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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Stallman seemed to want everyone to make Emacs apps, not TECO macros. If that happens, ultimately we all suffer from the loss of an open TECO community.

Only nobody cares from the TECO community -- and you can still use TECO for your texts without the new "apps".

But a web where people code for a specific browser, is less fun (or even downright unusable) to surf with another browser. We learned that in the Netscape/IE wars era.

>More seriously, there are quite a few differences between adding a feature to an open-source project and adding a feature to a web browser shipped as an inseparable component of the operating system installed on 99% of personal computers.

That's all well, but browsers can gain market share too. IE had a minority share at first, despite being bundled with Windows -- people just preferred Netscape. So that Chrome is not bundled with an OS is not much guarantee.

Not to mention that in Android, Chrome IS the IE.

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> Not to mention that in Android, Chrome IS the IE.

Really? Don't most Android phones ship with a different default browser than Chrome?

My wife just purchased an S4. It came with a Samsung specific browser. I thought that was fairly commonplace.

Android has its own webkit-based browser. The Nexus-branded devices (Nexus 4,7,10, possibly the Galaxy Nexus) come with Chrome and not the Android browser.

Don't forget ChromeOS, where literally the only user-facing application is Google Chrome. This OS ships on thousands of devices every day and takes browser-OS coupling to the furthest conceivable extreme.

While true, I'm not sure how that's particularly nefarious. It's just another platform that's not an existing platform. iOS is like this. Android is like this. FirefoxOS is like this. They all are their own ecosystem and have their own APIs, and they all seem to be working out pretty well for both developers and users of both native apps and web sites.

What would be worrisome is if the platform creators locked them down in such a way as to prohibit choice; if Chrome were ported to iOS and Apple denied permission to distribute it, for example. But that's simply not happening anywhere anymore. Every owner of a locked-down platform is being pretty open about letting users choose which apps to use, even for core functionality like the web browser. Perhaps this is the lesson we learned in the 90s with the browser war and we are actually trying not to repeat the past!

I'm personally quite attracted to the idea of a native app that I can program in Javascript, and wouldn't want ChromeOS to not exist simply because of concerns of being "unfair". I never really used my laptop much because it was too hard to keep in sync with my desktop. But since I switched to ChromeOS for my laptop, I've used it a lot more, because everything stays up to date. Yes, I have to give some control to Google, but I always have the option of compiling it from source and making my own sync server. So overall, I'm really happy that ChromeOS exists and is open-source, even if there is no standards process for web-browser-centric operating systems :)

>What would be worrisome is if the platform creators locked them down in such a way as to prohibit choice; if Chrome were ported to iOS and Apple denied permission to distribute it, for example. But that's simply not happening anywhere anymore.

Wait -- that does happen. For example Google wasn't even allowed to port Chrome to iOS. What they did is they made a "fake Chrome", all UI, which underneath uses the iOS Webkit engine.

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