Also Chrome. Chrome was the biggest shocker to many @ Goog. Even as a Noogler, people often sit down in cafeteria and talked about how Chrome got traction and so popular only because it got a main spot on Google's homepage; something noone, no company or individual advertiser can ever bid for. If that's not Google's "Microsoft Internet Explorer anti-trust" moment, then nothing is.
You're missing the massive point that it was also happened to be far superior to Firefox and IE when it came out... And it held the #1 spot (by far) for nearly a decade while Firefox fumbled around and IE remained IE.
It's crazy to say a product only succeeded because Google pushed it hard. Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) has a LONG list of failed products they pushed hard (Wave, Google Plus, etc).
Did it play a role? Sure. But prominent advertising is not the same as forcing hardware manufacturers to pre-install software. Nor does it suddenly make customers want a shitty product they wouldn't otherwise use.
Chrome basically got a fresh start and built on top of existing WebKit codebase with new ideas. They did well with the “second mover advantage”
Firefox and IE were riddled with code debt issues so they couldn’t move fast.
Chrome was a great example of software written by a company with resources to dominate a huge market segment relatively quickly. I’m guessing Chrome earned Sundar Picchai a lot of good karma within Google to later become CEO.
Excellent points. Chrome has the best development tools. I used the dev tools so much that I just launch Chrome out of habit when I want to browse the web.
While at the same time they've been stripping out vital features or outright disabling them on mobile. It's almost like gasp they don't care about the users but only their bottom line.
My point was Google didn't pay anything to gain the market share because they advertise Chrome on their frontpage, something neither Firefox, nor IE, nor Opera nor Safari, nor anyone else in that matter could do.
From an antitrust law point of view, using your monopoly status in one area as a weapon against the competition in other areas is something that likely gets you in trouble.
Although, it helps to remember that in the EU, you don't need nearly as big a market share before their competition law kicks in and places restrictions on your behavior, so things that you can still get away with in the US can be quite illegal in the EU.
The GP didn't make the claim that the "product only succeeded because Google pushed it hard". All they said was that Google used their search monopoly to give it a big advantage.
Chrome's quality was a necessary, but probably not sufficient condition for it to gain the market traction that it did.
Exactly, without Search pushing so hard the adoption rate would have been much slower and would have given Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft time to respond.
Firefox has rapidly improved since it's inception and was rapidly stealing IE market share prior to Chrome.
Had Chrome not been rammed down people's throats then we might have a more even landscape than we do today.
Search. And Gmail. And YouTube. And every other google-controlled site on the internet.
Plus email-SPAM(!!!) about installing Chrome when you signed in to your Google-account on a new computer using a non-Chrome browser.
It also used dubious wording: “You need to upgrade your browser. Click here”
And paying to have it bundled as a drive-by installation with other software.
And Chrome-only websites. And the list just goes on and on.
It was spyware tactics + SPAM all over the place. And the sheer amount of it was mind-blowing.
Even technical people who explicitly didn’t want Chrome had a hard time avoiding it. Imagine the effect on regular, non-technical users.
Saying it was all down to technical merit is just appoligist and delusional.
With Chrome’s dominance and semi-monoculture undeniably in place, Google is now using that position to force new things, like subverting open web-standards with DRM.
I can’t believe people are so non-chalantly allowing this to happen.
Its been a slow boil, and they employ experts to manipulate public opinion (HN fawns all over them still ... articles continually like "Ex-Googlers Do XYZ!". They won't get away with it long term.
Actually, the biggest thing in Chrome's favor was being an installer pack-in. People still get sometimes Chrome installed on them if they go download Adobe Reader without unchecking the box. (McAfee Security Scan Plus is Adobe's other paid pack-in, you might see that instead, depending on your location.) People seem to vastly forget that a large part of Chrome's dominance of the ordinary user is the fact that installing half a dozen plugins or tools on Windows has or still installs Chrome and sets it as your default browser.
When doing PC support for layusers, I've found that: Most people don't know what Chrome is, and don't know the difference between it, Edge, IE, and the malicious Chromium fork they have installed on their PCs. (Side note: May the soulless individuals behind the "WebDiscover Browser" suffer a life of misery and despair as punishment for their crimes.) They end up with Chrome (or a malicious fork thereof) due to a bundle installer.
What Chrome also did far better than everyone else was a user local install, ie an install that didn’t require admin on the PC. Shadow IT installs was a huge advantage over Firefox in Chrome’s first years.
I still have to fight this occasionally. :| In one instance, I ended up just telling the antivirus software at a company to flag Chrome as a virus and block it from executing. Software installation requiring admin rights is by design, and circumventing it is unethical as heck.
If you rely on the lack of admin rights to prevent unauthorised software from being run you’re doing it wrong. You should be using whitelisting (e.g. AppLocker in Windows) which also prevents “portable” applications (without an installer) from being used.
The eternal conflict between lowly workers trying to get their job done and the IT department trying to prevent them from doing their jobs to make their own life easier, based on the notion that if users can't use the infrastructure, they can't break it.
Obviously, Chrome is not needed to do their jobs. If it was, it'd be provided. Browsers, especially Chrome, are a massive malware ingress point, it makes zero sense for end users to install them.
IT actually exists to help ensure people can do their job, and do their job faster. As a general goal, I like to learn about people's business processes for the exact purpose of seeing how our IT environment can be improved to expedite their work.
And having five browsers on a PC doesn't make it easier for end users. I have no problem dealing with five browsers, but I get a lot of complaints from people when they open link A in browser B and link C in browser D and don't understand why things don't work.
You may have experienced poor IT departments in the past, or thought you experienced poor IT departments because you didn't understand the other considerations in play, but that's hardly an excuse to assume any given IT choice is some sort of attempt to prevent employees from doing their jobs.
That's a faulty assumption right there. Usually, people providing workers with their computers and software have limited idea what those workers actually need to work efficiently. This works out fine when workflows are defined so well a trained monkey could do the job, and fails miserably when the worker needs any sort of creative control over their workflow or work output (programmers, designers, all sorts of engineers and technicians, etc.). Most corporate work is probably closer to monkey level than to creative level, but enterprises love to do company-wide policy changes, making all work conform to lowest common denominator.
> You may have experienced poor IT departments in the past, or thought you experienced poor IT departments because you didn't understand the other considerations in play, but that's hardly an excuse to assume any given IT choice is some sort of attempt to prevent employees from doing their jobs.
I've experienced one competent IT department in my life, and their best quality was helping shield our programming team from policies like application whitelisting or limiting admin access, that they were forced to deploy company-wide. For other IT departments I dealt with, most of their actions were explainable if viewed through the lens of caring about the infrastructure to the extreme - that is, "if no one uses it, no one will break it" approach.
> That's a faulty assumption right there. Usually,...
You accuse me of making a "faulty assumption" about my own environment, and then proceed to assume that you can speak for most/all IT environments.
When I state "if you need Chrome, we'll provide Chrome", that's true of my environment. It's also true of my environment, if we don't provide Chrome, and you find a way to install it yourself, you'd be violating policy, and barring the casual mistake of not knowing that, potentially referred to HR. Obviously, in the ideal "don't need to involve HR" case, we just make sure you can't install it.
Now, what isn't just true of my environment, but true of all environments, is that users installing random web browsers is incredibly dangerous, and something every IT department should be preventing if they own the hardware. I don't think that's even a controversial statement, I'm confused why it's being treated like one.
Installation requirements are mostly a hangover from the days when Windows PCs weren’t locked down and anyone could write to the system folders and admin rights were just assumed.
Software developers often didn’t bother testing or ensuring that their software would install (or even run properly) without admin rights.
Not necessarily. Byod is commom. And quite frankly even if it is my employers box im not gonna put up with restrictions against installing a web browser. Or deal with some paperwork request, I'll work around it and just do it.
Who would bring their own equipment to work in software unless they are a founder? That's like paying to work. Especially when employers like to claim ownership rights to all data generated by their employees in the course of business.
Mechanics bring their own tools frequently but their employers don't try to repo their personal vehicles just because the mechanic used the same tools at home and at work
I don't have work slack on my personal phone on principle. If the company wants to require me to be available on their systems they need to provide the hardware
Are you running your personal hardware (without the security) on the internal network? Please tell me you don't have the same level of access with personal hardware as you do with the corporate equipment.
Even in a BYOD environment, an organization should be ensuring any devices granted access to resources are appropriately patched and secured.
I can understand that. I just don't want to have a reason why my employer could call me in off hours, nor for them to claim ownership of stuff I've done.
I don't see how partnering with a few other software companies to distribute software via installers is a bad thing or a sign of monopolistic practices (aka limiting competition and harming customers by forcing them to use a product they wouldn't otherwise)...
It's a bit shady to make it 'automatically the default browser'. But that is a problem with the OS. An installer shouldn't be able to make that choice for the user.
They fixed this with Windows 10, actually. Which of course, upset people because it defaults people to Edge, and asks people to give Edge a try when they change it.
True, I remember seeing that now on my moms laptop. I remember it was quite aggressive in warning you not to switch away from Edge.
Microsoft can never let the marketing people stop having control and ruining their products. They are trying to make it more useable and user friendlier, but it's funny seeing the push back within the product.
I've recently said that Microsoft is the most self-defeating company in history. They often take all of the goodwill they've earned, and then torch it on minor battles that aren't really making them any money. If someone's gotten into the settings screen to change their default, they probably have tried Edge, or at least know what it is and have some reason for switching.
Windows 10 telemetry is a great example: They shot themselves in the foot PR-wise on an otherwise excellent operating system, chasing a pile of metadata that won't really be significantly more useful than what they get from people who voluntarily agree to be Windows Insiders. There isn't a good business case for preventing people from shutting off error reporting, and it's had a huge impact on mitigating all of their other efforts to repair their image.
I'd say the forced update from 8 to 10, with all the UI dark patterns, was even worse. An OS "collecting telemetry" on you was mostly an abstract problem for non-technical users. An OS trying to annoy and trick you into updating to that scary "telemetry version" - that's another thing, and I know plenty of people who were pissed off about that. Hell, my own mother sticks to 8 and still refuses to entertain the thought of using 10 precisely because of those attempts at forced upgrade.
It's a shame, really, because Windows 10 is a decent OS, and it fixed most of the issues with 8.
> You're missing the massive point that it was also happened to be far superior to Firefox and IE when it came out
I mean, you really could have said the same thing about IE 4 when it came out. It was actually better than Communicator at the time, which was a bloated, unfocused, mess of a browser.
I was a www user at the time and that’s how I remember it. IE4 was clearly better than netscape’s comparable offering at the time, and IE5 and IE6 entrenched that lead to the point where I had to switch to IE. Much faster and much better standards support (ironically IE6 had by far the best standards support at the time of its release.)
It had little things like multi-process, omnibox, and something like a 10x faster JS engine than the competition, but the real killer feature was the auto-updating.
It did come with advantages, no doubt, but - as so often - its market share is not necessarily because it tried to push the web further, a large share is simply because of Google's aggressive marketing.
To this day Google is pushing their browser if you dare to use their services with Edge.
Why is that a shocker? They own google.com and they want to upsell another product, and aren't forcing it upon users or vendors. This seems like normal/standard business practice. Bundling IE with Windows was not the problem, but forcing PC vendors to only sell with Windows installed, and aggressively forcing IE to be the default browser was.
On the other hand, building "web" apps that only run on chrome, that was a shocker for me.
There was a solid half a year where google hangouts does not work on current versions of Firefox. It claims that Firefox support is in development, but the actuality of it is that hangouts was deprecated for hangouts meet, which does support firefox
Inbox, hangouts video calls, google earth, off the top of my head, spent 6months+ being chrome-only. H/o video calls over a year (just a few months ago became firefox compatible).
That is an important point; you might be ten times more talented than Google engineers but you won't get your browser promoted on the on of the most popular internet pages or preinstalled with Android. Google is using its dominance in one area to disrupt competition in other areas. I think that this is something that should not be allowed.
