The use of Shadow DOM v0 is a pretty good push, though. Chrome is way faster to load a YouTube page than FF. I hope they update their version of Polymer soon.
And managing your security keys also requires Chrome, if you're on Firefox you also get told it's incompatible, despite being compatible.
Can they just add DRM to content they do not own? They could likely work something out, but the problems may outweigh the benefit they would gain.
that implies either Apple's FairPlay or Microsoft's PlayReady; no Widevine
Can you tell me what you are basing that on?
From my long experience with browsers, Google is beating the other main browsers primarily due to competence. Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla have huge teams, and each has their own marketing advantages.
0. Competence at security. Chrome is unbelievably secure - although perhaps this says more about Google tooling and culture than the Chrome Dev team. My impression is that Mozilla and Microsoft have struggled to be secure.
1. Competence at fixing bugs. Chrome absolutely creams the competition here (I have much experience with this. Chrome is amazing, Mozilla is middling, Apple and Microsoft are hideous).
2. Competence at avoiding regressions. Chrome seems to be fabulously reliable software considering its complexity and development velocity. Safari and Edge have given me many many headaches with odd breaking changes.
3. Competence at delivering to wide range of hardware and OS versions. Chrome has hardly given me any problems with Android or multiple Windows versions. I wish I could say the same for Chrome's competitors on their respective OS. Safari only has to deal with known hardware and OS version, yet I regularly discover weird composition faults. I don't know much about Firefox here.
4. Many other organisations break down with large dev teams: Google breaks that trend. That's institutional competence.
> And ultimately, Google employees have control over what gets upstreamed and which contribution gets rejected.
So alternatives? Community edition run by W3C? Socialist version funded by a Google tax? Tongue in cheek, but you seem to imply we should tell Google how to run their operation differently.
As to the issue of DRM, why are we blaming Google for the DRM agreements that economically it had little choice to accept? Everything I have seen implies that the copyright barons are forcing Google to support it. Out of control DRM is our collective failure to control some powerful copyright lobbies. I am not a fan of DRM (or huge copyright terms).
I too am sad that other browsers are failing to compete with Google. I especially want to see Mozilla succeed. But I think we should recognise the skill of the Chrome Dev team.
And Mozilla (2016): has about 1,200 employees, revenue $520 million. Yet technically not keeping up.
> Compare that with EdgeHTML's core dev team, which was well under 100 people
Microsoft and Apple may choose to have smaller teams. They also only have to make each release of their browser work on their latest OS release, and they don't release to multiple OS's (Native Chrome is maintained for multiple versions of Android, ChromeOS, Linux, Windows, macOS).
And the myth(?) that smaller teams are more productive!
Apple and Microsoft are both outrageously rich companies: if they choose not to compete, why should we knock Google?
Meanwhile the Chrome team has beaten Mozilla at open source, which should be Mozilla's strength (V8, node.js, Electron, closure compiler, remote debugging, Samsung browser, Edge 76, Chromium, etc etc). The brightest non-browser component to come out of Mozilla to me is rust, which is a tour de force (Mozilla does have some serious technical chops), and as a developer mdn is superb.
Mozilla chased multiple dead-ends during that time, perhaps most notably Firefox OS (even though gonk was based on Android? [2]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
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[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/Plat...
Google owns the largest digital advertising platform in the world and controls the most popular consumer OS, it's hard to beat that reach.
And Chrome beating Edge and Safari is technical, not marketing. If iOS wasn't closed (Apple's market advantage), would Safari be dominant there?
Mozilla had us up to 2010 because Firefox was a better browser.
I'd really like to see how you came to this conclusion. I hate to be a fanboy but I don't really notice any performance difference between the two in daily use, except in some webGL demos.
Google fought dirty back against Microsoft. Microsoft pulled very dirty tactics to ram Edge down the gullets of Windows users. Google used the same tactics as used by a large percentage of installers on Windows: business as usual?
Or Google actually supported Windows 7 users, because Microsoft wouldn't. Maybe Google really needed a browser that worked and was secure on Windows 7 (not Internet explorer).
Microsoft owned the APIs to their OS yet Chrome beat them on their own turf - ouch!
""" Our 2019 goals for Servo - especially the Mozilla staff - are aligned with the Mixed Reality efforts at Mozilla:
* Higher quality text rendering with WebRender and Pathfinder, originally designed for desktop but now tuned for VR and AR hardware.
* Expanding the set of VR/AR platforms that can run Servo natively
* Contributing to new standards such as as WebXR, based on implementation experience on new platforms
* Achieving competitive performance and compatibility of new and existing mixed reality web content """
And with the new edge, there even will be a Chrome fork that supports EME DRM as well, and most likely it will support higher resolutions than Chrome itself as it's using OS built in DRM mechanisms that the studios love.
DRM is not the source of Google's control over Chrome. They use a different mechanism: manpower. They have an insane amount of developers working on Chrome, constantly changing it. Any smaller project forking Chrome and changing some major part won't be able to keep up with the changes unless they upstream. And ultimately, Google employees have control over what gets upstreamed and which contribution gets rejected.