It's fascinating how we've got this double standard when it comes to Apple and Google's security moves.
Take Safari on iOS, for example—it's super restrictive. You can't even use a different browser engine; everything's just a Safari wrapper.
On the flip side, Google, with its Chrome and Android flexibility, gets a lot of flak for the same kind of security efforts.
Bottom line is both companies are only doing it for their own greed and profits, but Apple gets a high-five for being all about privacy, while Google gets the stink eye for being too controlling. It's incredibly frustrating to see this double standard.
> Take Safari on iOS, for example—it's super restrictive. You can't even use a different browser engine; everything's just a Safari wrapper.
> Apple gets a high-five for being all about privacy
Apple has been repeatedly and relentlessly criticized for its iOS lockdown, including here on Hacker News. Of course it's a controversial subject, with a lot of people on both sides, but Apple hasn't received a free pass.
I give apple the stink eye, but I also don't even bother with equipment that I know requires fighting the manufacturer to do what I want, so I tend to be less vocal about them.
Yes, this is me. I deeply dislike the Apple Way and as a result I don't use Apple stuff. This means I rarely actually complain about Apple's approach, because I'm not the sort of customer Apple wants.
But one thing that's different is that Apple -- once the Mac was released -- made it very clear about the direction they wanted to take things[1] and have stayed true to their statements. There was no bait-and-switch aspect to any of it.
[1] But hoo-boy did I complain when the Mac was released. It was a slap in the face to the hobbyist community. Then they added insult to injury with their gaslighting "1984" ad. I'm still grumpy about it to this day.
The motivations are/were different, though. Google is doing it to prop up the ads business and prevent user control over ads. It is one thing to never give a specific ability, but once people use it for 10+ years, yeah of course they're going to be upset.
When people see restriction as "greed", I understand why the companies are being treated differently.
Apple does get flak for this, just less so from Apple users.
The browser restriction on iOS could thankfully come to an end thanks to EU regulation. Though one down side, is that will serve to grow Chrome's market share even further.
It’s not true that Apple is focusing on security for “greed”, and we know that Chrome can be a successful browser (and Google a successful company) without these changes.
Until Apple starts messing up Safari to increase that part of their business, I'll keep using it. Chrome was perfect before and didn't need more changes outside of security updates. It was "enshitified" after Google had all the market share and users locked-in. There is no incentive for Chrome to get better since their is no realistic competition. Chromium may get better since Brave and other browsers use it under the hood.
Brave is chromium. And how is chrome better (or worse) than safari? They both just work, and safari is even better for laptops in terms of battery life in my experience.
Brave is slower than chromium from my experience, had issues related to bookmarks when I last tried it, and it doesn't do stuff it claims to - such as privacy, ad blocking, etc.
Safari has weird Apple-isms like nonstandard shortcuts, weird UI, and the dev tools are just kinda shit overall.
Google has the business model that if it goes away they're screwed, Apple has the business model that oh well since everyone else is doing it we might as well get a few extra bucks as well, cause we like money, but make sure it doesn't mess with our real business.
This. Or put another way, if Apple wants to do something in their private sandbox, that's one thing. But if Google wants to make changes to the core of most browsers in the world, that's something else.
I so hate the enshittification of the Internets that I have really started to move to a so-called suckless way with a lot of features/malfeatures just cut off from my attention. Modern browsers (Firefox+Chrome duopoly) are less and less welcome on my machine.
CNN just started blocking visitors using ad block extensions. It’s made me stop going there.
Regardless of what you think of a particular news organization, I think this is a sign of things to come. (See YouTube’s experiment with warning users using ad blockers).
This will probably just make me use various sites a lot less.
Which, in all honesty, is probably good for my overall mental health.
Cyberpunk stories tend to predict a consolidation to a "legit" net and some flavor of "underground" net, where users are both more capable and more vulnerable than their "aboveground" peers.
I sort of suspect this is where we are headed. I'm also not sure it's a bad thing; people derive benefit from playing in a sandbox, and as long as the sandbox isn't the only option, there's value in providing it for those who don't, won't, or can't play the old 'net game of being a full peer online (with all the benefits of "publish whatever" and all the ills of "your machine was compromised? Sounds like a you problem").
I also want folks to be able to say anything on the internet, and to have agency in filtering content served to me. I’ll also pay sites that don’t abuse my humanity, to support them. Best of all worlds.
I am genuine in believing few would want this. I do not yet have a theory as to why, it's only my intuition. I want them to want that. Desperately so.
I don't think payment helps. They'll take your money and abuse you anyway. One phenomenon I've recently clued into is that of the "market-hostile business". Now that I understand that it is a thing which can exist, I see it everywhere.
There are businesses out there which have changed hands many times, and not just new owners purchasing them from the last. New boards of directors, new vice presidents hired, new managers. Just constant churn. And at some point in the (not necessarily recent) past, the people in charge were those that truly hated their customers. Hate of the "burning, eternal rage" variety. But they couldn't kill the golden goose either.
They still sell the stuff their customers want to buy. But they poison it. They fill it up with garbage. They make it worse in every way possible, right up to the point where this is still a deniable phenomenon. See it alot in media... there's some show or franchise or genre that you like. But the people producing the show hate it. They think it's low-brow. They give the laziest effort possible. They fight with the few on the production crew who enjoy it. In many cases, getting them fired.
Many other brands and products are like this though. And if you pay them for it, they don't love you for being a loyal customer. They resent you for being a chump. And there's nothing to be done about this.
I hate the phrase "facts don't care about your feelings." It's default-offensive and trite. It's also a little untrue; human beings filter their comprehension of facts through emotion all the time, and a huge category of "facts" are arbitrary social norms where the only reason they are what they are is feelings.
... that having been said, I feel like if people were going to want that, we wouldn't have seen Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok (even Blogger, MySpace, and LiveJournal, ultimately) take off the way they did. It is easier than ever before to host your own content, run your own blog from a static (or dynamic) site generator, and set up your own database of comments that you will moderate.
Almost nobody wants any of that. They want someone else hosting. They want the amount of time they spend doing sysadmin shit to be zero. They definitely don't want to be the front line of comment moderation, where everything from the most well-crafted put-down that will sit with them for days to actual child pornography will be their responsibility to filter.
I don't have an answer. In fact, I think the answer is "stop trying to force it." Let there be a less-free Internet for those without the time and jealously guard the more-free Internet for those willing to do the pain and toil of being independent. The only other alternatives I see are put up a bunch of law around this space (which just cedes the power from unaccountable corporations to governments that become increasingly unaccountable as their jurisdiction grows, and the jurisdiction scope needed to police the Internet is "global")... Or solve the problem from the other end, roll the clock back to the "good old days" when the 'net fit in a bathtub and could be moderated by gentlemen's agreements and peers... And start handing out licenses to use that 'net, while everyone else just gets to live in the late-20th century forever.
The exact figure is likely to be a little skewed by that, but I don't think it's enough to matter. At least, I rarely see anyone using Firefox anymore, when a couple of decades or so ago most people seemed to be using it.
I have never see even a one Tor/I2p user without Firefox and these numbers will never appear in the statistics. Probably not a big share of market but these usecases are just incompatible with Chrome and what else you consider as browser, Safari?
It makes me sad that Veblen goods dominate the tech market. Mostly sad for the human race, literally billions of humans had their inadequacy for status exploited.
Capitalism is like nature. It doesnt decide who is best, it decides who is left.
I don't know how to obtain a plausible number but Firefox is an x86 application and Safari is just a part of Apple's walled garden. Also I can not tell anything about snoop-phones because I do not use them.
That walled garden is the size of a continent these days. It's not really the kind of thing we can just categorically discount if we're talking about a holistic picture of how people engage to the online world.
A popular search engine like Google, or a less popular and freer, user privacy respecting search engine like DuckDuckGo, if you prefer not to use Google might help you get to stats other people have reported their websites getting, which is a rough approximation of plausible numbers. Those numbers will show you, without you having to use "snoop-phones" how many, approximately, people use Firefox. Which is about 2%.
Why do you think that some random result from Google is plausible? Why not to just search a cure from cancer or Rieman's proof in Google or DDG?
The snoop-phone case means that I do not want to see mobile browsers in those digits because as far as I know about them, there is no way of activating dev mode in browser on your snoop-phone, correct me please if I'm wrong.
Using Google and searching for "cure for cancer", I get a result from WebMD, which states "No “alternative” or natural cancer treatments have been proven to cure cancer." Using Google again, the first result searching for Rieman Hypothesis is a result from Wikipedia, which states that the Rieman Hypothesis is currently unsolved. I believe both of these results to be plausible, thus establishing some level of credibility for using Google (for me). If you have reason to dispute both of those findings, please let me (and the world) know.
Now that we've established Google results are, at least, plausible, searching for "browser market share 2023", I get a result * which states that, on desktop, which seems to be why your objection to "snoop phone", Chrome has 61%, Safari has 13%, and Firefox has 6% market share.
Again, if I should not believe the results from Google about the Rieman Hypothesis or the cure for cancer, please let me know.
Unclear, but the statement itself is also wrong - there are aarch64 binaries for Firefox, and I'm quite sure it will compile and run on a wide variety of other architectures.
Surf's a bit too minimal for my taste, but I found a couple of the other lightweight-ish webkit-based browsers on Linux serviceable, last I checked.
My motivation was I was trying to make a crappy dual-core low-clock Celeron rooted Chromebox with 2GB of memory usable as a light-duty workstation, a couple years back. I didn't find anything not webkit-based that I tried light enough to even be in the running. Firefox wasn't remotely close (nor were close Chrome-derivatives). Even light webkit browsers were practically limited to 1-3 windows/tabs depending on the weight of the pages, before they got unusable.
We really need to sabotage Chrome somehow before the open internet will forever be destroyed.
I remember people being mad about walled gardens, social media monopolies and the death of actual personal websites but it's like everyone has just given up now.
It's actually incredible. Open source is an amazing concept and the talent out there should be more than enough to create alternatives, but instead Mozilla like so many other alternatives have been taken over a group of rich friends who distributes everyones money among themselves while the browser landscape rots.
Mitchell Baker has received over 22 million dollars in CEO pay since 2015 while absolutely neglecting Firefox.
Try to let that insane number sink in. 22 Millions should be enough to bootstrap a completely new browser, where the hell did it go? Barolo and mansions?
We are in a worsening battle with plutocrats scamming the masses and leeching on so much work done by all of us.
I see people complaining about Chrome and yet refuse to stop using. Stop complaining and start using another browser. If people would actually switch then these companies would actually have to react to user demands.
Same things applies to people complaining about Android, IOS, or anything other operating system. Use something else!!
Just use Brave, if you don't like crypto, just completely ignore it. It isn't even in your face unless you want it to be. The browser is just like Chrome without the "phone to google". Plus it has a more performant version of Adblock builtin.
Very much on-brand for Google, the company that wanted to bring us DRM for web browsers, in the form of Web Environment Integrity, brought us DRM for web video in the form of Widevine, and wants to get rid of working adblockers with Manifest V3.
It's surprisingly hard to steer tech literate users off this cancer. They complain and complain, yet refuse to go back to FF for all sorts of nonsensical reasons which clearly boil down to "I don't want to".
Well, then stick with watching ads and don't ever cry on my shoulder again. I don't care.
Google simply saw where Microsoft failed in their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy and figured out a way to do it better. By all accounts, Chrome has a bigger stranglehold on the web than IE ever did, and if you don't use Chrome you'll get a sub-standard experience in most of their products and services.
It says as much that Microsoft ditched their own browser engine for Chromium, so even if it's not Chrome it's still Google-driven.
Mozilla could have got in front of this by making Gecko/Servo as easy to embed as Chrome, so we'd see more alternative browsers based on Firefox tech.
All of this Chrome popularity comes from hijacking with "additional offer" in Windows software installers where people just mindlessly click "next next finish" and then they didn't event noticed their browser changed. Google got their users by dirty tactics, not because their browser was good and gained interest of the public.
Or worse: In this very comment section is someone complaining that the CEO takes home a lot of money while the company stagnates. You know, like pretty much every midsize company out there.
They took "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good" as a personal challenge.
I've been considering the switch to FF, but there have been a couple of very specific annoyances that I haven't been able to find a workaround for, so I'm stuck on Chrome for the time being...
1. When copypasting messages from discord (I do this a lot for notetaking purposes) it randomly inserts a large number of newlines into the pasted text for some reason.
e.g. instead of "[8:15PM] username: message" it shows up as
[
8:15pm
]
username
:
message
2. Also I think this may be related to the fact that I use a wacom tablet instead of a mouse and it's really hard to reproduce but sometimes when scrolling on a webpage it just randomly like. jumps to different pages in quick succession, as if it's clicking links on the page very rapidly when I scroll.
None of these happen with Chrome. idk if it's a bug or just something configured weirdly on my end.
You mean the FireFox that won’t even allow you to persistently install an unpacked extension without installing a whole different version of the browser (Developer Edition, maybe also nightly)? I’ll take enabling dev mode any day. In fact I’ve had that enabled for more than a decade anyway.
I switched back to FF, but honestly, I find it annoying that there isn't a better option. Firefox is (for me) the least-worst option. I really miss the existence of a browser that I actually like.
Honestly, if that happened they'd be ceding territory to Apple. One of the reasons I develop for Android and not iOS is I can do it on my personal computer with no buy-in from Google and no developer license I'm charged for.
It certainly isn't because the APIs are better.
Given that it's a duopoly out there, they might choose to do this. But it's not a free option; there's market-share risk involved.
China is forcing it's manufacturers off Official Android domestically. Perhaps HarmonyOs or similar ends up with most of the developing world since Android for export phones won't be the best bang for the buck. That would put a dent in Google's ability to push API updates and further deteriorate their ability to push Google services instead of common AOSP interfaces with developers targeting a wide market.
I guess I'm dense, because I don't understand why someone would switch to apple from android because they become priced equally? why would a price driven person make a completely lateral move?
