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Comment by xypage | Hacker News Reader

I'm finding it hard to give you the benefit of the doubt because it really sounds like you're advocating for a Google monopoly, which doesn't help anyone. Sure having a bunch of different battery types is annoying but in that case either you should find a brand you trust and stick with them, or brands have fragmentation within themselves which is a different issue altogether. The "fragmentation" you're talking about here is competition though, there isn't really any downside to having a bunch of different popular browsers and the upside is that none of them get to do anything crazy knowing there's no serious alternative so you can't leave. Google is already invasive of privacy, I can only imagine it'd be even worse if they didn't feel like there was significant risk of people switching browsers because nothing else was popular.

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I'd even argue that the battery issue is more complex than centralization/decentralization. Look at USB or RCS. If there is a political push or reason to capture a wide variety of users, then these things work better. (hand held) Tools have a different issue, which is brand loyalty, which allows manufacturers to create a lock-in environment (see Apple). If there was proper competition, then lock-in is very hard. I would bet that if there was a big market if you could create a universal adapter, battery, or tool. But the issue is that you'd need to create a lot of brand loyalty. There's so many cheap tools that perform terribly and break that this space helps reinforce the brand loyalty. But just because new comers have a large uphill battle doesn't mean it isn't possible. In fact see how LTT is tackling a few different products. Yes, premium, but they show it off and the perfectionist mindset is essential. Also helps that they already have a userbase and brand recognition.

We see similar issues with browsers actually. If other browsers could get name recognition, many would turn from Chromium. But I don't think that it helps that us nerds squabble about Brave v Google v Firefox and just call the one we don't like "trash" or "absolute garbage." Honestly, they are all fine.

But I would like to point out how there is a real world slippery slope. We all used to complain about how Apple products were too expensive for the hardware the sold. How the lock-in and fanboy-ism would affect the rest of the market. And that reality has come true (at least for phones). Apple sets a price and others follow. I don't really want a world where a singular company dictates how the web should work.

Google is not really the point. The point is that there’s a single standard. Doesn’t matter who’s it is to me.

> The "fragmentation" you're talking about here is competition though, there isn't really any downside to having a bunch of different popular browsers and the upside is that none of them get to do anything crazy knowing there's no serious alternative so you can't leave.

If this is your opinion then what difference does it make if there’s a monopoly? You can use Firefox or Safari no?

Not to mention chromium is open source. Anyone can fork it, like Brave in FTA. I don’t see any downsides, given that you can disable and features you object to.

>The point is that there’s a single standard

An implementation isn't a standard, though... and the concern is that Google are using their dominance here to push more half-baked ideas (some of which they then discard, see HTTP2 Push)

An implementation isn't a standard, yet reference implementations exist, and yet the WHATWG standards are written in pseudocode.

> The point is that there’s a single standard

There already was single standard. I think your point is that you want there to be a single implementation. You can't really have that at this point without allowing powerful commercial interests to basically have free reign over what code is executed on your computer.

> If this is your opinion then what difference does it make if there’s a monopoly?

The argument is against monopoly, even an effective one. Chrome has about 65% market share (88.5% in India), I'd call that an effective monopoly (especially considering all the chromium based browsers). Large enough to dictate how things should be done and people will follow because they have to. It doesn't matter that it is open source, it matters that there is too large of a userbase that decisions fall into the hands of few. It's not like Microsoft's Internet Explorer abused this in the past and we have no precedence or anything...

I guarantee you that this will only lead to a fracturing of the internet, especially considering it is a global network.

> Not to mention chromium is open source. Anyone can fork it, like Brave in FTA.

I don't think you understand what a fork truly means. Blink, the web browser engine used by Chromium is a fork of WebKit. WebKit and Blink are now completely separate browser engines made and maintained by different companies.

Meanwhile, Brave is a skin on top of Chromium. They've patched Chromium to their liking. You can read the first paragraph in the link to confirm this.

People are really underestimating what hard forking a behemoth project like Chromium really means. I don't think anyone besides Microsoft has the capability to do it and they've already given up on that prospect.

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