The problem with Chrome dominating is it makes Google ecosystem dominates. With Chrome, you can sync your history with your Google account, it pushes you to use Google services, sends analytics to Google etc.

Edge, even with it's Chromium engine, fixes all that by offering Microsoft's ecosystem.

So yes, changing to Edge does change a lot. And Google will fight to keep Chrome's lead, 100%.

The problem is that even Microsoft with their infinite resources has to play catch up.

They have to devote developer hours to removing Google-advantaging features instead of adding their own custom goodies.

And even if said goodies take off, they're going to have a hard time getting them merged back to "root Blink" and into the rest of the browser ecosystem.

> With Chrome, you can sync your history with your Google account, it pushes you to use Google services, sends analytics to Google etc.

Yeah that's why I like using it

I know Microsoft has earned back a lot of goodwill especially from nerds like us due to some of the stuff they've done with VS Code, GitHub, and gaming, but I trust Google way more to not be a scumbag company. Of all the companies to hoard data, Google is in my view the most trustworthy and the most incentivized to be good stewards of said data.

The idea of moving the web to a single dominating browser engine isn’t a bad one in isolation.

A business monopoly is bad, but a technological monopoly is often just a standard.

Nobody gets upset because every OS under the sun uses OpenSSH rather than competing with their own implementation.

In contrast, Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.

Spin the Chromium project off of being in direct control by Google and into an industry organization and I’d be happy to settle on one browser engine.

Heck, if my iPhone got to use Chromium it would be an improvement.

All the proprietary corporate stuff on top of Chromium isn’t part of the open source project, anyway.

I think the concern here is that, as a practical matter, vendors wouldn't be free to make arbitrary changes within their own forks; some parts of the system would have to remain interoperable. And technical decisions regarding what those parts should do and how they should work would still have to be made somehow, and it's not clear that "open source project" type governance would be better than the W3C process that we have today, especially when it comes to interfacing with governments. Good blog post about this: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/22/chromium-only

> but a technological monopoly is often just a standard.

Sure. To use, participate in, and build upon this "open standard", you (or your team) just have to keep up with some of the most well-paid (presumably for a reason) programmers in the world, and then hope they see Chromium as an open standard worthy of pull requests as well.

The model the OP mentions is exactly how openstreetmap functions. A lot of big teddy companies hire people specifically to improve it. Only Google doesn't.

It's not unthinkable for a browser project to work the same way.

Big tech, not teddy :)

Sorry about the autocorrect error. It's too late to change it

I somewhat agree with the rest but:

> In contrast, Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.

Does it? I haven't ever been negatively affected or even affected at all as far as I can tell, I happen not to use Apple products or interact with the Apple ecosystem much.

What would these effects be?

It has some annoying times, mostly for people using apple products, though. Like Macbooks not implementing USB-C monitor chaining but supporting Thunderbolt chaining, or even something as simple as my friend being unable to charge her phone in my car because all of my cables are usb-c.

You don't even have to own Apple stuff to be impacted.

"My phone's dead, can I borrow your charger?"

"Sorry, I have an iPhone."

Technology monopolies are bad since one critical vulnerability means everybody is impacted. Having a standard that people conform to is fine, but the monopoly on an implementation is bad.

>Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.

That's a different interface, not just a separate implementation

Let's not mince any words. Edge is just Chrome(ium) with Microsoft adware.

And some nice added features. I use Edge over chrome for 2 reasons only:

- It has vertical tab support out of the box (is this even possible in chrome? I know Firefox can do it with extensions) - it has very flexible support for automatically sleeping and closing unused tabs. I sleep tabs after an hour except for a couple sites I’ve whitelisted.

Both of these are features other browsers either don’t have or require opening up a potential security whole to a 3rd party through extensions.

I take your point but I gotta say I trust the authors of the Tree Style Tabs FF extension much more than I trust Microsoft.

TST has a good feature set, but it is incredibly slow with a large number of tabs, to the point of being unusable on older hardware.

Sideberry has every feature of TST I ever used (and a few more), and is reasonably fast.

Ha! I just wrote a very similar reply to another comment. I use Linux in my personal laptop and about 6 months ago moved from vanilla Chrome to Edge because of the vertical tabs. The UI is really neat with the grouping and coloring. I also installed Tab Suspender because I didn't know it had the "sleeping tabs" out of the box.

So far it has been a superior experience to vanilla chrome, and at least in Linux I haven't seen any "adcrap". I installed Ublock Origin and everything is pretty neat.

> It has vertical tab support out of the box (is this even possible in chrome?

Vivaldi browser[1] has supported native vertical tabs for many years (possibly since its introduction in 2015), though sadly it doesn't get as much coverage in the media or in discussions. Made by the original Opera founder who left that company in ~2010.

[1] https://vivaldi.com

And Chrome is just Chromium with Google adware. I'd prefer people were using something else, but I would rather have them split between Google and Microsoft adware than all on Google's.

Microsoft being the key term there.

Actually, I've been using Edge as my main browser in Linux for the last couple of months. The main reason is that it is the only Chrome based browser that has a good vertical tabs interface integrated. They are pretty good, with grouping, colors and whatnot. I've tried every extension in chrome but nothing comes closer. I also used to use "tree style tabs" back when I used Firefox, but I find Fx unusable nowadays. A combo of vertical-tabs, tabs-suspender and extensity are a winner mix for me in Edge. in Linux!