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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."
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
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
Edge moved to Chromium because Microsoft doesn't see the value in continuing to develop its own rendering engine. What benefit does it bring them?
Despite decades of trying and being the default they still can't make a popular browser. Edge has a severe lack of good add-ons and Chromium brings them instant compatibility with most of the Chrome/Firefox ones. They already tied themselves to that mast with Visual Studio Code (which is built on Electron, which is Chromium).
They lost that fight years ago. Edge was the last ditch attempt, and it failed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If that was true, they would simply sunset Edge and start shipping Windows with Chrome or Firefox. They didn't. They still want to be in the browser game.
I never made any reference to Chrome, who gives a f*** about Chrome? I was talking about Chromium. Chromium runs every bit as good as Chrome as far as I can tell, and actually, Chromium is better than Chrome, since third party developers can tweak and optimize it. For example, there is a Snapdragon optimized version of Chromium that outperforms Chrome (on Android). And there is an ad blocking/tracker filtering browser based on Chromium called "Brave" that I find very useful too.
What Microsoft should do is build adblocking into Edge at the deepest levels. To block all of Google's advertising content.
Microsoft are getting lazy, there is no evil here. They want to use the open source community for as much as possible while sunsetting any products they canâ(TM)t open source for cheap labour.
Compare Visual Studio 2010 to 2015 and above, notice how one is using an entirely proprietary streamlined stack and the other is promoting cross platform open-source that isnâ(TM)t even Windows-optimised all over the place?
Microsoft already maintain code for electron as part of Microsoft Teams, they basically already have to optimise their services for Chromium... why would EdgeHTML be necessary? Heck, give it a couple of years and theyâ(TM)ll retrofit IE functionality into Chromium powered Edge by leveraging IETab style functionality.
They just donâ(TM)t wanna tell their shareholders the truth. The truth is that Microsoft are cross-platforming all their stuff, moving as many people as possible to their cloud services and preparing to dump the bulk of Windows out to the open-source community so they can get all the rewards for less work. Of course, like Apple, they will make sure enough remains proprietary for as long as possible to keep the license money rolling in...
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.
From the Brave Browser website:
"The Brave browser anonymously monitors user attention, then rewards publishers accordingly with BATs. (Basic Attention Tokens)"
"Ads are then anonymously matched with customer interests using local machine learning algorithms. This means fewer irrelevant ads."
They're blocking all of the ads so that they can monitor your activity and sell ads relevant to things you like to the sites you spend most of your time on. Yes, that's so much better! And that was being sarcastic for those that missed it.
Whatever happened to the time when if I was on a site about (ice) hockey then I would get ads relevant to hockey? Why not analyze the page being served and create relevant ads for that. If I'm spending time on that page then I'm most likely going to be interested in that topic. No privacy worries because you aren't gathering information about the user. Probably too simplistic but it sure as hell beats having your every movement spied upon.