The Browser Monopoly
blairreeves.me
blairreeves.me
Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a twinkle.)
>It is mind-boggling that basic tools like these are not yet standard features in browsers.
How long have browsers offered to save passwords? Seems like a lot of bad history in this article.
>The way existing password managers work, the vendor’s liability even if they are hacked is minimal. They don’t hold any passwords!
HUH? Yes they do.. They absolutely hold a copy of your password ... in the cloud.
>Sure, Chromium and the V8 engine are open-source, but they still belong to Google in a way that, say, TCP/IP or IMAP does not.
Im gonna feel really bad breaking the QUIC / HTTP/3 news. Cuz google totally wrote the new transport layer. They wrote the last one too (SPDY HTTP/2.) With this much market share, what google implements and forces the hands of the standards organizations.
>This is why Microsoft’s decision to kill Internet Explorer, once the leading portal to the web, and replace it with a Chromium-based successor says so much about its new direction as a company. I suspect that decision had more to do with clearly understanding Microsoft’s strengths and weaknesses than anything else.
Its primarily for two reasons. 1 is battery life, they want to embed blink into the os so programs dont need to bundle it (electron included.) 2 is because 99% of the web just targets blink now. I dont think you can credit "the move to ssas" alone with Microsoft finally abandoning IE derivatives.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-tabbed-browsing
Off-topic, but I don't think its about being cocky. For me, the most difficult thing to keep in mind about information technology is that it is entirely a construct of the human mind and we haven't yet devised methods to validate it against reality.
We see things as they are now and think "well, of course it has to be that way." That kind of view is true in a lot of fields--a rocket ship has a certain design because it must have a certain design. You can't put the engines on perpendicular to the ship or the fuel storage under the rocket exhaust.
But you can do that kind of thing with computers and might not even know it. I started to get a sense of this a couple years ago, when I first learned about the works of Ted Nelson and his contemporaries. Ted is critical of things like the modern hyperlink which, at first, seemed to me like criticizing the ocean. He even disapproves of the word "computer".
The idea that computing can and should be fundamentally reinvented has been the most exciting discovery of my life.
This was one of the more depressing discoveries of mine.
"Reinvention" works by the main stream of this industry having knowledge half-life on the order of decade or less. Instead of building on top of prior work, we keep reinventing the old stuff; sometimes better, but usually very poorly - I attribute this to bad incentives. In the 70s they had time to think about what they're actually doing. In 2010s we have constant race to the market, and "move fast and break things" culture, which leads to layers of crappy abstractions that keeps relative performance of our software on the level of 1980s while delivering little usability on top.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-master-password-pro...
That said, can you still copy the profile to a new computer and have it autofill? Physical access to data on a hard drive is often end of game, unlike cloud only hosted stuff that streams. Im guessing you cant copy a firefox profile with lastpass or 1pass or dashlane and have the new computer start autofilling without reentering the master password?
Firefox also has Firefox Lockbox now for storing passwords in the cloud.
I've been using it without any issues for several years now.
Respectively. Meaning private=safari, tabs=opera.
Unlike how a normal service is normally supposed to store my password (hashed, but with no copy of the original password anywhere, EVENT THE LOGS) the password manager DOES retain a plain text copy of a password, not JUST a hashed derivative.
Maybe don't use 1FA for your passwords?
According to this research article [1], QUIC is unfair towards TCP and consumes more than twice its fair share of bottleneck bandwidth.
[1] [PDF] https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2017/papers/imc17-final3...
But the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for each tab. One tab could crash while the others stayed functional and a security vulnerability in one tab would have a more difficult time compromising the others.
It's also one of the reasons Chome uses so much memory, they failed to keep optimizing their copy-on-write paging behaviour so that tabs would share more memory among themselves.
Nowadays Firefox has process separation for tabs AND it's not written by an advertising company, so I like it better.
In addition I also consider the marketing reach and the success of Android as important. Fwiw I never switched completely to chrome and quite regularly got a hint to try out a better/optimised browser.
Which IE8 had around the same time (It may have launched after Chrome, but in the contemporaneous betas, they both had the feature)
What made people switch was a combination of everything google did having the sheen of "cool" around it, and the fact that I.E development was slow and shoddy.
I think that's when Google noticed that the IE monopoly was breaking, and they jumped onboard and took Konqueror's code and then launched their own browser. The same code that Apple used for Safari. So they basically came in on the hard work of Firefox and the KHTML team and took over the market by putting Chrome right on Google's homepage.
It's my opinion that Chrome didn't become popular because it was better, or because it was cool (no average user cares about that). It became popular by being right there on everybody's home page, right at the perfect time that people were catching on to the fact that IE had zero security.
Firefox broke the monopoly and freed us, and then Google and Apple came in and shat all over them.
The first time I saw break away tabs in Safari for Windows in 2007. Before Chrome was introduced.
Safari 3
https://lifehacker.com/safari-3-beta-now-available-for-windo...
Safari 5 http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/safari-fo...
The safari 5 screenshot you have is EDGE with a safari installer in front of it.
Process sep per tab was a Chrome feature. Unless you count Lynx and separate instances per browser page ;-)
i think the author is a bit confused about this:
1. every email provider in existence scans emails for spam purposes. if they don't, they lose market share since their product becomes unusable.
2. gmail stopped scanning emails for ad purposes a while ago.
This would presumably be news to everybody involved.
Google's QUIC ("GQUIC") isn't very close to the IETF QUIC standard under development. The IETF went with TLS 1.3 as the cryptographic foundation (which didn't exist when Google built GQUIC) and most the details have changed considerably. You can definitely see a family resemblance, but for Google this was a proof of concept hack and for the QUIC WG they're building what is probably a successor to TCP. It's the difference between a five year old's doodle of a house and the plans you need to submit to get someone to approve it and then build the house.
The chairs are currently not Google employees (they work at Fastly and NetApp) and the editors on the main transport draft aren't Google either (Mozilla and Fastly). There are Google people in the room (such as Adam Langley of course) but there are people from the other browsers too.
But fair enough, to say they wrote it all is a mischaracterization of events.
Why am I bitter?
1. It hands a lot of power over to chromium, regardless of how much it gets forked by Microsoft.
2. It would have put some very talented engineers onto a Chrome competitor, which I always like to see
3. It would have been a huge boost to Rust, which if it ever will unseat c++/c as a systems language target, will need all the help it can get as a de facto standard (you can argue if this is worthwhile or just pie in the sky dreaming, I'll concede on that)
4. I just plain think we need a V8 alternative for a nodejs/electron like ecosystem, in my opinion servo could be that. I know they are doing node-chakra-core, but this could have taken it to a whole new level.
Competition is good, in another words. Even if all my assumptions are wrong, I'd love to see an alternative history where they were laid to bare.
Now, I will admit, I am actually happy to see that they are on Chromimum instead of yet another engine, and I see all the upsides of this move too, and will definitely take advantage of them (with Microsoft Edge being my favorite version of Chrome right now)
https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe...
I guess Microsoft was tired of losing the browser game, so it decided to back the winning worse this time. But I still believe it will be a mistake long-term, as Google will start controlling Chromium's direction with more of an iron fist.
I believe someone else mentioned in a previous HN comment about the ad-blocking API that it doesn't matter if Edge, Brave, or other Chromium-based browsers can "continue to support a Chromium API if Google wants to kill it", because in the end if their combined market share is tiny, most developers will stop supporting that API anyways.
I imagine the Chromium browsers will be going in the direction of Android, where "anyone can fork Android" but in practice you're dead in the market if you don't back Google's Android.
Microsoft could have written any browser engine it wanted and then placed iOS/Safari like rules on other browsers, such as... "if you want us to allow your app to run in Battery Friendly mode, you must ONLY use our OS provided web engine."
Just for reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_browsing
It was available for 3 years in Safari before it became available in Chrome and four years before Firefox.
In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.
I'm a Firefox user, but I've also already excised most of the rest of Google from my life. If you're still using Gmail, you're likely to stick with Chrome.
...I'm guessing we have a pretty much standardized IMAP protocol to thank for this?
It's possible of course that I just don't know any better since I haven't actually used Chrome with any regularity in the last 5 years or so.
Firefox tends to consume a lot of system resources on my pretty modest machine.
(1) it's a PIA to manage both extensions, I'm using WF more & more on Desktop these days. I hope Pale Moon can survive, evolve or one-up their lack of Web Extension APIs.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...
This is the best alternative I've found when using Firefox instead of Chrome.
In terms of mobile, me guesses you haven't got the news about Mozilla doing away with extensions for newer versions. Plus there are other open source browsers with extension support, even based on Chromium.
At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very confusing, and understanding what would work with which browser was a continual battle, and Microsoft had a good 15 years under its belt of attempting to make the web a windows only affair).
So then Chrome comes along, backed my Google, and people started treating it as a first class citizen. Sites were belt to run with, and tested on Chrome.
Fast forward to now. I actually do want to have a wide array of ad sponsored content on the internet because I appreciate the free content and I'm not going to pay 30 different 5$ per month subscriptions for stuff I might read. Are they tracking me? Yes. When I search for lawn mowers online I get spams (which gmail seems to filter just fine) and my rarely logged into facebook feed is full of lawn mower ads. I use in-cognito when I want to see what a google or linked in search looks like without my user context. I use ABP when sites are too aggressive with their ads.
And it's all fine. I suspect my current experience is common, to answer your question.
This is false. Firefox's market share was continuously rising until Chrome came along (and Google marketed it aggressively). IE was still strong but already losing.
I'm not like an IE fan - I don't user Windows for anything other than gaming, I just remember what the browser wars were like in the early 2000s.
Google paid a bunch of engineers to work on Firefox, then pulled them to create Chrome. They weren't given a choice. So yeah, not surprising at all.
For this reason and the fact that you think lawnmower ads are the worst that surveillance capitalism can do, I'm skeptical that you are technically minded at all. This is 100% how the average Joe thinks.
Kids these days will never know the struggle of having 10 browser windows clogging up the task bar...
It has a terrible spell checker. I find about as many errors in its spelling as it finds in mine.
There used to be one other thing that really irked me, but it looks like they recently fixed that (I'm on the beta channel, so not sure if everyone has this yet). That was handling of keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts, such as OPTION-HOME to go to the home page, did not work if the focus was in the address bar, the "search in page" field, or a text entry field on the page.
[1] Chrome's dev tools seem more responsive and better organized, and it handles multiple profiles better.
I think that Containers available on Firefox are much better than profiles
You can also start/manage profiles from inside Firefox by navigating to about:profiles.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
For different things I do during development, I want different sets of cookies, bookmarks, history, and add-ons. With profiles, I get that, effectively getting a separate browser that I can extensively customize to its particular task.
>In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.
On Android, Blokada, or any browser like Brave. On iOS, Safari has a builtin content filter.
Not really. Safari provides the API that content blocker extensions you install can use.
Safari with Firefox Focus as content blocker works well.
It also had some weird issues with remote desktop, and I remote to my desktop from meetings fairly often.
Firefox is losing a lot share just because it gets our fan/cpu crazy on macbooks.
FF is fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives.
For a sustainable web (what's left of it anyway), it would be more helpful to radically simplify the web such that developers have reasonable and feasible specs to work against, and have diversity in browsers once again. Meanwhile, Google is working hard to lead audiences elsewhere via AMP, a Trojan made possible by JavaScript in the first place.
Looks like they've got a plan in place to handle this. I also secretly wish Mozilla would offer up a paid email service that only scans emails to filter our spam. Maybe some incredible Rust based email server.
https://thenextweb.com/apps/2019/06/10/mozilla-will-reported...
At this point I'd love to turn running my mail server over to a paid service that I trusted, because they could have full-time people dealing with spam proactively. But Google's free service means a lot of people no longer pay, so the market seems to be very limited.
That’s just security by obscurity.
It's not security through obscurity.
I have a gmail account and a non-gmail account, and the non-gmail privately hosted one gets considerable spam, some of which even makes it through my manually curated filters.
I used to self-host email but the minimum time and expertise investment is now too high for me - I got fed up of having to fix breakages or losing email from random other sources.
Apple gets credit for being aligned with users and developers?
Out of any of the tech companies, I see Apple the most detached from their users and developers.
Forcing proprietary software, hardware, and accessories is not "for users and developers".
That's Apple's way of generating additional sales and data for Apple.
If they had users and developers as their primary goal, it would be easier to be an Apple customer.
Yeah I can see where this wasn't very well put into words. I meant Safari core browser development is financed via Apple sales, as opposed to FF being in the position where Mozilla wouldn't want to bite the hands that feed them. Though Apple is also taking Google money for listing them as default search provider on Safari and has ambitions to push their service business.
This was also mentioned at the bottom of the article:
> If I were a Product executive at Mozilla, I would be banging the table to introduce useful, paid products that could enrich and support the Firefox ecosystem. Chief among these would be a low-cost, independent email service focused on privacy and spam protection that would allow people to migrate off of Gmail; a VPN service; a media/content whitelisting service combined with an ad-blocker that allowed people to easily pay for content; and maybe even its own password manager.
This is where I'm wary, that it could become just a better walled garden. I trust Mozilla more than Google, but they've had hiccups in the past that tarnished that trust.
> allow people to migrate off of Gmail
My utopian dream is Mozilla spearheading open alternatives to all Google services: email, Open Street Maps, search, password manager, P2P file transfer, ad blockers, maybe even ethical ads. It gives me hope to see them already embracing some of this general direction.
Something similar to the former service of Project Wonderful.
I do it on principle and make sure my apps work on Firefox besides chrome. Although many friends and fellow developers tell me why I spend extra efforts.
Web components created a lot of issue when trying to make them run on both Firefox and chrome. But I went ahead with it and my front end team need to put a lot of additional efforts. I don't know why it's so hard to stick to standards. Both chrome and Firefox will behave bit differently for CSS and JavaScript.
Developing a PWA which works good on both browser feels like developing native apps for Android and iOS using cross platform toolkits, which at times require a lot of additional code and testing just so that they work predictable. Still results in not so good experience.
I believe YouTube uses a whole framework based on the preratified spec?
If it had been worked out properly there's isn't any need of react or angular except for a state management library, since the views and components is taken care of by the browser directly.
As demand floats towards few suppliers, organizations with the most value to gain from it will either look to purchase one of the current suppliers or increase investment to outpace its competitors. In time, the market becomes a monopoly/oligopoly due to both demand (customer) and supply (org/biz interests). At this point, the mono/oli has the means to change things, either slowly or drastically, to maximize their gains.
Unless a good portion of society takes further interest in keeping what they believe to be right (e.g. privacy) and put their money and time where their belief is, non-profit orgs or less agressive ones are most likely to lose 99 out of 100 times in the long run. This is a human nature challenge, not necessarily an entity problem.
...As I type this I look the sandwich menu, and lack of search bar in firefox and I die a little inside.
Most work fine, but still, I ended up switching to Safari, to discover that it's just not quite as good an experience as Firefox or Chrome.
IMO, I find it to be just the opposite--neither Firefox nor Chrome are as good an experience as Safari.
Maybe the difference is that when a particular site does not work in a given browser, I don't blame the browser, I blame the website.
And I certainly don't blame browsers for badly written sites, but blaming the site doesn't magically make it work either. Having less sites work for me is still a worse experience, no matter whose fault it is.
"Driving innovation on the web" is the don't be evil slogan that motivates us all to allow them to "vertically integrate advertising and cut costs".
They still pay Apple a reported $12 billion a year and they have no negotiating power on iOS.
For some reason, some developer/product manager at Chrome decided to ignore `"autocomplete"="off". This reeks havoc with the 100s of JS autocomplete addons out there when chrome autocomplete pops up over the custom built on.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12374442/chrome-ignores-...
Seems like there's no resolution yet, aside from a stream of ridiculous hacks that all tend to break at one point or another.
If Google wants to own the browser, they are going to need a more transparent process on these things. It affects everyone now and they have to start governing their changes more appropriately.
But then I looked closer at the data, noticing that only net 120 basis points of the change can be explained by share changes in the other browsers. The rest of the data seems to be missing, as the numbers add up to less than 100%.
What the heck is going on?
Edit: It goes without saying that the article's failure to address this point fundamentally discredits the author. It should be obvious that the first thing an article claiming monopoly would need to do is explain the plummeting market share of the thing that is allegedly a monopoly..
Yes, there's a dip right at the end. But browser stats are pretty noisy, so it could be nothing. Statcounter, for example, doesn't show that drop: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...
And Wikipedia's data similarly doesn't show that big falloff: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...
Even looking at just the original one graph, the only thing showing a big rise is IE, with a 39% jump in usage. The author makes clear how that fits his thesis, in that Edge is now built on Chrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
While I agree with the gist of the article, this is worth pointing out since a lot of people do use Chromium because it is advertised this way, thinking that somehow they are not playing into the Chrome/Google monopoly. For those interested, there is an alternative build without all the google stuff baked in: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
That list helps to show how Chromium is far from the open-source ideal.
this is just plain dumb. There are plenty of other uses for javascript and powerful programming features beyond ads, and even google's most complicated ad products barely scratch the surface of what's possible with the new js features that have been introduced since the beginning of the chrome project.
Just because google is an ad company, doesn't mean everything they do is purely and simply about serving ads. And if you're going to try and make the argument that it is, you had better have something to back it up - you can't just make the claim and then skip on to the next bit of your rant.
Other than that, Firefox > Chrome. Privacy situation is vastly superior and web standards support is comparable. I also just feel that Mozilla is a way better company ethics wise, and for the software community at large, than Google.
IMO Google softly requires you to use chrome because their tools, in my experience, are unstable in other browsers (I’m looking at you meet)
The cynic in me is doubtful that this is entirely by accident.
I think is just one example of Chromium being a bit too ubiquitous, and forcing users into the Google black hole.
Is there an affordable paid custom domain email option with good spam filtering?
Maybe there could be an alternative that only supports markdown. Or maybe markdown/rst and web assembly.
In work I'm stuck using Chrome due to the amount of time I spend in Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, Google Analytics, Search Console & Data Studio) as they break certain functionality on Firefox, which makes me less productive.
Google has too much power. I work in Search Engine Marketing and it wasn't so long ago that we optimised sites for different search engines, now no-one cares about any search engine other than Google.
But it is nothing in comparison of safari which is pathetically behind blink and gecko feature wise. It's a shame that the most popular websites don't team up to block safari and ask to install a browser that supports web standards. YouTube did this with a version of IE and weeks after they were followed by thousands of websites not supporting this antic version.
Yes, it is a hassle, but it works well in my experience.
Also this:
https://webkit.org/blog/9395/webdriver-is-coming-to-safari-i...
You probably need both an iPad and an iPhone because (1) iPadOS 13 now acts like desktop by default, (2) If you do anything with inputmode= or number fields the virtual keyboards are different, (3) screen size
In theory you can test iOS/iPadOS devices in xcode, but I have found real devices far easier and more reliable.
I think people who weren't around developing for the majority IE days are the ones saying this. It was just so much worse
For instance, before Edge adopted Chromium, it didn't have support for the web components/custom elements specification. Safari was one of the first browsers to have it properly (I think even before FireFox) beside Chrome (which had a reasonable interest in having it)
Also Safari mostly supports newer CSS standards, and they even propose some very good ideas to the W3C/WHATWG groups (like their Template Instantiation proposal [0])
[0]https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposals...
Yes Safari is far better than IE but we're in 2019, it's the new browser limiting the web, thus it's the new IE.
Is there some specific glaring hold back that I'm missing?
Most of the new daily use APIs seem to be well supported, not to mention iOS Users tend to be extremely well update to date (at least in my experience, and it seems to be the case as they report often in their developer conferences). I tend to note that Mac users aren't usually 1 or 2 releases behind, either (and they have been getting better at back porting Safari versions)
Here's what I see:
https://caniuse.com/#compare=safari+10.1,safari+11,safari+11...
and I don't see any glaring omissions of day to day APIs that I think most developers use most often, since not everyone is even on the latest versions of Chrome, per se, or the need for enterprises to mandate support for IE11.
I can see:
Lazy Loading of images and iframes via an attribute
requestIdleCallback API
The `:has` and `:focus-visible` pseudo selectors `text-justify` is a weird omission, I will say that (though its roadmapped to arrive)
They have ResizeObserver in 13 and the Tech preview, and likely this will land with iOS 13 at some point. Desktop Safari and iOS Safari don't tend to be too far behind each other.
CSS Paint API (Then again, only Chromium based browsers have this right now anyway, this is essentially houdini. Also worth noting it can be enabled behind a flag in developer versions of Safari right now, so I wholly expect this to be implemented in the future. FireFox isn't even that far along yet)
I'm sure I could find others, but how many day to day APIs are actually missing? All the big ones (CSS-Grid, Web components, CSS and SVG Animations etc) are alive and well, and the Safari team has most of the missing ones in their pipeline.
I am open to discussing this further, of course! I want to know if I'm missing something or unique, and I realize not every case is the same.
I also acknowledge that No, its not as good as Chrome, and some of these features have to be polyfilled (which is nice that it can be, but not ideal), and yes, I wish they were faster (much faster) at updating webkit and safari across the board. I'm not here to sing the praises of their release schedule and feature updates by any means.
However IE never had a real history of implementing things that most developers even wanted to use most of the time. It was truly that bad. With the exception of Flex Box and Ajax, I can't think of anything that came out of Internet Explorer that became a standard or inspired a standard. Microsoft at many points was actively hostile in participating with much of the WHATWG/W3C process. IE11 even didn't support the ES6 standards nearly at all (They got Map, but not all of Map, but didn't implement Promises etc). That was just plain horrible in my opinion.
I think Safari is falling behind in some aspects, but in terms of covering most of the popular, meaningful APIs? they seem to keep up OK, much better than IE or even Edge ever did.
Its also important to acknowledge that Apple is a devices and software integration company, not a Web Application Company, so Safari follows a product schedule, not a rolling release one, though they have made a lot of motions to decouple the Safari update and release process from this product cycle its been on (slow, for sure)
I think they don't deserve this moniker, because its completely distracting from real criticisms that can be leveraged into action. By declaring it the new IE you're taking power away from better, more substantial, valid criticisms and concerns that I think the webkit/safari team would be more willing to engage, honestly.
What about iOS? There's no alternative.
But we don't need to go so fast. Firstly the web should block desktop safari, then laptop safaris. We wait that Apple fixe it's OS. Then we do the same on IOS waiting for the same "fixe"
Instead of making apple bend the knee, the web got broken for GPUs with the shitshow that is webgpu (which is the intersection of features from metal, Vulkan and dx12) instead of doing a webVulkan which is well supported on all OSes except Apple because they choose to make the world a worse place. Google lack balls. Mozilla too.