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'Google Isn't the Company That We Should Have Handed the Web Over To' (arstechnica.com)
Iwastheone shares a report from Ars Technica's Peter Bright: With Microsoft's decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google. That's a worrying turn of events, given the company's past behavior. Chrome itself has about 72 percent of the desktop-browser market share. Edge has about 4 percent. Opera, based on Chromium, has another 2 percent. The abandoned, no-longer-updated Internet Explorer has 5 percent, and Safari -- only available on macOS -- about 5 percent. When Microsoft's transition is complete, we're looking at a world where Chrome and Chrome-derivatives take about 80 percent of the market, with only Firefox, at 9 percent, actively maintained and available cross-platform.
The mobile story has stronger representation from Safari, thanks to the iPhone, but overall tells a similar story. Chrome has 53 percent directly, plus another 6 percent from Samsung Internet, another 5 percent from Opera, and another 2 percent from Android browser. Safari has about 22 percent, with the Chinese UC Browser sitting at about 9 percent. That's two-thirds of the mobile market going to Chrome and Chrome derivatives. In terms of raw percentages, Google won't have quite as big a lock on the browser space as Microsoft did with Internet Explorer -- Internet Explorer 6 peaked at around 80 percent, and all versions of Internet Explorer together may have reached as high as 95 percent. But Google's reach is, in practice, much greater: not only is the Web a substantially more important place today than it was in the early 2000s, but also there's a whole new mobile Web that operates in addition to the desktop Web. Google has deployed proprietary technology and left the rest of the industry playing catch-up, writes Peter. The company has "tried to push the Web into a Google-controlled proprietary direction to improve the performance of Google's online services when used in conjunction with Google's browser, consolidating Google's market positioning and putting everyone else at a disadvantage."
YouTube has been a particular source of problems. One example Peter provides has to do with a hidden, empty HTML element that was added to each YouTube video to disable Edge's hardware accelerated video decoding: "For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge's fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge's battery-life performance and took it below Chrome's. The change didn't improve Chrome's performance and didn't appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome's battery life was actually superior to Edge's. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail."
The mobile story has stronger representation from Safari, thanks to the iPhone, but overall tells a similar story. Chrome has 53 percent directly, plus another 6 percent from Samsung Internet, another 5 percent from Opera, and another 2 percent from Android browser. Safari has about 22 percent, with the Chinese UC Browser sitting at about 9 percent. That's two-thirds of the mobile market going to Chrome and Chrome derivatives. In terms of raw percentages, Google won't have quite as big a lock on the browser space as Microsoft did with Internet Explorer -- Internet Explorer 6 peaked at around 80 percent, and all versions of Internet Explorer together may have reached as high as 95 percent. But Google's reach is, in practice, much greater: not only is the Web a substantially more important place today than it was in the early 2000s, but also there's a whole new mobile Web that operates in addition to the desktop Web. Google has deployed proprietary technology and left the rest of the industry playing catch-up, writes Peter. The company has "tried to push the Web into a Google-controlled proprietary direction to improve the performance of Google's online services when used in conjunction with Google's browser, consolidating Google's market positioning and putting everyone else at a disadvantage."
YouTube has been a particular source of problems. One example Peter provides has to do with a hidden, empty HTML element that was added to each YouTube video to disable Edge's hardware accelerated video decoding: "For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge's fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge's battery-life performance and took it below Chrome's. The change didn't improve Chrome's performance and didn't appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome's battery life was actually superior to Edge's. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail."
Anticompetitive?
But at least this time the browser we have to work around isn't bundled with the OS we have to work around. So it might not be as bad as it used to be back then.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I hope Google and Microsoft fuck each other up.
Edge got derailed with a transpartent div on top of the regulat content?
As it's used to right-click-block the download image option since decades? Or as annoying ad popup? Really?
Then it may have been a good idea to cancel edge.
bickerdyke
Things like animated PNG, webasm (I guess), future css revisions will all be the 'de-facto' standard and approved by all these companies (MS, GOOG, OPERA, etc)
This means, that there will FINALLY be no more coding for (BROKEN FUCKING BROWSER X, Y or Z) which, frankly, is worth it.
So yes, one engine to rule them all. Welcomed. Oh, and open source too. WIN.
So stop worrying and crawl back under your rock.
However, "get in our 4x4's with a hoard of guns and ammo and kill 'em all" is not a strategy we favour, and little else seems to work.
Chrome itself has about 72 percent of the desktop-browser market share.
Which is one reason why I stick to Firefox, until it becoms entirely unusable. We've had this problem before with IE and we didn't learn from it?
Competition is a funny thing. On paper we all understand that a free market economy only works properly if there is enough competition on both sides (yes, customer monopolies are a real thing as well). Yet the same people who are so much for free markets are so much against regulation when it comes to curb monopolies, despite a monopoly is more damaging to a market than any government regulation short of a full planned economy could be.
Because companies do not like competition. This is a built-in paradox of the capitalist system: The system needs competition, but the players within it desire to have as little competition as possible, and thus markets have a tendency to drift into monopoly (a lot of tech) or oligopoly (the energy markets are good examples).
Internet and information technology are especially easy victims. The nature of information makes it so that distribution costs are near zero, so the sunk costs of product development dominate, which means that it is surprisingly difficult to break a market dominance once established. At the same time the dominance is fragile and can be broken, even by a newcomer. It's just a very hard thing to do.
The big tech companies, meanwhile, have figured out how to entrench themselves. The thing that the MS monopoly didn't get: User data. Once you own your customers social media profile (FB), or media collection (Apple) or mail, search and communications history and personalisation (Google), their cost of switching to anything else becomes high, reducing their likelihood to do so.
Competition. So necessary and so unwanted.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video..."
That phrase is nowhere inside the page linked to it, and, further, the page is made from comments, like this very /.. Anyway, a hidden element might be truly existing, but a page made and modified by tons of web developers, adding layer to layers, has likely weirder elements. On top of that, if a "hidden element" breaks Edge, it's maybe because that browser code is not generic enough ; meaning they did some "optimization" to target a specifically coded page, and it breaks when that page code changes.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
does not, somehow, 'phone home to Google or otherwise enable tracking of what I am looking at then all that I am worried about is Google implementing its own web standards.
Google is not entirely bad - but sufficiently so that I do not trust them.
Oh, yes, we will have only one MOVING standard and have more free time to worry about...... OUR FUCKING PRIVACY INSTEAD.
You sir, are a moron.
Captcha: SADDER
Who the fuck things we should be handing the internet over to a COMPANY? Hell, I don't trust the GOVERNMENTS to regulate it, so I sure don't trust a company to DICTATE IT.
It is really time for us to collectively say 'We have had enough!' and take back, or create a new, internet for ourselves.
Firefox had a large share of web users, and then lost them by forgetting what made it popular in the first place, and doing their damn best to piss everyone off by trying to copy Chrome (did it ever occur to them that everyone using Firefox was doing so because they didn't want to use Chrome?)
Seems like a ripe opportunity for a new web browser to pop up and give users a choice again.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
This means, that there will FINALLY be no more coding for (BROKEN FUCKING BROWSER X, Y or Z)
Never had any problems supporting cross browsers, stick to the standard in the lowest common denominator you want to support and don't use proprietary extensions and you'll be fine. If you mean exclusively CSS layouts, then graceful fallback should always be an option. If you want to support the older browsers, you'll have to allow for people still using old versions of other browsers as well.
We need multiple independent open source browser engines with large market share to keep the web open. Imagine the web if Mozilla was never developed, and then imagine if Chromium got to be the single engine of the web like IE6 almost did. We can prevent a Chromopoly but onl if we act now.
And Mozilla seems to be helping out Chrome as well. I mean, give us a reason to use FF. For me, even though it was slower and buggier, the many unique and really useful extensions were enough value for me to use Firefox as my main browser. They took them away and I was left with no reason to keep it.
And it is sad that not even Microsoft can keep developing a separate technology, even though I've never used Edge personally. I know some people might say "a hidden div should not break your hardware acceleration", but it is another example making it obvious that Google is actively trying to screw other browsers. Even their more "benign" ways of telling you this and that feature on their sites only works with chrome is taking advantage of their dominant market share in ways I am not sure are legal. Well, we've known that for a while now and in general Google is at least as "evil" currently as Microsoft was at its peak and they are shaping the web the way they like (complete with their AMPs and all).
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
microsoft done their own share of sabotage over the years. I still remember what they did to drdos and os/2 among others. I remember when microsoft released frontpage and what it did to websites and browsers. I remember...
Over the years microsoft has been complaining about google thi and, google that. maybe google is part of the evil empire these days but microsoft has been a member of it for years, long before google was in existence.
They built a compelling service that people like to use.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
People are cheering this trend because Google is "less evil" than Microsoft. Google is evil, they just have "Apple" style fanboys.
What exactly is the bad actor thing they did? I did read the article but found nothing. Let's start with the stupid thing:
1: "Adding an empty div element does not count as evil". And I don't understand why Microsoft would really write to Youtube, instead of just fixing their browser.
2: SPDY or HTTP/2. Google made SPDY which was then used as a base for HTTP/2. What was so evil about that?. Both SPDY and even more HTTP/2 are open published standards* that anyone can implement. And Google newer requried any browsers to use either of these standards. They still support HTTP 1.1
3: "HTML imports". Yes google use HTML imports which is a part of the html5 standard which is not that well supported by other browsers. So they implemented a fallback solution in Javascript so the site would still work in other browsers. again: I don't see the evil. What is the alternative? To use the fallback javascript on all browsers even if they support HTML imports??
*that crap in IE6, which not even microsoft know exactly how worked.
There will be a need to deliver generic 3D content through the web in VR, and fortunately, nowadays Chrome only works in Google's Daydream platform, while other developers are building their own alternative browser engines (with Firefox the only one aiming for multi-platform).
There's still hope that those competitors will maintain a viable browser in that environment, starting a new browser battle with some chance of fighting back and keeping web compatibility alive.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Well, we have done this previously... It really is not all that hard.
1. Do not use Chrome or any other Chrome derivative; currently this means Firefox. There is a lot of complaining on FF, it really is neither better nor worse than Chrome.
2. Google will be forced to provide competition as was MS. Probably in Europe. Easiest would be to force them to make Chrome it's own company without Alphabet.
3. If or when Google uses their monopoly to hurt Facebook, e.g. by limiting ads or user tracking, there will be a Facebook-specific browser.
from most similar to least similar to current FF:
Tor Browser
Waterfox
Pale Moon
Seamonkey
Would he be writing the same editorial if the shoe was on the other foot?
Wow, imagine being this delusional
I guess Google learnt from the masters.
This is just a rehash of what happened 10-20 years ago. Where do you think things like AJAX came from?
No, actually, we are not OK with the six criminal gangs you name. We are also not OK with having government by the idiots, for the idiots.
Then quit voting for Democrats.
For example:
California: Ruled by Democrats, highest poverty rate in the US. (And you know that had to HURT Politifact to admit a "progressive" failure...)
Chicago: Ruled by Democrats, violent and going broke
Baltimore: Ruled by Democrats, violent and going broke
No more IE6! Woohoo!
Requiem for the American Dream
Brandon Eich's firing.
He wasn't fired. He resigned.
It doesn't matter what you think about gay rights.
Really? So, you would be against firing people over their beliefs?
by firing anyone left over responsible for that decision,
Ah, nope. You're just full of shit and want your status quo centrism to be foisted on all to protect your fragile ego. Grow up you snowflake.
When I realized who was the author of the original Article. I laughed sarcastically. Umm mmmh Peter Bright :) haha. A good dear M$ fan boy from the old glory days of Microsoft's monoculture. I'm not saying he's not right in some things. But he has never applied the same criteria for his favorite company. A little hypocritical it seems to me.
So... the biggest search engine from the 90s turned evil after all.
Considering now the two biggest developers of Chromium will be Google and Microsoft. This is not a good combination for a open web browser. In the end not a lot is open about Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. Their both going to take the good bits from Chromium and make it a platform that benefits these two big tech giants. I don't see this as a positive for a open web. Its going to stifle any other project like Firefox or other browsers who don't use Chromium. Peter Bright is spot on in this being bad for the web.
I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords, replacing Microsoft overlords.
Dude, I don't know what world you live in, but most people out there neither know nor care who Brandon Eich is or what he did, or if he was fired from somewhere.
Anyway, I will forever hate him for creating the monstruosity that is JavaScript.
What the world really needs are benevolent politicians with an in depth understanding of contemporary technology and good idea of where things are headed.
has become, "more evil than the Government", more evil than Trump.
People keep bashing Mozilla and Firefox and I do not know why.
even though it was slower and buggier
On my computer Firefox starts faster than Chromium. I have also found more web sites on which Chromium will crater than Firefox.
The reality is folks, that Mozilla and Firefox are free and awesome.
Every for-profit company may do something to give itself a leg up at the expense of its competitors. Google is no different, nor would I expect them to be. Sure we all wish big companies were peaceful with their competitors and didn't strive to improve their own profit. But what this article misses out is the power of the employees at Google. Google was set to make a lot of money in China, but the employees voiced their concerned and eventually led to the company dropping this very profitable venture into China. (didn't the employees also cause Google to stop work on a pentagon contract?)
So, yes, whine about some stuff you don't like about Google because you want other companies to be competitive. But don't forget about good things as well.
... of Microsoft's tactics back in the 1980's and 1990's. While some may have solace in seeing Microsoft hoisted by its own petard, the real losers here are the consumers.
Yeah! Bâ(TM)more represent!
Microsoft is complaining that Google is using a embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy. I wonder where they learned that from.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"Google Isn't the Company That We Should Have Handed the Web Over To"
Well, thank you, Captain Obvious. We shouldn't hand the internet over to any company.
Microsoft had a popular browser. The problem was they pissed it away by doing nothing with it.
I don't know if it was caused by the antitrust ruling in the hope that a competitor would show up for IE, or by sheer incompetence, but Letting IE6 wither while Vista was being developed was one of the absolute dumbest moves Microsoft ever did. The only reason IE7 and IE8 happened was Firefox was creeping on their share and by the time they got IE's IU together Chrome passed them both. Then they fragmented the browser between OS'es which did more damage, then instead of fixing IE's speed issues, they developed Edge, further fragmenting their base. At one point, there was Three IE's (counting XP) and Edge vs One chrome and one Firefox.
This isn't the only thing Microsoft has done this too either. Windows Mobile, DirectX, Hell Even the Microsoft Store between 8, 8.1 and 10 with DirectX probably being the best example. If they supported previous OS'es the game industry would be all in for DirectX, Instead they tied it to OS revisions and it's got so bad now there's version fragmentation between Windows 10 releases. They fragmented all of their tech to the point that no one moves forward and everyone has to support the lowest common denominator. Meanwhile their competitors move forward with their one unified supported version.
Fragmentation is whats killing Microsoft. They need to do whatever it takes to kill it be it free OS upgrades for all previous versions or supporting the latest software and API's on all supported operating systems.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Mozilla is sad that Firefox was completely left out of this analysis. 12% ain't much, but it's roughly AMD's share of the desktop CPU market.
Nobody in OSS cares whether some right-wingers stopped using Firefox. Conservatives are well-known for not doing research, the 1% aside, and for cutting off their face to spite their face, the 1% included. The numbers of them who were already using Firefox instead of whatever came with their system and not using chrome will have amounted to a rounding error.
Eich could have said "that was then, this is now, my views have changed and here is a donation to prove it" or he could resign, and I'm glad he made the choice he did since clearly his views have not changed. Firefox is about openness and interoperability, and prop 8 was about fear and prejudice. Whether he left or was pushed, it was correct.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You don't hand things you care about over to another party. You have to keep a hand in. We are going to need a non-profit browser, which is to say, managed by a non-profit. Mozilla has long since lost its way and is now chasing dollars. I feel sorry for people who actually gave them money, your donations were spent integrating Pocket instead of building a better browser.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not that "you cannot use Google search well" if you don't use Chrome. That would be not nearly as bad. Now, it's "optimize your website for Chrome, or get downgraded in Google's search". Therefore, they've forced all the popular sites into helping them. Which is not as powerful as Microsoft's IE6. That was "you'll render wrong if you don't adhere to our non-standards". This is "you don't exist if you don't adhere to our non-standards"
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I think the pattern here is being ruled by [insert tribalism name here]
Non aggression principal. Voluntarism.
It is foolish and delusional to believe those at the top are their to server those at the bottom. There is no need to rule in order to serve. The need to rule is the need to control others, to have them do as you wish, as subjects/rustics/peasants/slavs are meant to behave.
Technically, the Edge team was adhering to layering standards. And they fixed this issue in the next update. But it's not hard to imagine a strange edge case in any browser that can be exploited to run slower.
Well, Google is cementing it's ownership of the internet.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I love it when people complain about the market choices of consumers, shows how big their ego is, to think they know better than everyone else what choices any one person should make.
Chrome does not come by default on any Windows or Mac system and Chromebooks simply aren't that popular. That means that virtually all of that 76% market share is because the user went out and CHOSE to download and install Chrome.
Where's the problem here? It means that both Microsoft and Apple can't bundle in their own systems a browser that's preferable, BY THE USER.
To top it off, after bitching about the market share of Chrome and how "dangerous" it is, they go on to cite how Internet Explorer at one time actually had MORE market share. Well it's down to 5% now...so what happened? Markets happened, that's what. So what's there to worry about?
Edge is a good browser. Fast. It looks even faster than Chrome. But public ignored it. Firefox engaged in political correctness and liberal agenda instead of trying to make product better than Chrome so it lost. So we can only blame ourselves that we have chosen not to use Edge.
Never had any problems supporting cross browsers, stick to the standard in the lowest common denominator you want to support
Unless "the lowest common denominator you want to support" lacks a particular feature that is essential to your site. For example, before iOS 6, Apple WebKit for iOS lacked <input type="file">. This meant photo sharing websites could not accept uploads from users through Safari or any other web browser on iOS. Even nowadays, many web browsers implement only a subset of WebRTC: some lack H.264 because of the patent royalty, and some lack VP8 because of what appears to be a business decision to support only codecs standardized by ISO.
But, no, if the USA can't own it, it can't be set to be owned by other countries in partnership.
Google was a US company, so the USA thought it was good that a US company "owned the web". Until it stopped being nice to republicans because, unfortunately reality has an anti-scumbag bias and republicans don't WANT to see they are scumbags. And hiding that self delusion is hard when you can't get positive reinforcement about how great you are, like you can with a controlled mainstream media.
I see they're still giving Mozilla foundation employees mod points. Truth hurts, eh?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If it breaks on Edge, it is the web page at fault. If it breaks on some other browser,the browser is at fault.
Just like apps crashing windows are the fault of the apps, but if Linux crashes, it's a piece of crap. Or if it works on Windows, then not working elsewhere is the fault elsewhere (even earlier versions of windows "upgrade, chump!"), it it doesn't work on Windows (even if it works fine elsewhere, see GIMP MDI), then the app is at fault.
All things considered, who else should we have handed over the gateway to the internet to?
Were there any real choices?
Microsoft? I think not.
Apple? Ditto.
Seriously, though. Who would be the better option?
Webkit originally comes from Trolltech and Nokia and is Free. It doesn't belong to Google.
I imagine that people tend to forget monopsonies exist because they are most familiar with consumer product scenarios, in which the seller has far more power than the buyer. Someone who doesn't regularly sell things might not have heard of the situation in, say, toy or comic book distribution where a large number of manufacturers sell to a handful of distributors. The only selling that a lot of people do is in the wage labor market, which people tend to see as somehow fundamentally separate from the market for other goods or services.
You convinced me to give firefox a try
Looks Good!
Thanks
I'm of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, they're right. Google should *not* have the control of the web that it does. We've seen it before with Microsoft and there's no way it will end well.
On the other hand, I pointed my Schadenfreude meter at Microsoft and it exploded.
As silos continue to tighten their content policies, as Tumblr did over the past few weeks, more people will have to start caring about owning their URL space in order to continue to offer their works to the public.
Call me crazy, but if your browser cannot handle an empty div properly, then perhaps you should just fix your browser?
The whole drama is coming from a former Microsoft intern that worked on EdgeHTML. Read between the lines: the guy is bitter he lost his job to chromium, and wanted to vent in Hacker News. The press saw gold, and created news out of this for clicks sake.
You keep using the word "proprietary". I do not think you know what that word means.
I think a dead giveaway to that was their motto: Do No Evil.
Kind of like Fox News's "Fair And Balanced."
in the first place? The headline assumes that part was inevitable.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'd release an community maintained Ad-Block plugin and make it a featured one - so that it basically can get bundled with the browser for improving performance.
That plugin would take care of removing these Googley hacks - or setting a user-agent per page.
For all the bitching we can remember when microsoft owned the web and pages where IE centered.
ActiveX, and then later windows only flash. It ran like absolute crap, avoided W3C standards like the plauge and was %100 proprietary.
Chromium is Free software. Google is not great, and ideally companies should avoid proprietary extensions to an open protocol, but its still much much much better than it has been.
In any case, the end of yet another proprietary Microshaft tool is a reason to celebrate.
Google famously said it wanted to index "all the world's information", but we all know that information is power... That's all the world's power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
This wasn't new, but the warnings about it in the mid-2000's were out-shined by the distractions of the new technical advances Google was bringing (AJAX, Web 2.0, etc...), followed by the "data fetishists" that came into cultural and philosophical power around the time of the Obama Administration.
Perhaps if we'd taken better heed of the warnings signs, we'd be in a different place now. Here's ZDnet back in the day: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-targeting-all-the-worlds-content-and-all-your-information/
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
"a hidden, empty HTML element that was added to"
You're attributing malice without, you know, proof of it?
I acknowledge that a recommendation engine is the biggest missing piece of the IndieWeb paradigm. But in theory, an IndieWeb site would submit new pages to some aggregator service in Webmention format. This splits the roles of hosting and aggregation.
Google is horrible.
Remember when "Google" used its licensing agreements to force OEMs to keep all other operating systems (like Linux, OS/2, BeOS, BSD, etc.) off the PCs they sold to users? Remember when "Google" used its own internal operating system APIs to give its Office products a head start on its new cutting edge OS in 1995, thereby forcing competitors like WordStar, WordPerfect, and Lotus 1-2-3 out of the market? Remember also when "Google" kept its Office file formats proprietary and then kept changing them when alternatives like StarOffice, OpenOffice, and LibreOffice were able to reverse-engineer them in order for "Google" to force customers into using only its expensive Office suite? How about when "Google" tied its own web browser into its monopolistic operating system (I mean the one back in the 1990s) thereby shutting the competition of Netscape out of the market, earning "Google" severe penalties from the European Union? How about when "Google" kept spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about Linux by lying claiming that free Linux had a higher Total Cost of Ownership than "Google's" dominant and expensive operating system?
Yeah, me neither.
All of that sh*t was done by Microsoft. (With the exception that Google's current operating system Chrome OS does seem to only allow Google's Chrome web browser.)
I'm not saying that the message Microsoft is sending is incorrect. But what I am saying is that Microsoft and its Windows biased propagandist Peter Bright are not the ones to talk about monopolies. Besides, the same Peter Bright not too long ago praised Microsoft for leaving most of the testing of its Windows updates to end users. How well did that turn out?
Who wrote this trash?
Safari has been on Windows for at least 10 years. And they omitted Firefox entirely.
Not to mention, what browser a user uses has literally nothing to do with "control of the web."
Control of the web is in the same hands it has always been in - ISPs, ICANN, and the government backbones it relies on.
I really struggled to make the simplest config changes with Edge because they decided to either hide or change the way the settings were modified.
This made stupid things like home page hijack "attacks" on my father-in-law's PC a real pain. Good riddance to Edge!
Because firstly reality proves your claim wrong: the little guy goes bankrupt and has to sell their IP to stay off the street. Secondly, big companies pay politicans more than little companies so they get the laws the way they want them. Third, being civil you will have to pay all your own defence against a corporation that has more money than you and therefore "better lawyers" to argue points of law so that you cannot prove your case. See SCO and McBride.
The point I was trying to make, is that standards should be followed on both sides, both the browser and client side scripting. Then these issues wouldn't occur. Custom javascript extensions and CSS just muddy the water. Most of the problems I see with modern web development stem from people just developing for their preferred browser of choice, using whatever weird formatting tricks they need for that browser and then call it "done". When professional companies release webapps and say thing like "This only works on Chrome" strikes me as incredibly lazy. When I write sites/webapps for clients these days, I tend to target IE11, as some of their machines are still on Windows 7, and it's what they use. Using nothing more than the standards, with no unnecessary frameworks bolted on (I'm looking at you jQuery) I can deliver responsive sites that work across all the browsers without tweaking anything. I did write something for a school not too long ago that had to support IE9. But, using that as my base for development - rather than trying to do it in chrome or firefox, it "magically" worked for newer version and other browsers. Perhaps if they made it so that developers could specify the max scripting language version to run, at least for debugging, it would make things easier. Maybe make it so that non-standard extensions had to be enabled with some scripting or metatag first.
Pure JavaScript will one day be looked at like Latin, so, that a framework of the day will be something like Doctor's Latin, or will have morphed into something equivalent of Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese).. With tidbits also used in English.