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Comment by 0xdeadb00f | Hacker News Reader

Google's domination is incredibly worse, almost irreversible IMO.

Is it though? IE had a larger market share and came preinstalled on most people’s computers. It was also closed source so you couldn’t even take Trident and write your own browser around it (best you could do was embed Trident as a COM object).

Chromium being open source is a red herring here. The web is a protocol, with both clients and servers. If we accept that Google singlehandedly dominates the protocol in practice, then having control over the client is insufficient. If Google adds something to the protocol that you don't like, then it doesn't matter if you fork the browser, because servers will expect the addition and your fork will be incompatible with the web. On the other hand, if you want to add something to the protocol but Google doesn't want to add it, then it doesn't matter if you fork the browser to add it, because servers will not expect it and therefore no sites will use it, making the addition useless.

TL;DR: it doesn't suffice to fork the client, you have to fork the entire web.

You’ve completely and utter missed my point. The fact that I’m in a thread advocating Firefox usage should demonstrate that I’m in favour of people using Gecko. I’m not saying Chromium being open source makes everything ok. I was only disagreeing with the GPs point that things are worse now than they were in the 90s and 00s. To use your example, back then MS owned the protocol AND the browser code.

Just because I disagree that things are worse that doesn’t mean that I like the status quo either. Which is why I use Firefox (well, one of the many reasons. But a pretty big reason).

I remember writing my own web browser around 1999 (give or take a couple years). Just a toy thing but born out of frustration with Internet Explorer, or Internet Exploiter as I used to call it. That was a massive undertaking. But these days if Google do stagnate Chrome then it’s still possible to fork Chromium and push it in a different direction. Not to mention we also have WebKit, kHTML and Gecko too. That alone makes this situation better than it was when Microsoft owned the web. Add to that, Chome doesn’t come pre-installed on as many computers as IE did (lots if you count Android but at least Apple hardware ship something else. Opinions of Safari aside).

This doesn’t mean we should be complacent nor assume Google doesn’t still have a stranglehold but it does mean the GPs point is inaccurate.

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