[1] I'm not sure where it comes from and have never seen any survey/study to back it, but most of the industry seems to think it true.
Related: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux – https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/netflix-on-asahi.html
Chrome isn't what's holding higher resolution Netflix back on Linux, it's the lack of a signed graphics driver by an authority that would revoke anything that didn't enforce the DRM and pushes the decryption to trusted hardware.
True story: A few months ago I applied for a job. The hiring manager sent a link asking me to fill out a form, a Google form. They had it set up to require you be signed in to Google to see the form. I replied to the manager saying I don't have a Google account, nor do I want one. He sent to form questions via email. But I'm convinced he had no clue as to why anyone would want to avoid Google. When I said there are plenty of less offensive alternatives to Google and I sensed he didn't care.
I'm sure you're not the only one he's met who doesn't like Google. He just doesn't care. It's nice that he bothered to send you the questions separately... some might've seen that as a yellow flag, like "I bet this candidate's gonna be a pain. Wonder what else they won't want us to use."
All I'm saying is you do you, but don't expect others to follow. There are plenty of evil companies in the world, and it's not like there's a clear moral superiority between Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They're not offensive to most people. They're just more banally evil companies in an ocean of even eviler companies. Tis life under capitalism.
I would suggest reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."
My biggest worry about Google is just that they've stopped innovating and are in rapid decline, enshittifying everything while also facing regulatory actions. It might not be around in its current form much longer. That scares me only because it's a huge PITA to have to move everything off of Gmail and GDrive and Android and Chrome and have to find replacements for every minor service they offer. Ugh. The privacy angle just gets a big shrug, as it does for millions of other users.
For every person I know who goes out of their way to de-googify their life (there's a couple), dozens of others just don't care at all. It's not what we spend brain time on.
Guess what, every company we interact with on a daily basis is out to exploit us and doesn't have our best interests at heart. The car companies and fossil fuel companies are actively killing us, the food growers use dangerous chemicals, Target and Costco sell us mass produced crap... shrug. It's not just surveillance capitalism, it's everyday capitalism.
Maybe the full book has more substance, but it's not a subject I find all that interesting (hence the don't care).
Fortunately 30 years ago people didn't have that view, and that's why we have things like the web and Linux.
Alas nobody cares about freedom now.
This doesn't work. Appealing to people's emotions about monopolies or privacy does not work. This is a fact at this point; it has been tried repeatedly, and here we are.
Anyone who has been around for some time and tried hard to support multiple browsers in the past got burned out. Web developers want to develop; most don't want to be freedom fighters, and rightfully so.
The closer this is fixed at the source, the better chance it has to work. Unfortunately, the source seems to be outside the browser's engine internals and other interesting technical areas. I'd argue it's in the human/government sphere, where things are slow and require a lot of energy... who's willing to do that?
I'm a nerd. I like to work with technical things. I like to ignore humans and play with machines. None of that will fix the browser monopoly situation (or Firefox/Opera/Brave/etc wouldn't have single-digit market share [0]).
> Anyone who has been around for some time and tried hard to support multiple browsers in the past got burned out. Web developers want to develop; most don't want to be freedom fighters, and rightfully so.
Heard exactly the same thing from the Microsoft fanboys about IE6 15-20 years ago
Chrome was to the web what Windows was to the desktop PC: It made writing mainstream apps with wide distribution practical. It's not like devs were held hostage. They saw an opportunity in this new platform and flocked to it because it was so good. Finally, a way to write an app and deliver it to users across devices, mostly unchanged. Write once (well, really more like 1.3x), run anywhere.
Chrome was a huge improvement over IE and by-then-bloated Firefox, and Gmail and Google Maps and Google Docs good early demonstrators of what the Web could be (yes, they bought many of those, but that's not too relevant here).
Web technologies were still an uncertain bet back in the day, competing against Java, ActiveX, Flash, and plain old PHP/Coldfusion/ASP apps, or even .NET and ClickOnce, etc. Chrome and V8 largely enabled the web and JS to slowly gain traction, alongside the growing ecosystem of JS libraries and frameworks.
The future, then as now, wasn't "FOSS GNU/Linux against Google's web". It was big company against big company. Even now, if it wasn't for the Web and Android, we'd simply have iOS supremacy instead of Windows.
Linux doesn't gain mainstream traction among normal users because its desktop experience is relatively poor, thanks to a historical focus on engineering prowess and ideology over end user UX. It only succeeds when big companies build on top of it and polish it a lot (Android, Steam Deck, Ubuntu, ChromeOS). That's not Google's fault, it's just what the Linux community prioritizes.
Even today, it's amazing that the Web is still largely visible source of HTML and React. And it's contributed to by a bunch of companies, from Meta to Vercel to Cloudflare to Amazon to Oracle to to tens of thousands of small businesses and NPM contributors. This is already vastly more open than iOS and Android apps, at least until WASM closes everything off again. And though Google has definitively won the browser wars, Blink and Webkit are still far more similar than any other two platforms. It's easier to develop for two browsers than even two Linux distros / package managers.
Is it shortsighted? I think it's just going where the users are. And the users are typically going to choose ease of use over strict ideology. This shit isn't their passion. They don't spend their days pondering the virtues and vices of operating systems and licenses. It's just a phone. And to most devs, it's just a platform.
People are practical creatures. They'll use and write apps where other people are. Ideology will never be enough to change that. Usability and popularity might.
Given the EU digital market's act, this will deteriorate very quickly.
I can't believe how shortsighted most developers are. Don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom, etc. Because in the long run it hurts almost everybody and yourself included. This holds for the entire platform economy. If you think government regulation is bad, then wait until you see a market regulated by a platform owner.