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Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

So, here's the question:

When a large, publicly traded ad-company (that relies on collecting data and tracking users for most of it's income), creates a product that costs them quite a lot of money to make, and then gives that product to you for free...

Do you expect them:

A.) to be taking a loss on that product because they really just want to gift it to you from the goodness of their heart with no ulterior motives?

B.) to actually have another way to make money from that product, which makes the whole endeavor financially worthwhile to them?

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People are bending over backwards to justify why they should continue using a browser that is actively hostile to them made by a company whose sole revenue comes from collecting the entire world's data at all times.

I don't mean to trivialize it but it seriously reads like an abusive relationship. Or an addiction or something. Just leave, man.

It 100% is an abusive relationship. And it's the same as with Microsoft and Windows. People struggle a lot against it, but at the end of the day, they are completely vulnerable to Windows, as they depend on it.

I read a very apt quote[1] on HN a month ago, about how much Google values Chrome users thoughts:

> Chrome user opinion to them is important to their business in about the same way meatpackers care about what cattle think of the design of the feeding stations. As long as they keep coming to eat, it's just mooing.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035733

This is beautiful and I'm saving it. Thank you.

I don't use Chrome as my main browser but I can see one reason why people continue to do so despite the problems with it: there are simply no good alternatives, only slightly less bad ones. Mozilla absolutely does not care about your privacy as anything other than a marketing tool or they wouldn't keep pushing adding a million different ways the browser phones home and in some cases executes remote code each release. They are also funded by Google. Brave is mired with crypto and also involved in ads. Edge is Microsoft, enough said. Same for Apple's walled garden browser.

If you have to chose one devil over another anyway it becomes easier to put your convenience first and ignore the rest.

We can ignore everything except the last sentence because convenience is all it boils down to. Protecting yourself is annoying. It's annoying in part because companies like Google make it annoying on purpose. They make so much insane money from preventing people from protecting themselves (from Google) that they fund their competitors to buy public goodwill.

Even if you somehow think that Mozilla is as bad as Google, which, to me, is a ridiculous notion, you can still choose the lesser of two evils. At the end of the day Mozilla is a foundation, a legal entity which is driven by its mission[0], and Google is a corporation, a legal entity which is driven by profit and data collection. And there are also tons of other browsers that are less bad than the worst one.

To choose Chrome is, again, to bend over backwards to justify continual use of an abusive tool, in the name of convenience.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

I'd expect the government to step in because that is a highly anti-competitive distortion of the market. Microsoft once got punished pretty badly for including a free Internet Explorer with Windows, to the detriment of Netscape. I'm not sure Google pushing a free browser to the detriment of Mozilla is much different.

Not the best example though, as Windows these days is pushing Edge as anti-competitively as ever.

Windows now comes with three built in browsers: IE, Edge(Blink), Edge(Webkit) - none of which can be uninstalled.

Every other update users will bugged about switching to Edge again (exact amount varies by version and locale).

System apps will ignore default browser settings and use Edge to open all links (except in the EU they very recently went back to using the default browser again).

Browser-choice dialogue is gone, instead Edge will pester you if try to use it to download another browser.

Point being, all those punishments did absolutely nothing to stop or curb the anti-competitive behavior.

Edge never used Webkit, but their own implementation called EdgeHTML.

No, they changed the engine a year ago or two. Just around when they advertised the new Edge.

They changed from I-Can't-Belive-It's-Not-Trident to Blink, yes. Not from or to WebKit unless you count Blink as WebKit, but ggp already lists Blink separately.

“Not the best example though, as Windows these days is pushing Edge as anti-competitively as ever.“

I'd say that makes it an excellent example because it clearly shows that government enforcement of those rules used to have teeth. But since lost them.

I’d expect them to consider Chrome a loss-leader to get people online since the vast majority of their advertising is online. So giving people the best possible web experience will increase the amount of ads they’ll see.

No. It is their way of influencing how the web shapes out to be.

Your theory doesn't make any sense since every OS/device comes with a free web browser since I can think.

My theory is not just giving people a browser but giving them the best possible experience. Chrome has an enormous market share given every OS and device comes with a free web browser. Further the developer experience using Chrome is also superb!

Is this an ad ?

Hah, no, Chromes market share is an obvious fact but the developer experience bit is just my opinion and admittedly my use is probably different to the average webdev.

I also think this recent change sucks so it’s not all roses.

I am a live long firefox user that also uses chrome. The difference between the two in term of performance is so small and differenciated between various areas, it doesn't even matter.

Usability is a very subjective topic, but for me there are things in firefox or it's addons that I cannot have in chrome.

And in the end I need to trust my browser for daily (non-developer) use. Trusting google is naive. I don't say Mozilla is deserving of unquestioned trust either, but out of the two it is the better choice.

Firefox runs at about half the performance of Chrome for our use case and other people doing similar stuff report similar results. I wish it wasn’t so clear cut.

All the developers tayloring their applications to chrome has its inpact for sure. But in daily use you will also find cases where Chrome is slow and clunky and Firefox fast and smooth.

In the end my (very subjuctive) judgement is that the performance difference in daily use doesn't outweigh the benefits of not using the browser of the monopolist that makes their money with data collection.

That doesn't mean I don't use the browser or it's engine in other ways tho.

Everyone already have built in browsers. If chrome was shutdown tomorrow its not like people would all go offline because they cant access the internet.

Guess what's the engine that majority of those build in browsers use.

what argument are you trying to make here? something about the current state of the webkit engine, or more like the long-term resilience of the ecosystem?

Google aren't doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. Dominating the browser market means de facto free reign on setting standards. Chrome isn't a nice freebie, it is the most important moat Google has for its AF business.

Without Chrome, Google has no control over its product (your eyeballs as you browse) at all.

> that relies on collecting data and tracking users for most of it's income

How then duckduck go managing to compete with them wituhout collecting data and tracking user to the same extend? https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-business-model/

My understanding is that DDG relies on selling "keyword match" type ads based on what you searched for.

For example: if you search for "standing desk", it will include one or more paid ads that are keyed for some combination that matches with the search query. Those ads aren't targeted at you based on your gender, or your home address or where you eat lunch on Tuesdays or how many devices you regularly use or any number of other creepy shit Google tracks about it's flock of willing cattle.

It's a good point but also not that cut and dry. Chrome started as Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which was part of the very open source KDE.

Has Google benefitted more from other people's open source contributions, or have we benefitted more from Google's open source contributions? The answer is not obvious to me.

Google impacts infinitely more lives than KDE does…

I think your math is wrong.

If (as was stated) Google's Chrome is based on KDE, than any user of Google Chrome is necessarily impacted by KDE. Meanwhile there could in theory be some user of KDE who has never used Chrome.

So the set of lives affected by KDE is the same or larger than the set affected by Chrome.

Your argument works only if we consider being affected by something to be very broadly applicable and unconditionally transitive. Someone who uses Chrome from version 100 onwards might be using something with traces of KDE code, but those traces are probably so small after all these years and forks that I wouldn't count them.

This is very true.

KDE never ran any PII data collection programs targeting 70% of browser users, for the sake of selling ads.

Oh you meant impacts positively? No. Chrome is a blight on humanity.

Yeah they made v8 which beget node and npm.

I honestly don't see how "who benefited more" matters to the question of whether it's bottom-line worthwhile for Google to give Chrome away for free.

> Chrome started as Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which was part of the very open source KDE.

Safari started as Webkit which forked from KHTML which was part of KDE.

The various forks of webkit incl Chrome came later. If Chrome was ever based on webkit, iForget.

Option C. (shutdown unprofitable project) would be preferable for me ;)

Google is definitely no stranger to shutting down and killing unprofitable products - often pretty early even. They have a long history of doing just that.

And being a publicly traded company - they would have to shut down Chrome as well, if it actually were unprofitable/not worthwhile.

And they do have the data needed to actually get a relatively accurate picture of how Chrome affects their bottom lines overall. They know what they are doing, giving it away for free.

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