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by TeMPOraL 2629 days ago
> I do agree Google brings latest of web tech to Chrome fast, but that makes other browsers falling behind in terms of features.

Fire and Motion. By being first to add stuff that users (web developers) immediately start expecting from everyone, they ensure everyone else is too busy catching up with them to actually compete. Thus, they secure their leadership position. See: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/.

2 comments

Yes, Google's using all sorts of these tactics against Firefox.

I don't think Ff will survive, too many useful idiots out there to have any hope left.

It's pretty grim for Ff, but our real doom starts when they pull an Android and bundle lots of non-redistributable components to cut off their real competition, the Chromium clones. It'll be like Play Services in the aftermath of the Kindle Fire all over again, probably under the guise of Flutter and AMP.
Isn't there already something of this sort happening with DRM components? There was a story on here recently about someone whose Chromium-based browser was locked out of the video streaming addons. To be fair, that was more by the video streaming plugin developer than by Google, but it was still an example of undermining the open source portion of the product.
> To be fair, that was more by the video streaming plugin developer than by Google

The video streaming plugin was Google Widevine.

Same tatics been used with SPDY / HTTP2 / HTTP3. It leads to a very real competitive advantage for them.