Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> And you see that as a reason enough to prevent millions of users from choosing their browser?

"Only works in Chrome" will prevent millions of users from choosing a browser; Google already fucks with Firefox in spots, because they can. Anyone who built websites in the late 90s / early 2000s remembers the IE monoculture.



I remember the IE monoculture, and you know what broke it? Choice. Being able to install firefox, opera (and later chrome and safari) on windows, being able to install icab or other browsers on mac os even when apple shipped IE5 as the default.


If IE had been a thing on iOS we might never have been free of it.


Firefox was already at 25% when the iphone released[0]. The idea that there wasn't competition in the browserspace before the iphone is wrong.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers


Break YouTube in Firefox (which Google does sometimes these days) and people switch to Chrome.

Break it on iOS Safari and you’re losing actual revenue.


You talked about when iOS/iphone launched. Youtube did not work on iOS safari back then since it used flash. You're moving the goalposts.

Either way you still have not proven that less user choice now somehow leads to more user choice in the future.


You’re really missing the point, but as a bonus, that’s why the iPhone launched with a dedicated YouTube app; Google didn’t want to give up all that potential revenue.

We know letting a dominant player abuse their position to corner the market has long-term downsides to user choice. Windows, IE, and now Chrome.


> We know letting a dominant player abuse their position to corner the market has long-term downsides to user choice. Windows, IE, and now Chrome.

The solution to that is to stop the abuse, not remove user choice.


I’m all for breaking Chrome apart from Google’s ads business.

Until regulators stop being asleep at the wheel, “we can’t lock iOS users out of everything” likely keeps Safari alive.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: