MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help.
(Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right thing)
With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with via its control of the client - Windows.
Google is influencing what the web is viewed with by simply being such a key part of the web itself, and using its weight from that direction instead.
(One could argue that they have Android for the client, but as a percentage of web users it's still far from what Windows had in the IE6 days.)
Firefox won back the web by having a great product, grassroots evangelism, and a Microsoft who badly neglected their competing product for many years. They left an opening.
Chrome might be losing its lustre but it's certainly not being treated the same way. I think Firefox's new battle for market share might be harder than it was vs IE, simply because Google is still so active on this front. In response, the only real new thing in our arsenal is hindsight, which I guess is what the VLC example above is a result of.
Microsoft was trying (and succeeding) for the web not to be a preferable API to Win32, so as to keep that way a high barrier to entry into the OS business. Which is why IE was squarely against standards.
The Web won because a) its introduction was a one-time technological change whose social impact was on the order of the printing press, and b) Microsoft had gotten fat and lazy on their monopoly revenues from Windows and Office.
We can't get cocky here. It is perfectly plausible that HTML will still render 500 years from now. And I'm dead certain that it will still dominate 20 years from now.
Growing up in a major technical revolution, it's easy for us to assume that the future will have a lot of technical revolutions that will keep knocking monopolists, rentiers, and authoritarians off their perches. And if that happens, great. But we should really be planning for the opposite case.
Internet Exploder was constantly evolving and multi-platform.
Did you forget IE ran on PPC Macs, X86 Macs, Windows, and CP/M?
IE updated... just slower than Netscape.
For a long time being a 90s Mac user sucked as different websites required you to use IE on a Windows PC.
On the Mac it went as far as version 5 only. And never made it to x86 (unless you count Rosetta)
So, through the dark ages, IE was very much frozen and Windows only, for all intends and purposes.
I'd love to use Brave on my desktop too, but their lack of plugin/extension/add on support cripples it a little. There's a couple I just can't live without. Using Iridium[2] on the desktop instead.
I believe Chrome has to be installed, but it clearly doesn't have to be the default. Just see all the Samsung phones with the default Samsung Internet Browser as evidence.
As long as Chrome is preinstalled, it will win.
Where do you see this? I have Firefox open and don't see this on Search, Drive, Google Music, etc.
Transcribing the subtitles:
> "To be honest we’ve been offered some insane amounts of money to do bad stuff around VLC, like shipping tool bars at the same time of the installer of VLC or or installing other software like Google Chrome and so on. And when you see the numbers they propose to you, you’re just like: How the fuck am I going to say no to that?"
> "The thing is, it’s not only my project so I’m not allowed to do that. [It’s the] legacy of other people. That wouldn’t be moral."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/technology/google-europea...
As the lead dev of VLC in a recent interview said, they’ve been offered huge amounts of money to include Google Chrome in their installer, and saying no was the hardest decision he’s ever made.
As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites, as long as Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox (see the youtube redesign), as long as Google pays developers to ship Chrome as malware with every single installer, as long as Google forces OEMs to install Chrome with Android, Chrome will rule the market.
The only solution now is the EU.