Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?
Google Chrome is a fast and secure browser for YouTube. Try it? I got this when not logged into google on Edge. It's a popup not a video ad. Edge runs on chromium tech, so this claim is BS. They are in-between monopoly trial. Shouldn't they have limited some of their shady practices? I also can't think brave can run ads like that. Aren't they abusing their position?
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Use Firefox.
yt-dlp is supposed to be the new hotness, though I've yet to try it. https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/
I've been using it as a drop-in replacement for YouTube-dl and it's been great.
"Chrome is a fast and secure browser for YouTube."
That claim is NOT BS. And I am not shilling for Google here, I use Brave and Firefox myself and NEVER used Chrome EVER and I am proud of it. However, they did not claim its MORE secure or faster, they just say "is a fast and secure".
I remember when Chrome came out how heavily Google pushed it back then I used their search. It was something similar I think, or was it Firefox ads somewhere else? Not sure but there was also no claim just a meaningless general statement.
God Google search is it shitty these days. Putting things in quotes does not even work anymore and the search results are garbage.
If recommending a browser was monopolistic behavior, both Microsoft and Apple would be metaphorical rubble by now. The industry has done this for years, our glorious FAANG vanguards decided that browser solicitation was a normal user experience.
> at a fraction of the cost
Microsoft gave IE away for free and there where dozens of IE clones build on top of its engine, you just never had a reason to use any of them because in the end they where still IE clones.
"Then you have the UNIX market that was a lot more diverse before Red Hat Linux hit the market."
I think it will be trivial to prove that Google is actively harming the internet. Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission. If the market decides that a terrible, buggy and enormous runtime is the best way to freely distribute content, then that's what we'll settle on. It's hardly surprising that things got this way, too; locked-down platforms are becoming so normalized that browsers are the only window of freedom users and developers have. It's not like Google or Apple made it any easier to ship native, cross-platform apps in that time, either. So of course users will gravitate to a browser that has more features than their own OS.
So... implicating Google is easy. Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely.
> Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission.
It just happens that all of Googles web properties immediately adopt Chrome only features like the first shadow dom version or outright degrade features on third party browsers. You know small irrelevant services like youtube and maps.
What would winning this battle look like/achieve?
Winning that battle would probably look like one of two things:
- Browsers go back to their original goal of being document renderers, and a new wave of local and online APIs fills in the gaps.
- Browsers stay the way they are, but with broken tooling that forces developers into native APIs whether they want it or not.
And yes, the web would be better served by people building their own, hard forking an existing, or using any of the two or three remaining not-Google solutions. The web would be far better if Google was the only Chromium distribution because we wouldn't have the illusion of a dozen choices that are all just Google's and we'd likely have more and more viable alternatives.