
The Browser Monopoly - ntang
http://blairreeves.me/2019/08/20/the-browser-monopoly/
======
basch
>Chrome introduced a lot of neat new features (Porn “Incognito Mode,”
multithreaded memory changes, tabs and more).

Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and
Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a
twinkle.)

>It is mind-boggling that basic tools like these are not yet standard features
in browsers.

How long have browsers offered to save passwords? Seems like a lot of bad
history in this article.

>The way existing password managers work, the vendor’s liability even if they
are hacked is minimal. They don’t hold any passwords!

HUH? Yes they do.. They absolutely hold a copy of your password ... in the
cloud.

>Sure, Chromium and the V8 engine are open-source, but they still belong to
Google in a way that, say, TCP/IP or IMAP does not.

Im gonna feel really bad breaking the QUIC / HTTP/3 news. Cuz google totally
wrote the new transport layer. They wrote the last one too (SPDY HTTP/2.) With
this much market share, what google implements and forces the hands of the
standards organizations.

>This is why Microsoft’s decision to kill Internet Explorer, once the leading
portal to the web, and replace it with a Chromium-based successor says so much
about its new direction as a company. I suspect that decision had more to do
with clearly understanding Microsoft’s strengths and weaknesses than anything
else.

Its primarily for two reasons. 1 is battery life, they want to embed blink
into the os so programs dont need to bundle it (electron included.) 2 is
because 99% of the web just targets blink now. I dont think you can credit
"the move to ssas" alone with Microsoft finally abandoning IE derivatives.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Chrome had the nifty break away title bar tabs before anyone else.

But the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for
each tab. One tab could crash while the others stayed functional and a
security vulnerability in one tab would have a more difficult time
compromising the others.

It's also one of the reasons Chome uses so much memory, they failed to keep
optimizing their copy-on-write paging behaviour so that tabs would share more
memory among themselves.

Nowadays Firefox has process separation for tabs AND it's not written by an
advertising company, so I like it better.

~~~
muststopmyths
_But the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation
for each tab_

Which IE8 had around the same time (It may have launched after Chrome, but in
the contemporaneous betas, they both had the feature)

What made people switch was a combination of everything google did having the
sheen of "cool" around it, and the fact that I.E development was slow and
shoddy.

~~~
olyjohn
My perspective on browser history is a little different. I've been following
and using Firefox since before it was Firefox. At one point in time, I was
working in a computer store. IE6 - 8 was letting ActiveX controls and other
scripts run rampant, infecting people like crazy. 99% of our business was
malware cleanup and removal due to IE. Once you explained to people what
happened, they were appaled and were happy to switch to Firefox, despite many
sites only working on IE at the time. THIS is what really triggered the
migration away from IE. Firefox was taking off (look at the chart in the
linked article), and was starting to dominate, well before Chrome ever became
a thing. Those of us on Linux also had Konqueror, and it had a decent userbase
as well.

I think that's when Google noticed that the IE monopoly was breaking, and they
jumped onboard and took Konqueror's code and then launched their own browser.
The same code that Apple used for Safari. So they basically came in on the
hard work of Firefox and the KHTML team and took over the market by putting
Chrome right on Google's homepage.

It's my opinion that Chrome didn't become popular because it was better, or
because it was cool (no average user cares about that). It became popular by
being right there on everybody's home page, right at the perfect time that
people were catching on to the fact that IE had zero security.

Firefox broke the monopoly and freed us, and then Google and Apple came in and
shat all over them.

~~~
Agenttin
I seem to remember at the time Chrome was faster than FF.

~~~
mda
Way faster

------
aluren
I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of
privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at
feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions
ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find
the switch so hard?

In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile
if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-
holes or something.

~~~
pmikesell
I'm a technically minded person. I've been using web browsers since NCSA
Mosaic. I switch browsers probably once per decade (mosaic -> netscape
navigator -> firefox -> chrome).

At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox
was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally
making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards
were very confusing, and understanding what would work with which browser was
a continual battle, and Microsoft had a good 15 years under its belt of
attempting to make the web a windows only affair).

So then Chrome comes along, backed my Google, and people started treating it
as a first class citizen. Sites were belt to run with, and tested on Chrome.

Fast forward to now. I actually do want to have a wide array of ad sponsored
content on the internet because I appreciate the free content and I'm not
going to pay 30 different 5$ per month subscriptions for stuff I _might_ read.
Are they tracking me? Yes. When I search for lawn mowers online I get spams
(which gmail seems to filter just fine) and my rarely logged into facebook
feed is full of lawn mower ads. I use in-cognito when I want to see what a
google or linked in search looks like without my user context. I use ABP when
sites are too aggressive with their ads.

And it's all fine. I suspect my current experience is common, to answer your
question.

~~~
dao-
> At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and
> firefox was losing the war [...]

This is false. Firefox's market share was continuously rising until Chrome
came along (and Google marketed it aggressively). IE was still strong but
already losing.

~~~
olyjohn
You are correct. For some reason, I keep seeing this history repeated over and
over, but even the chart in the article confirms you're correct. Firefox was
taking over like crazy before Chrome came along...

~~~
pmikesell
... I'm talking about before that. Netscape went from 90% to 6% once IE
started bundling on Windows. Firefox "taking over like crazy" is a later
comeback.

------
tannhaeuser
> _Firefox is a fine browser by itself [...] I have the comfort of knowing
> that my personal information is protected (to the extent possible) – and
> also that my portal to the web is not custom-built to track me and serve me
> ads_

FF _is_ fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given
Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as
well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of
user and developer incentives.

For a sustainable web (what's left of it anyway), it would be more helpful to
radically simplify the web such that developers have reasonable and feasible
specs to work against, and have diversity in browsers once again. Meanwhile,
Google is working hard to lead audiences elsewhere via AMP, a Trojan made
possible by JavaScript in the first place.

~~~
HNcantBtrustd
>Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and
developer incentives.

Apple gets credit for being aligned with users and developers?

Out of any of the tech companies, I see Apple the most detached from their
users and developers.

Forcing proprietary software, hardware, and accessories is not "for users and
developers".

That's Apple's way of generating additional sales and data for Apple.

If they had users and developers as their primary goal, it would be easier to
be an Apple customer.

~~~
rsynnott
I assume they meant aligned _with respect to users and developers_. Google is
primarily an advertising company, and Firefox's revenue comes mostly from
Google. Apple has no interests in ads these days (and their old ad platform
never did browser ads anyway), so you don't have the same sort of competing
incentives.

------
dragonsh
I made Firefox as the primary browser even though battery usage during
conference call and some webapps is much higher than chrome on a Mac.

I do it on principle and make sure my apps work on Firefox besides chrome.
Although many friends and fellow developers tell me why I spend extra efforts.

Web components created a lot of issue when trying to make them run on both
Firefox and chrome. But I went ahead with it and my front end team need to put
a lot of additional efforts. I don't know why it's so hard to stick to
standards. Both chrome and Firefox will behave bit differently for CSS and
JavaScript.

Developing a PWA which works good on both browser feels like developing native
apps for Android and iOS using cross platform toolkits, which at times require
a lot of additional code and testing just so that they work predictable. Still
results in not so good experience.

~~~
sfink
What I've heard is that Chrome shipped an unfinished early version of the web
components spec, and now there are sites relying on it because it works in
Chrome and that's good enough. I think the spec has been more or less
finalized now? I'm not sure whether it's shipping in both browsers, though.
Something is (eg for firefox it's since 63), but I don't know exactly what.

I believe YouTube uses a whole framework based on the preratified spec?

~~~
dragonsh
Even though the spec is finalized there are enough variation on support on
different browsers leading to substantial efforts to make a web components
based pwa work on multu-browser.

If it had been worked out properly there's isn't any need of react or angular
except for a state management library, since the views and components is taken
care of by the browser directly.

------
Gpetrium
Monopolies like these are partially built by the demand side flowing towards
the option of least resistance. In such case, the average person will float
towards browser X when Y seems to, for example, become slower, take more
processing power or pure peer pressure "I can't believe you are still using
browser P, it is so slow!".

As demand floats towards few suppliers, organizations with the most value to
gain from it will either look to purchase one of the current suppliers or
increase investment to outpace its competitors. In time, the market becomes a
monopoly/oligopoly due to both demand (customer) and supply (org/biz
interests). At this point, the mono/oli has the means to change things, either
slowly or drastically, to maximize their gains.

Unless a good portion of society takes further interest in keeping what they
believe to be right (e.g. privacy) and put their money and time where their
belief is, non-profit orgs or less agressive ones are most likely to lose 99
out of 100 times in the long run. This is a human nature challenge, not
necessarily an entity problem.

------
dec0dedab0de
Am I the only one that doesn't like chrome? There has always been a "weird
feel" to it that I don't like. I used to really like Konqueror, so I guess its
mostly the interface that gets to me.

...As I type this I look the sandwich menu, and lack of search bar in firefox
and I die a little inside.

~~~
jfk13
You want a separate search field? Just go to Customise and drag it to the
toolbar.

------
mcv
I recently ditched Chrome and switched back to Firefox, at home and on my
mobile, only to discover that a surprising number of sites don't work in
Firefox. In particular: Twitter doesn't work on Firefox Mobile.

Most work fine, but still, I ended up switching to Safari, to discover that
it's just not quite as good an experience as Firefox or Chrome.

~~~
darklion
> I ended up switching to Safari, to discover that it's just not quite as good
> an experience as Firefox or Chrome.

IMO, I find it to be just the opposite--neither Firefox nor Chrome are as good
an experience as Safari.

Maybe the difference is that when a particular site does not work in a given
browser, I don't blame the browser, I blame the website.

~~~
__dawid__
Safari seems to lag a lot in features. In compatibility it's a modern IE

~~~
robertoandred
Hardly. It took how long for Chrome and FF to support position sticky, or
backdrop filter?

------
ozten
Why Chrome exists is missing a key driver - A significant portion of Google's
search traffic came from business deals where they paid browser vendors (or
others) to be the default search option. As they cannibalized the browser
market they eliminated this cost or gained significant negotiating power.

"Driving innovation on the web" is the don't be evil slogan that motivates us
all to allow them to "vertically integrate advertising and cut costs".

~~~
scarface74
_As they cannibalized the browser market they eliminated this cost or gained
significant negotiating power._

They still pay Apple a reported $12 billion a year and they have no
negotiating power on iOS.

~~~
ozten
Which is to say - "Why does Android exist?"

------
jacquesc
A seemingly minor issue got me really worried about the future of the Chrome
monopoly.

For some reason, some developer/product manager at Chrome decided to ignore
`"autocomplete"="off". This reeks havoc with the 100s of JS autocomplete
addons out there when chrome autocomplete pops up over the custom built on.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12374442/chrome-
ignores-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12374442/chrome-ignores-
autocomplete-off)

Seems like there's no resolution yet, aside from a stream of ridiculous hacks
that all tend to break at one point or another.

If Google wants to own the browser, they are going to need a more transparent
process on these things. It affects everyone now and they have to start
governing their changes more appropriately.

------
abtinf
I was shocked to see the browser market share graph. Chrome appears to be
collapsing on itself, dropping from from an all-time high of 65.4% to 55.4% in
just 16 months, effectively losing all share gains since 2016.

But then I looked closer at the data, noticing that only net 120 basis points
of the change can be explained by share changes in the other browsers. The
rest of the data seems to be missing, as the numbers add up to less than 100%.

What the heck is going on?

Edit: It goes without saying that the article's failure to address this point
fundamentally discredits the author. It should be obvious that the first thing
an article claiming monopoly would need to do is explain the plummeting market
share of the thing that is allegedly a monopoly..

~~~
sebazzz
I am also wondering why Opera (=Presto) is in that graph. Since the latest
Opera is Chromium-based I would expect it to be counted as Chromium.

~~~
IggleSniggle
Importantly, implemented on top of Chromium does not mean feature parity with
Chrome.

~~~
sebazzz
Neither security parity.

------
unknown2374
This article has a lot of wrong or otherwise misleading information. One I
haven't noticed in the comments so far is that the author refers to Chromium
as being free and open-source. It isn't [0]. It downloads more Google account
and activity tracking related blobs than ever when building the code as well.

While I agree with the gist of the article, this is worth pointing out since a
lot of people do use Chromium because it is advertised this way, thinking that
somehow they are not playing into the Chrome/Google monopoly. For those
interested, there is an alternative build without all the google stuff baked
in: [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409)

~~~
lioeters
I remember seeing an article a few months ago, that Microsoft removed 51
Google services from Chromium while they transitioned Edge to it.

[https://imgur.com/Szwkb0O](https://imgur.com/Szwkb0O)

That list helps to show how Chromium is far from the open-source ideal.

------
notatoad
>but what Google was really doing was laying the groundwork for the ability to
deliver all sorts of new online ad formats (like video) and complicated
Javascript behind them that would help track and target users more
effectively.

this is just plain dumb. There are plenty of other uses for javascript and
powerful programming features beyond ads, and even google's most complicated
ad products barely scratch the surface of what's possible with the new js
features that have been introduced since the beginning of the chrome project.

Just because google is an ad company, doesn't mean everything they do is
purely and simply about serving ads. And if you're going to try and make the
argument that it is, you had better have something to back it up - you can't
just make the claim and then skip on to the next bit of your rant.

------
Japhy_Ryder
Just a quick rant about Firefox -- an INSANELY annoying bug that they've yet
to fix is when trying to copy the URL on Mobile Firefox, 99% of the time I get
the wrong address (the previous page I was on), because it seemingly doesn't
populate the address as the page you're currently looking at if the page
hasn't fully loaded yet. It's so odd.

Other than that, Firefox > Chrome. Privacy situation is vastly superior and
web standards support is comparable. I also just feel that Mozilla is a way
better company ethics wise, and for the software community at large, than
Google.

------
realshowbiz
My only use for chrome is to interact with the google web apps that don’t work
well in firefox or safari. Otherwise it wouldn’t be installed.

IMO Google softly requires you to use chrome because their tools, in my
experience, are unstable in other browsers (I’m looking at you meet)

The cynic in me is doubtful that this is entirely by accident.

~~~
neogodless
So I have a Gmail (G Suite Free) account, and I use Thunderbird on any
computer I use regularly. Gmail is painfully slow to being almost unusable on
Firefox. Sometimes I cannot get emails to send. So if I'm logging in
temporarily, I'm usually forced to use Chrome.

I think is just one example of Chromium being a bit too ubiquitous, and
forcing users into the Google black hole.

Is there an affordable paid custom domain email option with good spam
filtering?

------
ilaksh
The only way you are going to get a competitive landscape for browsers is to
get away from the paradigm of the browser containing the entire kitchen sink,
i.e. its own OS.

Maybe there could be an alternative that only supports markdown. Or maybe
markdown/rst and web assembly.

------
theboulevardier
I have recently returned to Firefox for my personal browsing after using
Chrome since about 2014 and it works great. However...

In work I'm stuck using Chrome due to the amount of time I spend in Google
Apps (Docs, Sheets, Google Analytics, Search Console & Data Studio) as they
break certain functionality on Firefox, which makes me less productive.

Google has too much power. I work in Search Engine Marketing and it wasn't so
long ago that we optimised sites for different search engines, now no-one
cares about any search engine other than Google.

------
Siecje
I only use Chrome when I want to exec into a pod in Kubernetes when using
`kubectl proxy`. For some reason this doesn't work in Firefox.

------
pcurve
I really tried hard to use Edge as much as possible, but it was rubbish until
the day MS threw in the towel.

------
KuhlMensch
Set my default browser to Firefox for the first time in ~10 years.

------
thezeebass
Can we talk about Brave? Its impressed me immensely, and BAT is a profound new
approach to monetization on the web. in the context of this article its the
only salvation i see; much like telegram for messaging, it provides a privacy
and performance focus that makes it infinitely better than the bloat of chrome
at getting you around the web; And without the ads and tracking. Awesome.

~~~
bdcravens
Brave is based on Chromium.

------
brootstrap
Interesting i was just thinking about this yesterday. I should ditch chrome.
yet here i am typing more shit for google to harvest from me and sell to the
highest bidder.

~~~
glenneroo
What is the point of making this comment? Why haven't you switched? It's not
that hard.

~~~
thezeebass
Brave, guys. Switch to Brave. Brave is everything.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
Brave has too much bloatware for my taste.

~~~
spidermango
whats your alternative?

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
FireFox or one of the many other Chromium derivatives.

------
The_rationalist
The number of features that gecko (Firefox) lack vs blink (chromiums) is
growing everyday... In a factual sense, mozilla slow down the evolution of the
web and what it allow web masters to create.

But it is nothing in comparison of safari which is pathetically behind blink
and gecko feature wise. It's a _shame_ that the most popular websites don't
team up to block safari and ask to install a browser that supports web
standards. YouTube did this with a version of IE and weeks after they were
followed by thousands of websites not supporting this antic version.

~~~
skrowl
For most front-end web devs, iOS Safari is the new IE6.

~~~
nerdkid93
Truth, mobile Safari is far and away the worst of the "modern" browsers, and
it's basically impossible to test unless you have a spare Apple device or you
pay for BrowserStack :/

~~~
no_wizard
Why not use [https://webkit.org/](https://webkit.org/) to test against it? you
can usually just get the version of webkit that mobile safari is based on and
build it

Yes, it is a hassle, but it works well in my experience.

Also this:

[https://webkit.org/blog/9395/webdriver-is-coming-to-
safari-i...](https://webkit.org/blog/9395/webdriver-is-coming-to-safari-in-
ios-13/)

