just to name a few. And Chrome. They took the browser market. I think that they did all of these things with good ol' engineering. They raised the bar, and not through promises but by delivering products. Yeah, some of their products are killed or die off, but the ones that work are great.
But to your question, I think that they work really hard at making things work together in the Google ecosystem. Just the other day I was helping my daughter use a sync app to get pictures from her phone to her computer. But I had synced her Camera folder on her phone, and she needed a pic she had created using the google collage app (which I didn't even know existed). I just had her log into her computer with her google account, went to photos, and there it was. THAT is why Google is where they are. They make things work easily together - and that is very hard to do. In school the kids all use gmail/drive/docs, it just simplifies things. My daughter in 7th grade works on team presentations with other kids using drive.
But... as much as Google impresses me from an engineering perspective, I do everything I can to not be their product. I run linux, I use palemoon and I make sure I am logged out of my google account. I turn off my location on my phone. They keep trying to creep in though. I just found out that "ok google" is enabled on my phone now, even though it was previously disabled. Worse yet - I have gone into the google app and disabled it, but it is still active! The only way I was able to disable it was because I use Nova Launcher, and it had an option to turn it off which worked. These kinds of things, along with many others, make me very leery of Google. I think their interpretation of 'evil' is different than mine.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Some also block Firefox with messages to download Chrome.
Not if you're on Linux. They seem to only bully MS users. They know GNU/Linux users know better.
My experience differs from yours on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Firefox 57.0.3 (64-bit), visiting https://www.google.com/earth/
They are starting to tighten their grip to the point where systems are starting to slip through their fingers.
Google's new strategy has definitely been walled-garden - for example look at the youtube vs amazon fire tv debacle.
They're starting to use the systems they already inhabit as leverage to wall people in.
You just described IE6 (which was free)
Nope.
it only works on microsoft windows.
it's only a free bonus for people who have already shelled out money to microsoft.
By making people dependent on IE, Microsoft makes sure to increase the sales of Windows.
By making people dependent on Chrome, Google is supposed to profit how ?
and Microsoft (which bailed out Apple).
Which served them in proving that they are not covering 100% of the market of selling operating systems on personal computers.
"Look there's also Apple selling OSes ! They are still alive".
Google is selling what again ? Mozilla is selling what ?
They aren't covering 100% of sales and profit in a market, they don't sell anything and don't profit there.
Google profits by selling eyeballs =yours (and apps).
Their browser (and smartphone) business is entirely accessory.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There are many things that are way different then back in the IE days, the most important perhaps being that unlike IE the essential parts of Chrome are FOSS. There are quite a few feasible Chrome clones out there - commercial and enthusiast/FOSS and Chrome is way closer to web standards that IE ever was. Google would be very stupid to turn Chrome into something proprietary.
Google wants the Web to remain free. They just want everyone to use Google, that's all.
The danger with Google isn't Chrome but that they potentially have the power to hijack the web. For ordinary people who can't tell the difference they bascially have already, with their search engine. However, as soon as they attempt lock-in, people would notice and streat clear. The choice to rely on Google ranking for you business is nearly without alternatives for many people, but still no one forces you to do it,
I see some dangers lurking but Chrome turning proprietary and locking others out sure isn't one of them. At least not yet.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yeah, there are similarities but it is actually completely different, both in philosophy and magnitude.
First, besides a few bleeding edge web apps (pun not intended), the vast majority of websites work on any recent browser. The situation is much better in that regard than it was before. In fact most headaches come more from compatibility between different versions within the same family rather than between the latest version of different families.
And unlike Microsoft in the IE6 days, Google actually wants other browsers to be compatible. Google doesn't make money off Chrome, they make money when you use their online services, they are perfectly happy to have Firefox users too, they even pay good money to Mozilla for it.
Microsoft was in the opposite situation: they make money by selling you the browser (as a component of Windows), they broke compatibility deliberately so that you needed to pay for Windows/IE in order to access a significant part of the web.
The reason Google makes Chrome is to push standards. When they want to add a feature that is advantageous to them (ex: lowers their bandwidth requirements) they don't have to beg standards governing bodies and other browsers developers. They just implement it in Chrome and encourage others to do the same.