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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand these attacks on Google and Chrome. Yes, Blink in general and Chrome in particular are dominant. Yes, Google has a shitload of money. But at least it invests its money in the web platform, which, if you are a web developer, you ought to be grateful for. Apple, in comparison, also has a shitload of money; but until a couple of years ago, didn't seem overeager to invest in web. As for shrunken browser xhoice, isn't it easier for developers to target a few platforms than a host of diverging ones? When you are not in control of the client platform isn't it a relief to have as little variability - and hence as much predictability - as possible? Isn't this the closest thing to being in control?

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Google has contributed many good things to the web, but they should always be scrutinized and challenged to prevent them taking over the platform to serve only their purposes. This is the same complaint leveled at Apple.

Yes, there's a very real conflict of interest between their line of business and the level of control they have over the web, and they've not proven themselves willing to abstain from inappropriately leveraging that control.

Exactly. Apple's lack of contribution to the internet ecosystem exactly aligns with their profit motive: Selling hardware.

Google's involvement in the internet ecosystem exactly aligns with their profit motive: Putting relevant ads in front of individuals based upon data they've gleaned from relatively "un-sexy" sources like search, analytics, libraries, font hosting, email, chat, etc.

I'm not opposed to companies making a profit. I try, however, to keep in mind conflicts of interest when choosing my sources of information. Everything anyone at Google says about the web is suspect because that is a conflict of interest. Google, as an organization, exists to turn web traffic into profit and should always be considered accordingly.

>As for shrunken browser xhoice, isn't it easier for developers to target a few platforms than a host of diverging ones?

You dont remember IE6 do you?

There's a growing number of people who are adults years into their careers who have only known a world with a dominant Chrome. Stuff like this is cyclical because new generations come, and no one tells them about this stuff. Or if someone does, they don't take it seriously.

The IE6 situation happened because Microsoft lost interest in the web. Plus, Microsoft was developing its browser in disregard of web standards. With Google, at least for now, we have a company that is heavily invested in web, AND, what the article strangely complains about, is heavily involved in web standards, to the point where it becomes a driver for some of them.

IE6 was stagnant and non-standard-compliant. The horror for developers, as far as I understand, came from the fact there was another, much more rapidly evolving, web browser, and they had to maintain compatibility between the two.

Part of the problem is that when Google really wants a feature for themselves, they'll plow through and implement it in Chrome regardless of any concerns raised or input offered by Mozilla and Apple, creating "nonstandard standards" much like those created by IE.

This is a bit inaccurate, oddly. At least, for my memory, IE6 was genuinely better than Netscape at the time. They did make some odd choices, such as border-box, but by and large Netscape was stagnating hard. That said, I remember the fieldset and legend styling was much better in IE than it was in Firefox. And, amusingly, I have grown to prefer border-box for sizing.

Now, as time went on, IE became very stagnate and upset folks by not adding more and more. So maybe it depends what time we are talking about here?

Yes, there was a dark period (early 2000's) where IE 6 was basically the only usable browser. Netscape was far behind, and also incredibly unstable (crashing hourly.) Firefox wasn't out yet. Chrome was years and years away.

From memory, Netscape decided to pivot to open source via Mozilla/Firefox but IIRC, the development process took much much longer than expected.

I remember reading Mozillazine back in the day, breathlessly anticipating the shiny new version.

Some years later I stopped waiting, and gave up.

They did a Big Rewrite which was somewhat bogged down by feature creep.

They were rewriting not just a browser, but also an Outlook competitor and a WYSIWYG webpage editor - and while doing that, they decided it would be cool to create a universal GUI runtime for all of them, powered by the browser engine itself!

In a way, it was an amazing effort (without which we wouldn't have Firefox and Thunderbird), but it was definitely more than most people expected of them.

IE6 becoming standards non compliant was deliberate. Not because MS lost interest in the web.

And IE6 becoming stagnant was a result of MS's deliberate attempt to bake IE6 into the OS itself, which made it a ridiculously complex piece of software to change safely.

Again, not because MS lost interest in the web, but because MS thought they could use their ownership of the desktop OS to own the web, rather than by innovating through a web browser.

And frankly, if it wasn't for the EU they may even have succeeded. You can already see how they would have done that with some of their actions today, where opening a link from a Windows search will open the link in Edge irrespective of what your default browser is, etc. If it wasn't for the EU antitrust ruling forcing them to separate IE from Windows I suspect their actions to push IE6 would have been even more aggressive.

Blink was forked from Apple’s WebKit, 8 years after WebKit forked off of KHTML; Apple’s invested plenty in the web.

Do they support new things as quickly as Chrome? No. But some of their most important investments have been in supporting less, not more: a decade ago, that meant killing flash to preserve security and performance; nowadays it’s about killing adtech to preserve privacy.

> nowadays it's about killing adtech to replace it with their own version, so they can make more money flow to them

FTFY

> if you are a web developer, you ought to be grateful for.

As a web user, I'm definitely not grateful for this.

Apple didn't invest in web because their ecosystem is already their walled garden.

Google tries the same with web and Chrome as it's de facto standard browser.

It should be one HTML standard not one browser's interpretation of it.

>Apple didn't invest in web because their ecosystem is already their walled garden.

Can see why they didn't invest in web when they didn't want linking to work in apps on the iPad, except in specific cases:

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1667990407085711360

Don't they also hinder PWAs on iOS?

they took their time, but the next iOS/MacOS release brings them to the OS with full support as far as I can tell

I guess not as much as Facebook, who announced PWAs on Meta headsets will be subject to the 30% tax and have to go through the store.

>but until a couple of years ago, didn't seem overeager to invest in web.

or maybe they invested in the stuff they thought was worth investing in instead of what Google wanted - like better accessibility features support or more advanced color profiles which Google and FF still haven't implemented even though they said years ago oh it's coming "this" year (perhaps using JavaScript this, hence the confusion)

Exactly -- in a Web 2.0 world where everything is siloed into proprietary, closed platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc., Google AMP looks like an angel.

Yeah, you get corporate fingers in the cookie jar, but at least you can still recognize the cookies (i.e. webpages).

This is particularly pertinent with what is going on with Reddit. Imagine if subreddits were actually just portable HTML+CSS+JS websites built on a common framework produced by Reddit Inc, instead of bits of data in their proprietary databases.

What you call investing in the web I call making the web worse by making browsers very complicated (which is good for Google because it makes it so that only the largest corporations can afford to compete with Google, e.g., in offering a fully-functional browser).

Apple invested well in Safari early on.

They used to be very proud of their JS performance and so on.

But then in recent years they seemed to coasting.

Hopefully now they are back on to it, maybe the threat of being forced to allow alternative browser engines has them to focus.

Who knew completion might actually be good for innovation and capitalism….

> Who knew completion might actually be good for innovation and capitalism….

Autocompletion, perhaps? I suspect you meant "competition".

There is only one thing worse than having a lot of browsers to target, and that is NOT having a lot of browsers to target.

Just wait for Apple dominance, and yes, it's coming. Oh boy, dark times ahead for the web and it's people.

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