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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
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.
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.
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.
What Microsoft should do is build adblocking into Edge at the deepest levels. To block all of Google's advertising content.
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.
Better known as 318230.
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.