The android OS has no knowledge of chrome and it doesn't get any special handling or abilities like iOS/Safari.
"The Reddit experience isn't complete in your browser. Please download the official app to continue:"
By contrast iOS is ~50% of mobile OS market share (in the US, I think it's less elsewhere). Hardly a monopoly. If using a different mobile browser is important to you, there's a competing, popular mobile OS that can provide that.
Ecosystems exist. Throw away your phone and every piece of software you've ever bought for it just so you can install a particular app? Ridiculous.
If governments give corporations with such overwhelming market dominance completely free rein then developers are nothing more than sharecroppers and consumers are going to pay the price either financially, in terms of privacy or through limited choice.
The specific term here would be duopoly.
And a duopoly still has a large ability to engage in anti-competitive practices that harm the market.
50% of a market is with the realm where you can cause significant harm to competition.
They also control 100% of the OSes that run iOS applications, and allow iOS purchases to be redeemed.
That sounds a lot like a monopoly to me.
you could have saved time and just said "I disagree but refuse to explain my disagreement"
It's good for Google when Chrome is good. So Google has a great incitament to improve Chrome. The only drawbacks would be proprietary functionality others can't use.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/724441/what-is-googles-floc-and-ho...
Google makes most of their money from search ads -- I've heard upwards of 80% -- and search ads supposedly don't even use targeting information.
And what proprietary functionality is that? Chromium exists and does all the same things.
Ah yes.
The preferred choice advertised by dominant web search.
The preferred choice that is forced by Google apps when clicking on links that actually conveniently forget about said choice.
The preferred choice when Google sabotages competition across its dominant platforms https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686
And so on
Chrome is getting bundled with a buttload of software. So many software that comes with an ‘installer’ has a hidden checkbox somewhere that if you don’t uncheck it, it will install Chrome on your windows machine.
Also Edge is now the default on Windows which is also Chromium. So a Chromium-only future doesn’t sound so distant anymore.
Namely an engine isn't a product and most value-add is in the porcelain of the browser, implementation of web standards -shouldn't- be a competitive advantage because doing leads the the sort of fragmentation that we don't want.
If all the major browsers shared and worked on a single engine collaboratively (similar to PostgreSQL and Linux) I think the web would be a -much- better place as a result for a number of reasons.
1. Aforementioned standards could be relied on by developers.
2. Browser vendors could spend less time duplicating efforts on low level standards implementation that aren't product differentiation.
3. Platform specific performance optimisation could be shared across browsers instead, i.e Safari like energy performance for everyone.
4. Plugin architecture could potentially be shared across all available browsers which would help plugin authors out significantly.
5. The engine could be linked as a dynamic library so that multiple browsers could be installed without duplicating the engine binaries if they are using the same version (probably only viable on Linux distributions but would be nice)
6. Fuzzing and security efforts wouldn't need to be duplicated across engines. This is important because of just how gnarly the sorts of code you see in browsers. Namely XML/SGML parsers, JS runtimes/isolation, etc. Also with every vendor chipping in this infrastructure could likely be greatly expanded.
This is a utopian view and most of this probably wouldn't come to pass because the world sucks at doing the "right" thing but the potential is there.
On the other hand the downsides mostly amount to Chromium governance could be bad and Google could abuse their position to make it hard to create new browsers based on Chromium/Blink. However they would be incentivised not to in order to prevent a return to the current fragmented situation.
This somewhat prevents browsers from implementing fully proprietary tech that canät be replicated by anyone else. It does lead to problems like WebSQL being scrapped (the idea was to basically run sqlite in the browser, Mozilla said they donät want to reverse-engineer sqlite behaviour for an independent implementation, the idea was scrapped).
However, with Google dominance we see more and more things appearing in Chrome only and based on Chrome's own goals, and then advertised as standards.
There's an ideal state somewhere, but I don't know how we could reach it.
If Chromium was to become the same thing we could have just had WebSQL assuming maintainers agreed it was worth landing and maintaining.
None of the future IEs were very good though, IMHO.
It’s only what MS let happen later that turned IE into the pariah it is today.
IE shipped on (almost) every machine, had a ton of lock in features like ActiveX, etc. MS actively abused their monopoly position to make it so preventing default installation of Netscape by OEMs, incentivising ISVs to ensure web based enterprise products shipped with "Works best in Internet Explorer" etc. Netscape lost market share to IE not because it lost users but because while the userbase was massively expanding they were buying Wintel boxes that shipped with IE on them so they never learnt that Netscape existed.
Chrome is something users install because it's their preferred choice. We can argue as to why it's their preferred choice but the point remains that users actively download and install Chrome - usually as one of the first things they do when they purchase a new computer.
That to me puts things on an entirely different level. To compete reasonably with Chrome you need to compete for users directly. You could argue that Google abuses it's monopoly position to market Chrome and that would probably be a valid argument but again, it doesn't change the active decision users are making.
If anything Safari (especially on iOS) is more like IE. In that it serves Apple more than it serves users. Apple wants PWAs to remain gimped, by simply dragging their feet or refusing to implement certain web standards/proposals they effectively gimp PWAs. This forces apps to be written for their platform which in turn is where they generate the vast majority of their scalable growth/profit.