
Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain - naktinis
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/google-s-chrome-becomes-web-gatekeeper-and-rivals-complain
======
masswerk
Anecdotal observation: A few years ago, I made a video game for an early 1960s
computer, the PDP-1, running in an homegrown emulator in web technology. [1]
Amazingly, the game runs at 60 frames per second (yes, you could do this with
early 1960s tech), and, amazingly, browsers were able to render the emulation,
including a rather complex simulation of the dual-phosphor screen, at 60 fps
(you could do this in 2016). Admittedly, Chrome wasn't the fastest browser
then, skipping a frame now and then, but caught up with others browsers over
the next year. That is, until a few revisions ago, when something inside
Chrome went terribly wrong, causing the browser to grind over the emulation in
single-digits frame rates. Other browsers, like Firefox and Safari, are still
running the emulation (which is as of 2012) happily at 60 fps, but these
combine just about 15% of the intended desktop audiences. So for all measure
and market concentration, the project is dead by now, due to a bug in the
dominant browser. More importantly, it fails to deliver the proof it was
intended to provide, namely that you could do a video game at 60 fps around
1960, because you randomly can't do so today.

[1] [https://www.masswerk.at/icss/](https://www.masswerk.at/icss/)

~~~
shawabawa3
fyi that works for me at 60fps in chrome 74 on a 2018 macbook pro

~~~
masswerk
Interesting. So it may be related to hardware acceleration (GPU)? Or even
processor type (think side channel attack mitigations.)

~~~
mistercow
FWIW, I tried both with and without hardware acceleration on my 2018 MBP, and
it worked fine both ways.

~~~
masswerk
It's definitely bound to hardware acceleration: I just tried on an old MacPro
(2008) and it stutters with hardware acceleration enabled, but runs smoothly
without. Apparently, there are some overoptimistic assumptions about the GPU
hardware available.

------
bad_user
In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did
some marketing and it got popular.

However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative
implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.

Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a
project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open
source nature, is the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft
proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser.

At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari.

I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better
at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better
browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.

~~~
dalbasal
" _They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular._ "

They did make a good browser. However, their market share is not down to
better browser _or_ "some advertising." They use their other assets (search,
youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome the "default" option.

It's a dominance breeds dominance cycle... a hallmark of modern monopoly.

Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is
good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without
leveraging google's greater web dominance.

There was a time when IE was a good browser _and_ the default one. They
dominated. A few years later, Mozilla had the better browser. Firefox slowly
climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the
market.

IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was
at its highest. _Much_ bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is
far more dominant than FF or anything ever was... except IE in its monopoly
day.

~~~
anewhnaccount2
If you search for Firefox, Google says "did you mean Chrome?"

Edited to add: This has actually happened to me when setting up a new Windows
PC for someone.

~~~
inflatableDodo
Just tried searching for 'firefox' as a quick test.

I do get a page of Firefox results, but I also get a box titled _' People also
ask'_ after the first four results, with the very first item being; _' Is
Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?'_ I also get a box at the bottom of the page
titled _' Web Browsers,'_ with the first item in that box being Chrome. And
Firefox is just not in that box at all. Not a popular enough web browser to
include in the box marked web browsers when searched for by name, it would
seem. On the other hand, UC Browser makes the list after Chrome, Opera and
Safari, which I hadn't even heard of until today, but is apparently by
Alibaba.

~~~
vamc19
> And Firefox is just not in that box at all.

If you search for Chrome, Chrome will not show up in that box either. And the
first browser in that box is, guess what, Firefox. You just searched for it,
why include it in the box?

UC Browser is pretty popular in Asia. Statcounter reports 3% market share
worldwide, right between Samsung Internet and IE.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>If you search for Chrome, Chrome will not show up in that box either. And the
first browser in that box is, guess what, Firefox. You just searched for it,
why include it in the box?

Oh, good catch, you are right. Is just a bad title for the box and does not
appear to be in any way nefarious. _' Other Web Browsers'_ would be a lot less
confusing.

Am still cocking an eyebrow at _' Is Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?'_
though.

~~~
eslachance
I'm not sure if anything changed in a day, but I'm not getting that result at
all (in fact, I'm not getting a "did you mean Chrome" either). The latter
isn't explainable by me, but for the former... well, remember the search
results are tailored to you (that's another pandora's box about echo chambers
in itself) so perhaps you've been searching for more security-oriented things
and that affects your results. In my case, the first page was mostly official
Firefox links, wikipedia, and the very last result of the first page was
"Google Just Gave 2 Billion Chrome Users A Reason To Switch To Firefox" so it
doesn't seem like there's anything awry going on here.

------
ishan1121
Google is a clear monopoly, there's no doubt about it. It has a 70% browser
market share, 70% market share in the search ecosystem. Even though their
service is good and people are happy, I think they need to be broken down for
the sake of keeping an open internet. Even Facebook for that matter. That's my
opinion

~~~
dTal
Those 70% numbers undersell it. It's basically impossible to use the internet
today without touching Google servers. Even if you, personally, completely
eschew all Google services, almost everyone you want to communicate with will
be on a Google service. Sending an email? Watching a video? Reading a blog?
Chances are good that Google's involved.

~~~
fouc
Not sure why you were downvoted. I think you raise a good point, chrome +
adwords + dns + etc + etc.. is concerning.

------
dalbasal
Antitrust law is, I suspect, _hopelessly_ outdated... both the laws and the
understanding of monopolies/trusts that are baked into them.

These laws were based on 19th-century competition. The problems att were price
fixing, predatory pricing (eg price low to kill competition then raise
prices), supply chain bottlenecking (how you gonna sell your ore without my
trains) ... industrial era trust stuff.

The precedents and laws are hair-splitting and specific. It's just not the
kind of system that can "think" high level and apply abstract principles to
totally new problems.

Google & Facebook mostly have no prices to fix. The ad markets where they make
their money are competitive bid-based, ostensibly the opposite of a
"monopolistic pricing" structure.

The economic/theory just doesn't match the pratices anymore. For example:
Facebooks' revenue.

Imagine that tomorrow morning BMW's revenues are cut in half. BMW would need
to produce fewer cars. Cars cost X to produce. Cut X in half, and you can
expect half the volume.

What would happen if we did the same to FB. My guess is that they'd still make
the same FB. If you take path dependency^ out of the mix (that it's hard to
fire people and adjust downward), It's scary to think how big a company is
required to make FB. Doesn't seem like a stretch to speculate that it can be
done on a $5-$10bn budget... 1/10th of their current revenue. After all,
Facebook _was_ Facebook on that budget not long ago.

^By path dependency I mean imagine that FB's revenue had just never gotten to
$80bn in the first place, the sahare price had never gotten so high. Etc.

IDK what exactly that implies about what antitrust laws should be, but it does
mean that the theoretical foundation for the current ruleset is totally off.
The way monopolistic power conerts to money in 2019 is _fundamentally_
different from 1891... I mean genuinely fundamental, I'm not using it as a
superlative. The definition of monopoly, benefits of owning one, the reasons
why they're bad (or not).

~~~
chii
Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society, and
it's adverse effects can't be fixed via markets due to reasons like size and
reach.

Monopoly in its own is neither good nor bad.

Facebook has a monopoly in social network. Is that bad? What is the effect of
the monopoly? Is Facebook's monopoly having an adverse effect, or is the
adverse effect inherent in the way social networks work (and breaking the
monopoly won't help).

Simply being a monopoly is an unreasonable reason to break it up.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
You could say that monopolies are inherently bad because they stifle
innovation even if they don't lead to higher prices. An unassailable
monopolist has no reason to innovate because competitors are effectively
locked out.

But it appears to me that there is a psychological bias towards an exceedingly
narrow definition of substitution goods and therefore markets, especially in
digital technologies.

For instance, Microsoft clearly has an extremely dominant position in PC
operating systems. The market for PC operating systems used to be synonymous
with personal computing, but that is no longer true. Mobile devices now
dominate personal computing.

So Microsoft has lost most of its monopolistic power without ever losing its
dominance in the market as it was originally defined by regulators and users.

Similarly, search used to be synonymous with using a web search engine and
Google clearly has a monopoly there. But now we search Facebook, Amazon,
Netflix, etc for various specific things in different contexts and Google has
to pay billions to buy users from Apple.

So my point is that yes, monopolies are inherently bad, but they are also
inherently unstable in ways that are not adequately reflected in the current
thinking around anti-trust regulation.

------
lprd
I installed Firefox as my daily driver last year and have been completely
happy with it. Great dev tools, good performance, and I agree with Mozilla's
stance on privacy. All wins for me. I'll still occasionally open up Chrome for
dev purposes -- but for the sake of browser diversity and maintaining an open
internet, I encourage all my friends to give Firefox a try.

~~~
huy-nguyen
The main problem with Firefox is high memory usage.

~~~
joaobeno
Did you mean "Chrome"?

------
scarejunba
What's the steelman argument for Google withholding Widevine from Samuel
Maddock? Electron packaging with Widevine is a thing so this seems unusual. If
you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this?

~~~
repolfx
The steelman is that Widevine is a DRM platform; to tell the difference
between a browser and a ripper application it needs a lot of knowledge about
the context in which it's meant to run, and how to tell the difference between
a 'real' Chrome that follows the licensing rules and a fork of Chrome that
doesn't. It should have been obvious to Maddock that he wouldn't be allowed to
do this: I'm not sure why it's come up as an issue as a result.

As for Electron, are you sure? I found this page:

[https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-
cdm](https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm)

It says:

 _To enable video playback with this new restriction, castLabs has created a
fork that has implemented the necessary changes to enable Widevine to be
played in an Electron application if one has obtained the necessary licenses
from widevine._

So there's a fork of Electron that _enables_ you to embed Widevine, _if and
only if_ you have the necessary licenses (otherwise presumably your Electron
fork would be detected as a stream ripper).

Thus I'm not sure you're right about that. At any rate, if Electron became a
back door to extract content, it'd be remotely detected and disabled. That's
the entire point of the Widevine system.

As for "the good guy", gah, please, are we all 10 years old here? Content
licensing and copyright enforcement is not a good vs evil fight. Some content
producers choose to upload their video as WebM files to free hosting providers
and let anyone who wants to watch them. Others stick it on YouTube and ask YT
to monetize (means, no ad blocking). Still others want viewers to pay for the
content (means, no content ripping). All these are valid economic models that
are widely used, and Google obviously wants to support them because otherwise
the answer is not "no DRM", it's "no in-browser Netflix".

~~~
smaddock
The issue I ran into was in acquiring the necessary licenses that you
mentioned. Verified Media Path (VMP) can be used to verify the authenticity of
the browser platform. I believe it uses public key cryptography for
identification by Widevine's license servers.

It seems like it would be trivial for Widevine to revoke access if there were
ever abuse.

I have more details in a blog post I wrote last month.
[https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-
blocked...](https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-
browser/)

~~~
repolfx
Look carefully at the response they sent you. Their perception is you're
asking for a license for an open source product, i.e. a license that would
remain valid even as random people contribute code or fork the product. That
clearly cannot work, conceptually.

If you had a private, proprietary fork of your browser that was being
distributed and nobody else could modify it or contribute code that would undo
the DRM, _and_ you were willing to sign giant contracts spelling out in
exacting detail what features you could and could not add around video (e.g.
no download feature), _and_ the Widevine people thought you'd actually have
the financial resources to defend your private fork against hooking, memory
overwrite and other attacks (you don't think proprietary Chrome is just
Chromium+library, right?) in a long term manner, _then_ they might have been
willing to work with you. But then you'd be a company, not an individual open
source developer.

Rights enforcement and open source are not compatible.

------
Theodores
My problem with Chrome extends to Google's general stewardship of the web,
including search.

I wish to qualify my complaint by acknowledging that Google have done tonnes
of brilliant stuff, Chrome included. However, one can be over-awed by the
brilliance and not see what is being missed.

A few years ago HTML5 came along with better elements than the humble div to
describe content in a page. These new elements, e.g. section, aside, article,
main, header, footer and nav, are what web pages should be written with. But
Google are okay not really caring about HTML elements. They can sift through
tag soup for search and therefore how well a page is written is of no
consequence for them.

Chrome does support the new elements absolutely fine but the dev tools that we
use and the things like Lighthouse are about metrics that matter to Google and
don't concern quality HTML. This enforces a cargo cult mentality and we have
99% of the web bloated by markup that is quite hard to write and to debug. If
Lighthouse audit reminded you that the div element was 'element of last
resort' according to the spec and knocked a few percentage points off your
score for accessibility if your page only used divs then that would encourage
people to write decent HTML using the full element vocabulary.

------
b-3-n
The real problem is that regardless how much we trust Google and Chrome nobody
can make guarantees about future government or corporate politics so it should
be really important to us to keep the browser market competitive.

------
mothsonasloth
To those who don't see an issue here, go an read up about ActiveX and NPAPI.

------
woranl
Firefox made a lot of strategic error mostly because they were arrogant. Not
implementing the Filesystem API is one of many. The world will simply move on
without you. It’s very unfortunate how bad decisions screwed up the web.

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-
in-f...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-firefox/)

------
cletus
It's hard to believe what a behemoth Chrome has become when it was only
announced in 2008. What makes this even more amazing is it did this when
IE/Edge ships as standard on Windows (which seems to be ~80% marketshare) and
Safari ships as standard on OSX/iOS. It wasn't until Android 4.1 (2012) that
Chrome even shipped on Android.

Chrome did several things really well out of the gate:

\- Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and
refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to
install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is
what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want.

\- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is
technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so
search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is
beyond me.

\- N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar

\- This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first
major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance
issues. This was huge at the time.

\- Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and
everyone else.

\- Chrome was standards compliant.

\- Chrome ran across multiple platforms

\- (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient.

\- (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a
fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking.

Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact
that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome
is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust
application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can
disappear or cease to be relevant.

I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to
dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really
knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there
were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been
unable or unwilling to replicate.

Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me
from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support).

All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not
only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes
people numb.

~~~
javagram
> \- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is
> technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course
> so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is
> beyond me.

Privacy. Google doesn't worry about privacy, of course, but firefox tries to
avoid sending all the URLs you ever type to google or your alternate search
suggestion provider.

~~~
mft_
Isn't that just a bit of code to fix?

if (s matches possibly valid URL pattern) then try to open it else send s to
search provider

~~~
javagram
Searches are sent as you type, so it's not really that simple.

Firefox already does what you suggested when hitting enter in the default URL
bar - if it's not a valid URL, it gets used as a search.

FWIW, I now see search bar has been off by default in firefox for the last 2
years (still grandfathered in for legacy users like me), so I think mozilla
gave up on this. [https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/09/firefox-57-search-bar-
off-...](https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/09/firefox-57-search-bar-off-by-
default/)

~~~
iggldiggl
> Searches are sent as you type, so it's not really that simple.

You might also very well end up with something that is not a valid URL when
searching in your local history or bookmarks.

------
majkinetor
Great time for Microsoft to open source its Edge engine. It sure seems like it
works great and has no Google related problems so it can form base for future
foss adventures.

~~~
javagram
Considering Edge is just an evolved Trident engine, open sourcing it would
probably be very difficult. A 24-year-old proprietary software project may
have commercially licensed parts inside it that aren't subject to open
sourcing; MS has certainly made such deals in the past like the ZIP support in
Windows Explorer being licensed from a third party.

~~~
majkinetor
I think they could manage, given that they open sourced bunch of stuff that
probably had the same problems.

What is shame is for such valuable effort to die. Tech dying is a shame and
you can see it everywhere, from folks experimenting with TempleOs to 8bit game
emulators...

------
gfosco
I really don't like how browser vendors have become extension gatekeepers,
strongly discouraging any integration they disapprove of. I like what Gab has
done with the Dissenter Browser (fork of Brave) after being removed from the
Google/Firefox stores.

~~~
stephenr
Imagine being so convinced that nazis and white supremacists are "right" that
literally fork your own browser.

~~~
collyw
Can you explain your comment, as it sounds like hyperbole to me.

~~~
stephenr
GAB is a social media site that is "friendly" and "a safe haven" for neo-
nazis, white supremacists and "the alt-right". It was created because they
were too extreme even for Twitter's ridiculously ineffective controls on hate
speech.

They apparently believe so strongly that they are "right", that they literally
forked a browser to allow their extension to be used, so that like-minded
nazis and white supremacists can discuss.... how bad jews are I guess, on any
site they wish.

What exactly is hyperbolic? The first sentence is almost exactly the
description of GAB from wikipedia btw.

------
kmlx
as a software dev, not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing.
countless hours wasted on debugging various browsers gets massively reduced.
second point, moving the conversation from "<browser x> hasn't caught up" to
"everyone's caught up" helps the web focus on technologies more so than
before. discussions should now concentrate almost exclusively around the next
web technologies, no more competition regarding web engines, more competition
regarding web technologies. clear win imo.

as a biz dev, it's a bit saddening to see a lot of browser competitors go down
the drain. but this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much
higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?

~~~
kuu
The problem is if Chrome finally wins it all (we're almost there) and at some
point they decide to remove a functionality that we all love, or they stop
improving as there is no competition, or they decide to make you pay a little
fee for developing a website with an extra functionality, or they decide that
Chrome does not run on Mac anymore....

The problem with monopolies is that they control all the power, for the good
or the bad decisions, and without competition they are not forced to look for
the costumers benefit...

~~~
tikkabhuna
As Chromium is open source, wouldn't someone then fork it and re-add those
features or maintain Mac support?

It seems like there is little motivation to maintain a separate browser at the
moment, but one day Google may do something that motivates people to
fork/create a new one. That could be a big bang moment or just a slow crawl
that opens up a niche that a new browser could fill.

~~~
zaarn
Maintaining a browser fork is a lot of work. And Google can simply decide to
close-source their browser engine once their takeover is complete. What could
anyone do about it? Google just keeps adding features until all Chromium forks
die off.

~~~
chii
The problem is not the source but the way Google can affect the standard.

The biggest is DRM. If stuff like that gets into the standard where only large
players can make a compliant implementation, then it becomes a huge problem
for the web.

