Besides, the mobile web is becoming more and more of a niche platform, since the web is becoming centralised as time passes and most main sites redirect to their own apps.

And that’s without considering direct web search being replaced by AI search,which google seems convinced is the way forward.

Google pushes Chrome HARD.

Also, it's wise to not underestimate the power of developers ceasing to test against non-Blink browsers and taking a page from their IE-era past selves with "Best Viewed in Chrome" and "Browser outdated! Download Chrome" badges. There are few user motivators stronger than things not working.

As far as I can see there are only two possibilities on any kind of near term:

Apple can lock Google and everyone else out, or Google can take over the web fully.

Those appear to be our only choices right now. I don’t like either one. But I know which one I don’t like more.

The existence of a threat from Google does not justify the existence of anti-competitive business practices by Apple. We do not have to "pick a favorite" monopoly, we can and should use legislation to handle both. Framing this as a binary choice is a defeatist tactic that serves only to protect the Gatekeepers and preserve the status quo.

What can we do in the next two years (let’s say) that would accomplish both letting other browsers on iOS and preventing Chrome from taking over everywhere?

I don’t know of another option. As far as I can see, that’s it.

Longer term yeah we should break up Google. If they didn’t own Chrome that would fix the problem. But is that going to happen in the next year or two?

Or are we about to hand them even more control and then spend the next 5-10 years trying to unwind it?

As I’ve said elsewhere I don’t like this situation. I don’t think governments should have allowed it to get here. I’m not picking an”favorite monopoly”, just the option of the only two I see right now that I think will do less harm.

We’ve screwed ourselves and I don’t want to make it worse for (at least) quite a few years.

That line of roleplay of yours also seems to be just 'Doomsday Defense' part 2. Now you’re adding an arbitrary time limit ("next two years") to justify inaction. We don't need to "unwind" Google before we stop Apple's anti-competitive behavior, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. The fact that you view "allowing other browsers" (like Firefox) as "handing Google control" reveals the flaw in your logic. You are effectively arguing that we must destroy the village (the open web) to save it from the dragon, if this isn't concern trolling then I don't know what is.

And if you find any content, it’s on a website riddled with ads.

AI search has none of these issues. Google from 15 years ago was wildly superior to today.

Yet. AI feeds from the content it substitutes. I’m skeptical to the long term feasibility for this reason, how is it going to bring me news when publishing those news is no longer profitable, for example?

but this can change. At least in the EU Apple already prompts a user which browser they want [1]. While at the moment every browser is WebKit under the hood, this will probably change as the EU is also pushing Apple to allow other engines [2] - and with users knowing Chrome from Ads, their work or from a previous Android phone, I can imagine a lot of them selecting Chrome as a default.

1: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Apple-alters-selection-screen-f... 2: https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...

You HAVE to use Chrome or possibly Firefox. We’ve always seen what Firefox is doing, they’re not going to be our saviors again.

1. They produce the world’s buggiest browser by far. Look at this chart that shows the number of bugs that ONLY OCCUR IN A SINGLE BROWSER. https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...

2. They don’t support any modern testing protocols like WebdriverBiDi

3. They don’t make their software available to anyone who isn’t using Apple’s hardware.

The core root of the problem is very clearly Apple who’ve done nothing other than make the world’s buggiest and least accessible browser and then tried to hold everyone hostage who was previously forced to use it until courts had to stop them and they had no choice.

Why should they? When did this become a rule? If Atari survived would they be required to make Windows software? Be? Commodore?

Where/why does/should the law require everyone to make Windows apps?

Really?

It's logical to skip that step.

It was possible to rip people away from Microsoft. That may not be something we can do this time with Chrome.

Try telling someone that moving off of Chrome may mean moving off of every single Google property because Chrome is the only browser they work on by then.

See how easy an argument that is. It’s right up with there with “stop helping capitalism and move to the woods“.

1. The US isn’t doing this. They have a case but aren’t calling for breakup

2. We all know howling anti-trust and appeals take

If Google gets handed the web (let’s say) this year by Apple being forced to allow them, it could be a decade+ before the Google side gets tackled.

And I’m afraid of how much damage they can do in that timeframe.

I think fixing Google’s ownership over Chrome before forcing other browsers on iOS would be less harmless than forcing iOS to allow other browsers than doing Google.

I’m totally good with doing both. I worried about the effects of the order they’re done in.

And I am only saying this about browser engines. This should not be taken to say Apple should be able to do some of the other nonsense they’ve been doing for 10+ years abusing their position.

From my perspective, Google tends to focus on somewhat niche features that will benefit a small slice of web apps. In contrast, the things Apple works on are those that benefit everything from static blog sites to huge commercial web apps.

I wish Google were more like Apple in this regard, because the primitives from which everything web is built are still overwhelmingly crude, which results in the half-ton-truck-built-on-a-golf-cart frameworks and apps the web has become famous for. Making the web reasonable to develop for without a dependency tree that looks like a spiral fractal would do way more to make it flourish as a platform than things like access to the GPU and USB devices.

No orientation API so impossible to make games and other experiences that require a certain orientation

No WebXR (though Apple will allow it on Vision Pro)

No support for ResizeObvserver devicePixelContentBoxSize so impossible to get correct rendering reguardless of user's zoom level.

No simple PWA installation. Requires an obscure incantation that only expert users know.

That's just a few off the top of my head.

Yes, I know all the comments will be about how they don't want those features. That's really irrelevant. Allow them to be turned off. Require permissions. Those features have been shipping on other OSes, Desktop and Mobile for > 5 years and the world hasn't ended.

That said, the only plugins I use are ad blockers, so maybe I’m missing something.

https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...

It’s undeniable that Apple makes a dogshit browser.

And in your opinion "being honest" is speaking for every web dev out there?

I've been a web dev for 25 years (god I'm old) and Safari has not been a major pain for me.

You keep bandying wpt.fyi results around not even understanding what they mean. E.g. Safari only passes 8 out of 150 accelerometer tests. So? Does it affect every web dev? Lol no. But it does pass 57 out 57 accessibility tests which is significantly more important.

Even if that's an edge case, it's why having only one engine is pathological. Maybe Safari iOS works fine for you. Not for me. I don't want rationalization on why it's not Apple's fault, or somehow not Safari's fault, or "they'll fix it one day", or "I'm doing it wrong", or all the fanboy-talk that sounds like the enabling relative of an alcoholic. Don't care. I should be able to switch for even the most frivolous reason. Maybe I don't like that it doesn't render every website in pink.

It's like having only one type of chocolate in existence. This was never normal.

Do you see any pattern to which pages it happens to?

What kind of control would Chrome have over the web? Adding APIs doesn't force the billions of websites to adopt them. So what if a website adds WebBluetooth? You don't want the web to have that anyway, and if you keep using Safari, you still won't have it. Happy you!

If scrappy Firefox on open platforms could save the web from 95% IE, then why are we all dependent on Apple, alone, to save us from ~60% Chrome? It's learned helplessness and Stockholm syndrome. I wonder how our species survived before the trillion-dollar company started taking such good care of us!

> I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.

>

> I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation Robin Hood waylanders)."

edit: I see now. Firefox still has uBlock Origin. You missed the point. If Chrome wants to make itself less attractive, you should celebrate.

I wonder how many chrome fanboys remember the ie6 days.

I appreciate that Chrome reducing user autonomy in order to further Google's own business goals _should_ be a reduction in their competitiveness in a perfect market.

But the web browser market does not have perfect competition today, and I cannot recall a time when it had.

Regulators preventing Apple from controlling iOS browser engines but allowing Google to have de facto ownership of the web would be an example of governments picking winners and losers.

Public policy needs to move the market towards real competition.

I have much more faith in a new entrant, like Ladybird. I should be able to use Ladybird on iOS. Why not?

Tabs/stability (Firefox vs IE). V8 (Chrome vs Firefox).

Anything else is a battle of attrition, where the deepest pocketed competitor in terms of advertising spend wins. Or Google, because it flood all its own advertising channels.

And Chrome still barely only won.

They are more concerned with making something from scratch than something that actually works.

Also they’re switching over to Swift which can only be worse for performance.

https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=What%20does%20%22No%20code%20f...

I want something free of Google code, which sounds like they aren’t doing if Skia is anyway involved.

Instead they’re wasting resources where it’s less needed. Like building a JS engine instead of starting off with something like SpiderMonkey, JSCore, or QuickJS.

View sponsors https://ladybird.org/

Because ie at the time was dogshit. FF was such an indisputable improvement that people just had to switch.

Chrome great. There is nothing a newcomer can do to compete.

Think of the plethora of instances where you wish your browser made minor changes to make browsing easier

Do you remember Manifest Version 3? They did away with ad block extensions.

If we all end up using Chromium, there’s no longer a web standard. It’s whatever conforms to Google’s standard because all sites will have to support Chromium. That means there will be an undocumented spec. It’s much too difficult for browser engine developers to compete with them, they don’t have nearly the resources.

Do you think the web should be an open standard? How can company catch up if Google is the one pushing the envelope?

The idea that you’re pushing is a hole that Apple themselves have dug on purpose, this is not an oversight but a very intentional decision of theirs to protect their profit margins that their main user retention strategy is that many courts in the world especially the US are never going to force them to compete freely in an open marketplace with consumer choice is a factor.

Whereas, a company that has 70% of the global browser market somehow would have no way to take advantage if they had an even larger share.

I wonder how our species would survive without the unique market analysis from one-of-a-kind minds like yours.

The OS lock-in is much more difficult to break than Web where the standards are openly built and made available. One aspect in favor of Google is the complexity of implementing all those standards. But that is not lock-in, rather an issue of having enough resources to implement a compliant browser.

Where have you been in the past 10 years or so? Chrome views the web as their own fiefdom, and web devs happily oblige. There are now dozens of Chrome-only non-standards that are presented as "openly built standards" and devs deride other browsers for not implementing them.

In case of Windows, there is no spec. There is no possibility of implementing another Windows clone (patents limit such clones). Wine exists, but was reverse engineered with great difficulty.

A scribble on a napkin does not a standard make.

A feature released in a single browser engine without support, consent, and against objections of other browser vendors does not a standard make.

Just because Chrome ships something does not make whatever they ship a standard.

> The documentations and specifications are available for free.

That's how Chrome abuses its position and relies on gullible devs to assume that just because something is documented it becomes a standard the moment it's shipped in Chrome.

That's not how standards work.

Absolutely not. Most of us are perfectly happy with Apple tightly integrating Safari with their hardware.

However, we're going to legally forbid them to prevent users from breaking that tight integration, because it's their device. Apple doesnt "own" the smartphone market: it provides hardware and services, and it shuts the fuck up.

You are assuming adding APIs is a net positive, and the debacle that was Chrome’s privacy sandbox initiative suggests that’s not the case

> why are we all dependent on Apple, alone, to save us from ~60% Chrome?

How’s Firefox doing now? They’re literally dependent upon Chrome to exist. Without Google they have no money to fund development.

The only viable non-Chromium browser engine today that is not funded by Google is WebKit.

Firefox is not going to save us again. It’s arguably part of the problem in a different way.

The reason why we have a Chrome/Safari hegemony is because Apple insisted on everything being Safari on their device platforms. This combined with Android shipping WebKit for years meant that the only mobile browser engine that mattered was WebKit. Chrome is a different engine now, but it was forked from WebKit, and it used to have a lot of the same quirks. Hell, Microsoft switched to Blink specifically because Electron - their own web app shell - couldn't run on EdgeHTML.

The fact that this change practically means Chrome displacing Safari is... not really all that meaningful. They're both forks of the same code. The single-engine dystopia you worry about is already here. I daily-drive Firefox, and the amount of shit Google deliberately breaks on Gecko is obvious. Like, YouTube tabs freeze up every few hours because they get stuck in garbage collection, and I have to manually kill whatever processes are running YouTube before I can watch another video. That sort of thing.

I don’t think one company should own all the stuff that Google does. It gives them way too many perverse incentives over the web.

I’m not saying it’s smart we got here. I’m not saying it’s good we got here. I’m not saying we should be here.

All I’m saying is we ARE here. And given that (effective screw up) I fear this will make things drastically worse.

Does it? It might give them perverse incentives in some cases, but in others it perfectly aligns their incentives by letting them internalize their externalities. The whole selling point of Chrome to executives, and the reason it's introduced so many nice features, is that consolidating means they have an incentive to invest in things that make their websites work better (a better Chrome means a better Google/Gmail/YouTube/Drive).

Google feeds DoubleClick. Gmail does too. YouTube is a pure ad play.

Drive/Docs/etc. I’d say drives Chrome and undercuts competitors.

And Chrome? It drives Google. And Google also helps drive YouTube.

They all end in ads.

If Chrome wasn’t owned by an ad company that owned all that other stuff I wouldn’t be as worried. I still don’t like the idea of a Chrome monoculture. But if it was independent I’d be less alarmed.

Eventually, the hell that was IE was a combination of hostile user experience, security problems, performance problems, and developer pain in finding workarounds or other support because it was so far behind on everything. It had nothing to do with their power to dictate or experiment with new features. The extent of the hostile user experience that leaked outside the browser itself was the "only works on IE" problem that forced people to use IE for that site, on the whole it was comparable to the "only works with Flash or Java applets" problems and not as bad as the experience of the browser itself. For the most part these days, the two parts of that hell that remain relevant are the hostile user experience and the developer pains parts, and Mobile Safari is the successor to both for over a decade now. No one supports IE11 anymore (let alone older IEs) but they still have to support Mobile Safari. I have fonder memories of dealing with IE11 (and earlier) support/workarounds over Mobile Safari's crap. My view is more power to actual Chromium-based browsers on mobile even if I personally use Firefox on PC and android despite their user experience shortcomings (at least they're not very hostile). The only part of hell I'd be worried about is that of a hostile user experience, which can be worked around by individual users if they are allowed choices.

Only for those misguided "push the web forward" idiots who just wanted the latest shiny shit, aided by Google's plans to control the Internet itself. Plain HTML worked well enough for everything else.

Google's weapon is change. They have the resources to outcompete everyone else by churning the "standards" as much as they want. The less people think that constant change is necessary, the better the web will be.

Technologies like HTTP and Wasm are truly excellent tools for cross platform software delivery and browsers are an ideal sandboxed execution environment.

This idea that the web should only be for straight up HTML documents is a broken mental model.

Apple have a multi-billion dollar income stream that is firmly premised on the fact that nobody could deliver software on their platform unless they could steal 30% of the companies profits and as such spent a huge amount of time and effort undermining the idea that the web could ever be an app platform but you’re not compelled to cheerlead for Apple’s profit margins and anti-consumer bullshit.

Then the problem isn't adding features to make web apps more capable, either.

Web apps replacing unsandboxed applications is a net win. We could argue about whether web apps replacing sandboxed applications is a net win as well, but most local applications on PCs are not sandboxed, and even mobile applications aren't sandboxed as strongly as web apps. (I would love to see an "allow network access" permission on a per-mobile-app basis.)

On a more serious note: what is Apple exactly saving you from here? If Apple allows you to install any browser (including theirs) is there a downside?

I mean I get it - what you're saying is that if Apple allows it everyone will just install Chrome. But what does that really say?

I have an iPhone now and miss Firefox for Android (with Ublock, sponsorblock, etc). But this painful restriction is the only thing stopping Chrome from becoming the new IE6.

At a few startups I've worked for, the devs all use chrome exclusively, and only test in chrome during development.

The only reason they consider other browsers, is because of Safari on iOS. Sometimes it's driven by support calls / complains from iOS users after a release. If Chrome's engine is allowed on iOS, that means support can just tell the users to install Chrome (like they do now if anyone has issues on Windows in other browsers). This means Firefox will usually work as well.

Many years ago, I was able to swap banks when my bank's website stopped working in Opera 12. If all the major banks / websites target Chrome-only, we'll have no choice but to use it. And then we'll have no control as Google push new restrictions into Chrome.

I don’t think they can compete. Apple doesn’t release Safari on Windows (any more, god it was bad) and that basically kills their chance at desktop relevance.

But even if they did my point is Google has way WAY WAY too much leverage and is already in an effective near monopoly position due to making Chromium. iOS is the only reasonably sized bastion left.

And that’s entirely due to Apple’s policy, whether one thinks it’s right or wrong.

The stakes are way too tilted. The market can’t function.

And we’re about to see it “freed”, which is basically handing it to Google for a total monopoly.

And I don’t like that future. Whatever I think of all the other issues with both Apple and Google right now and what has happened in the past.

The best I saw was the case against Google in the US and they decided not to call for breakup.

I don’t see the EU trying to unbundle everything they do.