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SllX

> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action.

Heard this once already when the song was about IE6.

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And it was true

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

IE6 post-dates the conclusion of this lawsuit, and held ~90% of browser, not desktop browser, but browser market share for the better part of the next decade.

What changed? Firefox was released, Safari was released, and quite a bit later, Google Chrome was released, but it would still be a while before IE6 would lose its dominance even once IE7 was released.

Key differences between this situation and IE6/7:

1. IE6/7 were just egregiously bad experiences for both users and developers, with Microsoft being almost entirely disinterested to the point of disbanding their browser team. Holding the web back was clearly part of their strategy.

2. Chrome, on the other hand, is well-maintained and rather good. Unlike Microsoft in the 2000s, the web is a core pillar of Google's business. Any challenger to the throne will have to overtake a moving target powered by a world-class engineering powerhouse, rather than a static dinosaur like IE6/IE7.

3. The barrier to entry in the browser market today is roughly an order of magnitude greater than it was back then. Browsers today are far more complex; they're more like operating systems.

As far as the free market is concerned, nobody is seriously challenging Chrome in this area. Ever. Unless/until Google loses interest and stops competing.

All of your criticisms of IE6 are fair and on point, but if you recall IE7 was Microsoft putting the gang back together again and trying to put some effort in again. Still not a great browser, but still a marked point where they abandoned their abandonment of Internet Explorer as a project.

Google also originally piggy backed on WebKit to build their browser. The JavaScript runtime was homegrown, but Google worked within WebKit before forking out of there. My guess is when Google Chrome is eventually overtaken, it will be by another Chromium-based browser under similar circumstances.

The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS and iPadOS.

    The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much
    harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major 
    browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per 
    Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS 
    and iPadOS.

Yeah and, perhaps I'm giving them too much credit for strategy/foresight, but it feels like this all plays precisely into Google's hands.

There is just enough competition, and Google's web apps are just functional enough on Webkit/Firefox, for Google to sail clear of accusations of monopoly.

Well, not sure what to tell you mate. You can make the case that Google Chrome is a monopoly that should be brought to heel by the Law, under new legislation if necessary, or you can’t.

Again, I don’t even particularly like Google Chrome, but do you know the only reason I keep a Chromium-based browser installed at all is? Government websites. Not Chrome though, currently it’s Brave with all the crypto stuff turned off. I don’t even need one for anything else. To the extent that Google Chrome is entrenched, it’s the same entities whose powers you mean to bring to bear on them helping them stay entrenched.

Some of us feel trepidation about Chrome being 'too big to fail' simply because Google has demonstrated itself to be capricious and fickle in terms of continued support for products. One only has to glance at killedbygoogle.com to see a pattern of rather arbitrary decisions to kill various things. If for any reason Google decided to kill off Chrome, it would be nice to have an alternative to fall back upon.

The web is 10x more complicated now. Firefox's challenge was being bug-compatible with IE, but the challenge now is replicating the entire browser runtime.

Does the web being 10x more complicated mean that 1. Google Chrome, which full disclosure: isn’t my browser of choice, deserves the same end as Internet Explorer? And 2. That the government is the means by which it should be brought to heel?

I mentioned this in another comment, but Google Chrome originally piggybacked on WebKit, homegrown JS runtime aside, before forking out of there. I think there’s a decent chance that the same could happen to Google via another Chromium-based browser. Just because it’s not immediately apparent how Chrome will lose its dominance today doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen. Nor does that mean it should. People actually like Chrome. I used to like Chrome, and it’s easy to see how people with a different set of priorities than mine still do.

The old song was about IE6, and today’s song is about Google Chrome. The lyrics might be different but it’s still the same old song.

I don't want to see Chrome (and Chromium) die, I merely want to see other browser engines flourish. Heck, even Trident, if we could turn back time and have Explorer become a good web citizen.

My problem with Chrome dominance is that it's both a dominance of a single company (since Chrome is by far the dominant "fork" of Chromium, and owned by an advertising corporation), and a dominance of a single browser engine. The latter is IMO a really big threat, as it leads to browser engine monoculture. Monoculture leads to a single point of failure, and in this case, a loss of knowledge about how to build a browser engine that's "the websites that are actually out there"-compliant. Much more relies on the web now, so it's paramount that we have a useful alternative browser engine implementation.

Sure, but what’s the original sin at work here? Google investing their time and resources into their browser projects, or the fact that web became this complex mess because web developers beat the drum for 15 going on 20 years that the web should be an app runtime?

Duplicating an app runtime feature for feature and bug for bug is difficult in a capital intensive sort of way. Even companies that can afford the expenditure, primarily Microsoft, decided to get out of that game because that level of expenditure comes with its own opportunity costs even at their level.

And there are alternatives: WebKit and Mozilla, one of those is the exclusive web renderer for iPhones and iPads which is not an insignificant amount of hardware in the world.

Google puts the work in. It’s really just that, and it’s their private prerogative to put that work in if they so choose, where others choose not to. The diversity of rendering engines isn’t great compared to say 15 years ago, but it’s not so bad that it’s a total monoculture in the way IE6 was. Actually thinking about it, more people are using more and different browser rendering engines than back then because Chromium-based browsers don’t have the total dominance that IE6 did, and there’s a lot more people on the web than there used to be. We had diversity, but we’re talking iCab, pre-WebKit OmniWeb, Opera on Presto, and yeah, Trident’s not really around anymore, but it was there, and so was Gecko and WebKit.

At least you don’t need a browser that supports ActiveX controls for regular websites anymore.

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