Re:Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of m...
by josefx on Thursday October 12, 2023 @12:24AM
(#37853473)
Red Hat was created by a new company that had nearly no market share in any market. But having to repeat the mantra that "anti-competition" is all about abuse of market power in one or more other markets is sadly normal.
> 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.
Re:Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of m...
by robertlagrant on Thursday October 12, 2023 @03:57AM
(#37854580)
> Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely.
What would winning this battle look like/achieve?
Re:Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of m...
by smoldesu on Thursday October 12, 2023 @05:32PM
(#37863425)
It's hard to say. My theory is that the demand for complicated browsers is largely reciprocal to the power of your OS. If you have a Chromebook, then your browser is probably less locked-down than your root system. Same thing would happen if Chrome's Blink engine got put on iOS.
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.
"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.