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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."
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.
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
Yes, but EU is only one party that really cares, so you should simply flood everybody with proprietary and anti competitive garbage and see what sticks. Balmer's Microsoft lives on as Alphabet corporation.
839*929
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.
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.
a) Anybody else remember the "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run" days of Microsoft.
b) Microsoft could have pushed out an update to Edge in a matter of hours if they really wanted to. This is just a pot calling a kettle 'black'.
No sig today...
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
Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail
Couldn't microsoft have patched edge to ignore it?
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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 could, but then fixing their own mistakes purely to benefit others would violate their "Lawful Evil" character alignment and they would receive an experience penalty.
They built a compelling service that people like to use.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It is Evil.
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.
No more IE6! Woohoo!
Requiem for the American Dream
Not really, no. Most websites these days are entirely driven by javascript, so an empty div could be filled with content at some random point in the future, and only the site developer can say for certain if the div can be safely ignored or not. Meaning that Google, as YouTube's owner, can know if that div can be ignored, and optimize it away, but nobody else can. And since it appears to serve no purpose, and YouTube refuses to remove it, one can only conclude that its presence is deliberately there to sabotage benchmarks of other browsers.
I also noticed a lot of comments on the other discussion around this topic that Edge had coded specifically to YouTube's HTML structure, and the added div broke that. That's extremely unlikely, because websites change all the time, and it would be very silly to depend on actual HTML structure. What is more likely is that Edge uses hardware acceleration for videos, but the presence of an element over the video canvas means that there could be content that must be overlaid on top of the video. Meaning that the video can't be hardware accelerated any more, as any overlaid elements must be rendered in software. So MS is actually doing the right thing here by dropping to software rendering.
The only real benefit of Edge switching to Chromium internally is that Google won't be able to do all of the browser-specific tricks that it puts in all of its sites to make the experience crappy everywhere except Chrome.
Surely they can see if a tag or class or whatever is empty and safely ignore it? If it has something there then don't. Unless there's more to it that 'potential future use' and I am certainly no browser developer but it seems a faitly easy fix. I guess google can break the fixes faster than MS can make them though. What MS should do is put something in windows that can detect when you go to youtube.com and have it crash your computer then blame google for it XD
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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.
Not really, no. And the dumbasses who say "sure they could" can't tell a bulldog from a bulldozer, from a web development perspective.
Web standards exist for a reason.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
What Microsoft should do is build adblocking into Edge at the deepest levels. To block all of Google's advertising content.
a) Anybody else remember the "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run" days of Microsoft.
b) Microsoft could have pushed out an update to Edge in a matter of hours if they really wanted to. This is just a pot calling a kettle 'black'.
Like fucking hell it is.
Microsoft never actively aided a murderous totalitarian government in suppressing their population.
It's one thing to go beyond the law in trying to gain market dominance.
It's another fucking thing entirely to help a government with a history of killing the better part of one hundred million people in controlling their people's thoughts.
Microsoft was naughty.
GOOGLE IS FUCKING EVIL
Microsoft stomped on so many competitors that I cannot feel sorry for them.
You are TOTALLY missing the point. This isn't about feeling sorry for one grasping, domineering, monopoly-seeking corporate behemoth or another. It's about preventing ANY of them from controlling the web and/or the Internet.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
There's no way in hell that overlay should have been crippling hardware acceleration. It was a bug. Blame whoever you want for exposing it, but don't pretend it wasn't a bug in Edge.
There is only one problem with your claim. The idea that anyone has "handed the internet over to Google" is preposterous.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Of course they could have fixed their broken code, but then how would they get so many people who are clueless to start saying "Google bad; Microsoft good"?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
Nice.
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That's what Pi-hole is for!
... 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.
Aren't there alternatives to youtube?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.'"
"Aren't there alternatives to youtube?"
Not really. None of the other streaming services which permit user upload have a significant percentage of eyeballs. There are other video sites, but all of them are actually more restrictive than YouTube.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Spotify is the best they've ever done :-(
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
It will also Microsoft the boatloads of work and thus money that takes to create a modern web browser engine. Anyway, I'm sad the decided to stop developing their own engine because that leaves only two: Chromium and Gecko (Mozilla's one)
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!
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!
>easy white list if you feel sorry enough for a beggar crying for money on the internet?
You mean the people producing the content you want to see? Since when is someone trying to get paid for the work you obviously appreciate a beggar?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The funny thing is that Microsoft tried cramming Edge down the throats of Windows 10 users with various pop-ups telling us how much greater it was than Chrome, which basically had the opposite effect of what was intended.
Instead of promoting Edge from that "other browser pre-installed on my computer that I used to download Chrome" to the browser that I actually used, it Demoted it to "that piece of shit software that I have to disable notifications for".
We (the IT community) really should be promoting Firefox usage instead. Sure, their development team is kinda weird, but at least they are promoting open web standards. It sure beats trying to force your users into to using company specific web services to get the most out of your browser.
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.
None of the other streaming services which permit user upload have a significant percentage of eyeballs.
Not youtube's fault. If there's a problem, people need to find/create a solution. I don't know, maybe complaining gets better results. Certainly is easier.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.'"
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?
There's no way in hell that overlay should have been crippling hardware acceleration. It was a bug. Blame whoever you want for exposing it, but don't pretend it wasn't a bug in Edge.
I've not done much bare metal graphics programming, but isn't their a clear difference between something which is on top (can render directly to the screen) and something which isn't on top and so needs depth testing and/or compositing before it is rendered in the final form?
If I'm correct, I consider the problem not a bug but an opportunity for future optimization. A transparent HTML entity could be detected and ignored as a special case, but I would not call that part of the core feature, considering that most entities aren't transparent.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
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.
Serious question here: Youtube has started to interrupt videos with ads now in a way that I don't seem to be able to block with NoScript/Ublock Origin. Can Pi-Hole catch and block these, or are they in-line enough with the video that it can't?
I haven't deployed Pi-Hole on my home network yet, but I'm starting to lean that way given these latest irritations.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Not youtube's fault. If there's a problem, people need to find/create a solution. I don't know, maybe complaining gets better results. Certainly is easier.
There are lots of people. Some of them become aware of a problem when others complain. Most people have little influence on most situations save for their voice. Public opinion can shift both public and private policy; examples abound. Ironically, you're complaining about complaining. Why? What do you hope to accomplish?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, yes. But people can't wrap their brains around the fact that they only way to ensure that companies compete with each other is regulation.
Armchair capitalists believe in a world where businessmen eagerly leap into commodity price battles for the consumer's dollars, but those of us who've actually run a business know damn well that what you try to do is lock your customers in and lock your competitors out. Anything you can do to avoid competition that is legal, you do. And by "legal" I mean de facto legal. Rules that aren't enforced might as well not exist.
"Selling a commodity" is practically business cant for being incompetent and unimaginative. It's for suckers. Captive customers is what every business wants, and over time the more competent businesses will get them. And once you're safely extracting easy profits from those customers, you look for ways to use them as a lever to extend the markets you control.
Google's leveraging its position in the uploaded video market to exclude Microsoft from competing in the browser market is exactly what any unregulated company would do. In fact, it's exactly what Microsoft did for many years. And IBM before them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
With the notable difference being that the internet is client-driven, so that nobody can even whisper at you unless you explicitly ask them too (Or somebody you have asked offers them a soapbox)
If you don't like the idiots asking you for money, stop asking them to yell at you.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Bing is available in China....
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.
Sorry, got too used to what's happening on the political scene. Complaining hasn't done a damn thing there. And youtube still dominates despite the well publicized chronic problems. Is inertia really that powerful? When looking at the numbers, most of the complaining looks more like theater. The follow through is absent. Decade after decade, the same people are still running the show, more popular than ever.
The thing is that youtube is still the most convenient outlet for monetizing the cat videos. There isn't really much more to read into it. I don't expect anything more than noise until somebody else becomes more convenient. The headline says it best. "Google isn't the company that we should have handed the web over to." Is that proper grammar?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think a dead giveaway to that was their motto: Do No Evil.
Kind of like Fox News's "Fair And Balanced."
Ha! I think it's hilarious you don't think MS makes changes for the Chinese market to allow spying.
And youtube still dominates despite the well publicized chronic problems. Is inertia really that powerful?
YouTube only exists because Google had extra capacity in their cluster. Today I presume it takes up a significant slice of their resources, but at the time it was minor. It came into being and was viable because Google already had the equipment in place and functioning, and making money. In order to do the same things on the same scale, a potential competitor has to be in a similar position. When you combine the technical and economic hurdles with the first mover advantage, the hill appears to just be too hard to climb.
TL;DR: yes.
With that said, there's room for competition to come from markets where YouTube is artificially constrained, like China. They can build themselves up there, and then if China ever goes full capitalist they can burst out and become competition. But out here in the Rest Of The World where YouTube is free to operate more or less at will? There's little to no chance.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
32 bit? What is this, 1999? It boggles my mind how long it is STILL taking for Windows users to upgrade to 64 bit.
Edge does have extensions. IE does not.
I would still use Firefox over Edge. But I always install ublock just in case I need to use Edge for something.
a) Anybody else remember the "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run" days of Microsoft.
b) Microsoft could have pushed out an update to Edge in a matter of hours if they really wanted to. This is just a pot calling a kettle 'black'.
Could they? Is this something that they could have just worked around with a simple code patch, or would it have broken other sites if they did it as a generic fix ("allow hardware acceleration if there's an empty HTML element over the video"), or if they put in a specific fix for Youtube, would Google have just changed it until it escaped the detection by Edge, yet still broke the hardware acceleration? Website changes can be pushed out in minutes, software patches across hundreds of millions of consume and business owned devices can take months if not years, so MS would lose any game of catch up.
I actually just deployed pi-hole this last week for the first time (rather than buying new hardware to run it, I'm using it via Docker on the Windows box we use as our Plex server), and while the answer seems to be that it used to block those YouTube ads, right now it doesn't. At least not out of the box. There are various block lists that people have compiled that you can add to your pi-hole deployment, but blocking YouTube ads via pi-hole is a moving target, since YouTube is serving the ads up from the same servers that serve the videos, meaning that pi-hole can't easily distinguish between them.
It's still worth it, since even with content blockers (uBlock and/or uMatrix, depending on user) in all of our desktop OS browsers, we're still seeing nearly 10% of network requests getting blackholed by pi-hole. I imagine most of those are ads in mobile apps and mobile browsers.
There's little to no chance.
Then it's up to all us to make the chance. The whole flock can turn on a dime. Inertia is personal too.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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/
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,
>Microsoft was naughty
Ah, short memories. Japan was developing its own OS and systems ages ago to fully support their language, had everything ready for delivery to their schools and universities until microsoft pressured the US gov. They hit japan with sanctions until they stopped.
Just a bit 'naughty' hey.
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.
There is only one problem with your claim. The idea that anyone has "handed the internet over to Google" is preposterous.
"Handed it over" or "stood watching and did nothing while they rolled it up and took it". To-MAY-to, To-MAH-to.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
There are so many improvements in AMD64 beyond the memory addressing. It is absolutely an upgrade.
I'm not saying the system is flawless. I said it is ironical. Yes, the system is being abused and massively. But in addition to large corporations, there are quite a few IPs which are still in the hands of their authors or their heirs. Tolkien, Heinlein, etc.
We need to fix the system. But not abandon it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
So I suppose you never click on hyperlinks when using the internet? Isn't that a bit extreme?
How do you discover the content you are looking for, is there some kind of paid service you use which vets links for you? Or is your browsing very limited in scope?
I can't imagine using the net like that.
Part is probably a reasonably well-tuned filter bubble that knows I'm looking for substantial information, as well as a refusal to waste my attention on obvious trash and click-bait, no matter how compelling it seems. Which probably helps with the filter bubble, come to think of it.
But more to the point - I don't blame others for yelling at me, when I can only hear them when I go looking for what they were yelling about.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.