Hacker News Reader

Comment by kinkrtyavimoodh | Hacker News Reader

I will save you the click. The article spends 1100 out of its 2300 words sitting by the campfire, retelling the epic saga of "Microsoft the arch-enemy numero-uno", followed by another 1100 words about how GMail was Google's attempt at almost extinguishing other email providers, how it was bad to kill Reader (RIP) and how AMP is Google's most brazen evil.

View on HN

Author here. I think one of the important points that hasn't been talked about somewhere else is how Google is using Chrome to do things very similar to what Microsoft has done.

For example, Google has taken over the PDF format (Most PDFs today open in Google Chrome) and not supporting all of the features PDF. They have stopped the further development of PDF format and also blocked the previously made features such as fillable PDF forms by not supporting them.

Isn't supporting a subset of PDF features pretty standard for most browser plugins? These are meant mostly for reading PDFs online and not necessarily making modifications to them and saving them (in the browser cache?).

I wouldn't call something a plugin when it comes bundled with the browser.

Meanwhile the whole web is held back by the Safari browser on a platform where you're forbidden from creating a better competing browser by decree and DRM.

That's true. But, unlike Chrome they don't own the majority of the browser market.

They own the most important and most profitable segment of the mobile browser market, so practically all mobile web sites are designed for Safari. Every startup is iOS/mobile Safari first.

Do you believe that if apple owned 90% of the market that they would open up iOS?

And to "save" even more clicks, it gets flagged off the front page like that.

So much for shallow dismissals... "sitting by the campfire, telling the epic saga", while knowing full well a snarky reply to you isn't allowed.

I read the article before reading the comments.

It feels like what is written in the comment above and then a section blaming Google for not supporting a feature yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com