'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."

Comments

It's IE6 all over again

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:It's IE6 all over again

[misnohmer]

It's bundled with "the internet" instead. Google search, google YouTube, Gmail, are a very large percentage of internet traffic. If using a different browser means not being able to use any Google sites, people will not use it. That is why Edge moved to Chromium.

Re:It's IE6 all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not? Tell that to the far majority of all Android users.

Re:It's IE6 all over again

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:It's IE6 all over again

[misnohmer]

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.

Re: It's IE6 all over again

[Cmdln Daco]

So, they've bought up the whole town, as you show. How altruistic of them. They get massive amount of control and domination in the process. Nobody ever gives that much away for 'free.'

Re: It's IE6 all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

A transparent div?

[bickerdyke]

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.

Re:A transparent div?

[Dan East]

You're understating things just a bit. It's over a multimedia video element, not "regulat content" (sic) or an image (to try and block context menus). Sure, to the layperson it's all just "regulat content", but from a technical perspective there is a vast difference between a static image or rendered HTML and a bitstream of billions of pixels being drawn per second.

When there is nothing to render over top of a video viewport you can easily invoke hardware level rendering, which is already integrated within the OS's windowing system to make sure windows appear on top of one another as they should. The latter is relatively easy with a window type UI because each window is well defined and rectangular, so tracking what is on top of what isn't too difficult. When you get into the mess that is HTML that sort of thing becomes extremely difficult. Are you going to give that div its own rendering context at the hardware level so that it renders over top of the video layer properly? But then what if there are 20 divs over top of that video? You'll run out of GPU memory quickly on lower end machines.

Yes, it was a bit of a kludge that Edge uses hardware rendering only for a totally unobstructed video element, but it was a simple solution for a specific use case that worked well in almost all cases and resulted in better battery life and better rendering quality because the GPU is designed to efficiently do that decoding / rendering.

It was definitely a jerk thing for Google to do. The timing of this story is a bit ironic as I set up a friend on Google Docs yesterday on a lower end HP Stream laptop. Google Sheets just wouldn't function right in Edge in a nearly empty, newly created document. Simply inserting a column resulted in it grinding away for minutes. I installed Chrome and it worked flawlessly. That kind of thing doesn't just happen by accident with these modern browsers. Google is being a monopolistic-minded jerk.

Re:Isn't that blatantly

[should_be_linear]

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.

competition

[Tom]

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.

Re:competition

[AmiMoJo]

It's actually relatively easy to switch your email away from Google. I did it when I was in China and Google services were blocked.

It was a few clicks in Microsoft Live Mail to set up. I could have done it at the domain level but it was only temporary. For people who want to keep their gmail address it works great.

You can also just download your entire mailbox in mbox format with Google Takeout. It's really only the @gmail.com address that is an issue, which is why I encourage people to simply buy themselves a personal domain.

Re:competition

[TuringTest]

It's actually relatively easy to switch your email away from Google
It's really only the @gmail.com address that is an issue

So, switching email providers if you ignore the single one thing that makes it difficult?

Skeptical

[hcs_$reboot]

RTFS

"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.

Re:Skeptical

[Ultra64]

So like what Microsoft did with DR DOS?

Re:Skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

Transparent elements might seem trivial, but code-wise it is a fucking nightmare.
It's one of the reasons rendering engines are so massively complicated now with this shitfest that is CSS these days.
Half the fucking thing should have been deprecated for being worthless since they were replaced with CSS3 features vastly superior to them. (particularly things like flexbox, even if I do hate it overall)

No chance of that happening now. Shitty rendering pipelines are here to stay.
Web-browsers are honestly worse than most games when it comes to rendering complex nested geometry.
It's not the worst, some of the techniques used are pretty neat and weren't even used in 2005, gotta give credit where credit is due, but STILL.
But there are so many hacks all over the spec to get around actually making a decent renderer.
Things like hints to tell the engine that elements are about to be repainted and other stuff.
So much shit is not required. It only slows the browsers down by needing to check for useless instructions / attributes every single page cycle. (most capped at 60 Hertz, very rarely ever said value outside of video / canvas)
CSS is the worst of the 3 major web specs.
The only thing worse overall is a sub-spec - the DOM itself. Holy FUCK that needs to be scrapped already, it's a high-overhead nightmare. Ever use websites that are stupidly slow with fancy effects? Majority of the time it'll be the DOM being edited frequently, not so much the effects itself. It's the same reason any reasonably large, complicated online editors are slow like online word processors, spreadsheets, etc., or Facebook, large commenting systems with dynamic comment loading, any other site that uses any templating engines to build HTML, all the same source, the DOM being atrociously slow.
Why we have stomached that piece of shit this long is beyond me. It could have been fixed with a JS header that says "this JS uses newDOM" (like JS harmony "1.6" changes break old browsers) or something along those lines, completely preventing the loading of any code relating to old DOM. While it would be a hit every cycle, it would still be less overhead than even a simple website.
The only decent compromise, which most sites STILL DON'T DO, is building all the HTML in-variable, then writing the entire thing at once. This has minimal impact on the DOM and renderer.
But it still won't fix a broken spec. The higher the webpage geometry, the slower the site will be. It takes time to parse that shitfest in order to render it when viewport changes.
Useless nodes all over the place to deal with a shit spec.

Re:Skeptical

[beuges]

No, it rather means that the browser code is generic and correct. If an element is overlaid over a video, then that means that there could be content in it that would need to be overlaid on the video during rendering, meaning the video content now needs to be software rendered and can't make use of hardware acceleration, which is the issue at hand.

The browser can't just pretend the div isn't there because it's empty, because in today's javascript-driven world, any element can be changed at any time, so you can't drop empty elements even if it looks like they're doing nothing.

Given that thus far the div appears to be useless, and that YouTube refuses to remove it, it appears that it's been added purely to sabotage benchmarks for other browsers, since Google can optimize it away, knowing that it's useless. But no other browser can do that, because, given Google's behaviour of late, as soon as Edge starts dropping this useless element, Google will start inserting something into it, and then claim that Edge isn't rendering their site correctly.

Re:Skeptical

[EMN13]

Dealing with rendering layers is a tricky optimization process. All browsers have had notable issues with it over the years, and almost certainly will for the foreseeable future, including most definitely chromium - as a job I maintained a chrome+website plugin for a few years and ironically chrome had the most issues of all browsers in this regard. If you've ever tried to optimize an HTML layout for animation, and low interactive jank, you may have run into issues with similar root causes.

It's just not that trivial to figure out which few potential layers - amids the thousands (and sometimes more) in a typical web page - the browser should materialize as one of it's highly scarce usually on-GPU layers, and which it should flatten onto another one.

So that hidden div can be nasty, because the browser can't predict if it will *stay* hidden. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the div wasn't actually `display: none`, but instead used one of the many less complete forms of hiding, which is probably why whatever heuristics edge used went wrong. It may have been non-hidden in a previously rendered frame. Who knows?

Seriously though - if a huge site like youtube can't be bothered to seriously test in edge, then something is wrong. The only reason to continue supporting edge for MS then would be strategic. And they apparently just decided: screw that.

As long as Chromium ...

[Alain Williams]

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.

Re:As long as Chromium ...

[CanadianMacFan]

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.

Re:Isn't that blatantly

[Joce640k]

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'.

Re:Isn't that blatantly

[stealth_finger]

Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail

Couldn't microsoft have patched edge to ignore it?

Re:On the plus side, webstandards get adopted quic

[BinoX]

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.

And Mozilla helped with that.

[Ecuador]

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).

Re:And Mozilla helped with that.

[Can'tNot]

The quantum upgrade really provided a lot of advantages. Yes it broke some of the old plugins, but having a really nice buggy whip is not a good reason to shun automobiles. If there's some plugin which you absolutely can't do without, then use Waterfox.

Re:And Mozilla helped with that.

[sad_]

"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."

The reason why you should use firefox is in TFA.
If there ever was a reason to use firefox (again), it is now! The earlier populairity of firefox was caused by the dominance of IE and the abuse it caused on the web. The same problem we are about to have now. So again it is important that firefox gets more usage, only because it is the one free (no hidden agenda) browser still available.

Re:And Mozilla helped with that.

[CrimsonAvenger]

So again it is important that firefox gets more usage, only because it is the one free (no hidden agenda) browser still available.

So, we should use Firefox because it's not Google? How about coming up with a positive reason for using it? Like, maybe, it's better? Assuming it is better, of course.

Disclaimer: I use Firefox, and have used it pretty much since its inception....

Re:And Mozilla helped with that.

[AmiMoJo]

They took them away and I was left with no reason to keep it.

So did you switch to something else? Pale Moon or WaterFox maybe?

Firefox is still massively more popular than either of those two, which suggests that Mozilla probably did the right thing by keeping Firefox competitive in terms of speed and security.

Re:And Mozilla helped with that.

[drinkypoo]

Firefox doesn't need a hidden agenda to be crap. Their pocket-padding agenda is right out in the open for all to see. And speaking of Pocket, we don't want it integrated into Firefox, nor any other advertising against us as a captive audience. Firefox mobile has been changed, at least on Amazon fire TV, to always show Pocket links before viewing the URL it was called to display.

The people on charge of Firefox no longer give one fuck about their existing user base. The only thing they care about is being chrome. Well, we already have chrome and chromium, and we don't need another one. What we need is a browser that actually fulfills the original promise of the brand: fast, light, good. Instead they are giving us a bloated sack of attack surface and then calling us the problem when we don't want it.

All this has convinced me that once you get too many people profiting directly from a project, they will ruin it, unless there is a charismatic leader who isn't endlessly greedy. Webkit to chrome. Phoenix to Firefox...

Re:And Mozilla helped with that.

[StuartHankins]

Some of us who used addons that are no longer available (Scrapbook in my case; I have hundreds of pages saved) are now on the fence... I don't want to support Google by switching to Chrome, but in researching the issue with Scrapbook -- it appears that the interface is no longer exposed to accomplish this -- Mozilla and others backing Mozilla have basically said "we don't care". The variants which sprung up afterward don't perform the same task.

All I wanted was a way to save a page's content into a searchable folder-based tree, and have the ability to delete ads and such that don't contribute to the actual content I want to save. Scrapbook was a really great quickie research / documentation tool.

Re:Isn't that blatantly

[Narcocide]

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.

We didn't.

[Qbertino]

They built a compelling service that people like to use.

What exactly is the bad actor thing they did?

[TheSunborn]

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.

Re:Isn't that blatantly

[beuges]

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.

real market share

[BlackOverflow]

The real market share numbers from statcounter.com as of Nov 2018:

• Chrome: 61.77
• Safari: 15.09
• Firefox: 4.92
• UC Browser: 4.22
• Opera: 3.15
• ie 2.81

Re:Isn't that blatantly

[Cmdln Daco]

What Microsoft should do is build adblocking into Edge at the deepest levels. To block all of Google's advertising content.

Re:Isn't that blatantly

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re: Isn't that blatantly

[jenningsthecat]

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.

Re:Mozilla has a huge albatross around its neck

[pezezin]

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.

Re: Isn't that blatantly

[Narcocide]

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.

What??

[Kludge]

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.

Do I have this right...

[msauve]

Microsoft is complaining that Google is using a embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy. I wonder where they learned that from.

Fragmentation is the problem

[Deathlizard]

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.

Re:Mozilla has a huge albatross around its neck

[drinkypoo]

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.

Aww, poor baby

[drinkypoo]

I see they're still giving Mozilla foundation employees mod points. Truth hurts, eh?

Re:So, if not Google, then who?

[ceoyoyo]

Nobody? That's kind of the idea behind the whole "Internet" thing.

empty div ... hardly evil

[paulpach]

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.

Re:Isn't that blatantly

[drinkypoo]

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.