Hacker News Reader

Comment by mirthflat83 | Hacker News Reader

Yep. We will end up with a singular “standard” set up by Google.

From the perspective of users or developers, what's bad about this? I mean, we generally take it as axiomatic that it must be bad, but the dream of anybody being able to come along and make a Web browser is long dead.

That the network effects of everything only being tested on Chrome will mean that for some sites you have to use (eg Government, e-commerce you can’t do without), you’ll no longer have a choice of browser, and that that dominant position will be maintained even if Chrome starts to really suck, or Google decide to lean in to “you need a trackable Google account to use this”.

Google releases Chrome in order to show you ads.

I am not 100% convinced that the existence of Safari exclusively on Apple platforms is all that effective at preventing this -- for instance, if you don't particularly care about mobile users you're pretty much already living in this world today.

> if you don't particularly care about mobile users

I think this is a small share

Maybe, though maybe less so for business Web apps or other boring uses.

Either way, monopoly or oligopoly can also have salutary effects. Flash was a complete blight on the Web and all it took was Apple saying “no, we aren’t going to support that” and it disappeared practically overnight. Chrome’s been similarly effective in pushing forward some basic security measures. Hard to imagine this happening in a world of 50 different browsers with roughly equal market share.

I don't think anyone's talking about another elephant in the room: Facebook could very easily make their own framework for embedded web browsing and get all of their tracking ability back.

They’d still be behind Apple with OS-level insights that they claim the right to use in their own ads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com