[ishan1121]

Google is a clear monopoly, there's no doubt about it. It has a 70% browser market share, 70% market share in the search ecosystem. Even though their service is good and people are happy, I think they need to be broken down for the sake of keeping an open internet. Even Facebook for that matter. That's my opinion

[dTal]

Those 70% numbers undersell it. It's basically impossible to use the internet today without touching Google servers. Even if you, personally, completely eschew all Google services, almost everyone you want to communicate with will be on a Google service. Sending an email? Watching a video? Reading a blog? Chances are good that Google's involved.

[fouc]

Not sure why you were downvoted. I think you raise a good point, chrome + adwords + dns + etc + etc.. is concerning.

[ishan1121]

I agree...I am talking about the data releaed by Google to prove its not a Monopoly. The only reason Google is not considered a Monopoly in laws eyes is that people have the option but they are not shifting. Like chrome supports changing of Search engines. The only argument can be raised against is Google is on Chrome, that everyone is using Chrome and Google products are not working properly on non-Chrome based browsers

[c0vfefe]

Upvoted for ending with a rhyming couplet.

> Watching a video? Reading a blog?

> Chances are good that Google's involved.

[ilaksh]

I don't know what you can do about browsers besides use Firefox.

But as far as other stuff, I hope people will give distributed p2p possibilities some consideration in terms of usage or development.

For example YaCy works pretty well as a p2p search engine. There are some others that I haven't tried.

Back to the browser stuff. The problem is the browser has a full operating system in it at this point. There are too many APIs to compete.

What could make competing browsers viable might be something like the following. Imagine a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Instead it emphasize fast rendering, has a state of the art web assembly implementation, and some kind of ABI/API for things like UI, UDP, etc. such as OpenGL (or a simpler UI system). It only allows a subset of CSS and HTML, maybe only Flexbox or something. It it could be just restricted to old-fashioned HTML rendering. But anyway it won't be able to have the scope of Firefox and Chrome.

I guess the biggest problem is if you don't support the whole ginourmous HTML5 featureset (starting with JavaScript) then most websites will not work at all. They either will not load or will be totally scrambled.

Maybe some kind of p2p content-centric web could become popular and have it's own streamlined and simplified browser.

Or maybe there could be a new browser tailored for augmented reality that could become popular and compete with Chrome.

[andrewla]

I've been putting some design work into a minimalist browser like you describe, but starting from a different angle, namely starting with javascript as a first-class citizen, and a React-style virtual DOM as the rendering model. Javascript (or, I could be convinced, web assembly) is the primary interaction model with the browser, with HTML and CSS supported via polyfills.

The additional HTML5 suite of APIs would theoretically be supported by a plugin model, but given the depth of integration of some of the APIs, this might be a great deal more work than it sounds, and even more difficult to prevent the proliferation of questionable plugins to this backend. It would probably have to resemble something closer to the Linux distribution model; where an installed instance of the browser would come with a set of whitelisted plugins, with no real ability for the non-expert user to add plugins.

More important to me is the idea of making use of client certificates to attest identity more strongly, together with masking the use of those certificates over third-party channels. So if I went to facebook.com I would present a cert "abcd" (a self-signed certificate), and if I went to yelp.com I would present "bcde". If yelp loaded content from facebook.com, I would present "cdef". Similarly for cookie handling, at least initially.

My hope would be that websites would associate multiple client certs with a given "user" on their site, but unless the user explicitly associates a cert with an identity there's no way (outside of fingerprinting, etc.) to make that association; all third-party interactions show as incognito sessions. Eventually the goal would be that (if this technique is widely adopted) that cookies become kind of useless in favor of strongly attested server-side identity (rather than using bearer tokens in the form of cookies) that can be associated with session data.

[zaarn]

YaCy works and in my experience that's pretty much the extend of it. I never (not a single time) found what I was looking for, vital sites like StackOverflow and Wikipedia aren't properly indexed, the pages that are, are wildly out of date. That plus it's incredibly slow.

[dosy]

Your proposal for an alternate browser universe sounds sort of like a project I'm working on.

It makes use of a regular browser (Chrome, Firefox) in the backend but provides a customized experience to the user and over the final hop to the user.

It supports a plugin development where you can use plugins to change the page before it is sent over the final hop to the user, and the JavaScript on the page is never executed on the user's machine, but only run in the cloud backend.

I actually built it for webcasting and scraping, and then needed a lower bandwidth access over my 4G connection while oversees so added a plugin to remove everything except for the essential HTML.

I'm actually looking for feedback right now on what to improve next, as I've got 50 issues I found myself but not sure what's most important to others. You can try it on https://staging.litewait.io and use a stripe test card number.

Mail me for issues and I'll try to help you. In profile.

[partiallypro]

AdWords and other Google platforms have more reach than that, even Microsoft serves up Adsense ads on MSN. Analytics is so heavily tied to AdWords, it's practically impossible to run an effective campaign without it. I'm more concerned about the advertising market Google has a strangle on. Analytics is everywhere, they have so much behavioral data that everyone pales in comparison, and no one can give as much insight into the ad market.

[WilliamEdward]

Im surprised facebook was an afterthought for you. I immediately think of facebook whenever i think of bad things involving the internet. Google doesn't even really cross my mind, it's just the most prominent internet thing so of course it's bad in some ways, that's just entropy.

[Kaiyou]

Probably because it's trivial to cut facebook out of your Internet experience. Google,... not so much.

[monetus]

For a long time, I would have agreed... Until my family began to confuse fb messenger with text messaging itself.

[Kaiyou]

It's still easy to cut out of your life. I told my family if they want to reach me they have to use e-mail or the phone. This works surprisingly well.

[monetus]

I've explained how the messenger app isn't the text messaging app (called messages), but the similarity still causes it to happen occasionally.

[jayd16]

Has this course of action ever actually worked? I can't say US telecoms are a great example of competition. I'm not anti-regulation but it seems like simply enforcing open standards might be more effective.

[zaarn]

I hope your joking because US Telcos are the result of a monopoly broken up (AT&T). And even then it's not the healthiest telco market due to the rise of local monopolies and market entrenchment.

[jayd16]

You should reread my post more carefully. That is my point exactly. Clearly, I'm aware of the history or I wouldn't have brought up telecos. My point is breaking up a monopoly is not a panacea as you can see.

[bduerst]

Just having dominant marketshare, especially in the presence of easily-accessible competitors (e.g. Safari, Mozilla, Opera, etc.), is definitively not a monopoly.

[Illniyar]

It more or less is, from a legal stand point, or atleast when referring to anti-trust laws.

That doesn't mean that they are doing anti-competitive stuff and are viable for enforcement, being a monopoly in an open market is not illegal, it does mean that with that level of marketshare they have some legal limitations that their competitors don't have. Usually it's a limit on merges, acquisitions, price setting and bundling.

[bduerst]

No it is not.

In the EU you don't even need market dominance to break anti-trust law, while in the US you do. In either case, Chrome is not committing anti-competitive behavior nor is it the only option on the market, hence it is not a monopoly.

Being a popular product in a market full of consumer options is not a monopoly. If Chrome prevented you from downloading other browsers, then that would be monopolistic behavior, but Chrome is not doing that.

[krageon]

Your argument would be easier to receive if you enlightened your reader with what you think a monopoly is, rather than just framing it as something it is not.

[bduerst]

I just explained it - monopoly is not a complex economic principle. When consumers have easy access to multiple competing products or services in a market supply, there is not a monopoly by the definition of the word monopoly. This is semantics, not an argument: https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Amonopoly

It's not well received because, as GP said, people have the opinion that Chrome is a monopoly because they lack the empathy to understand that consumers are choosing something they don't like, and they would prefer it was a monopoly because they want a reason to break it up.

[krageon]

You did the same thing again (defining something by what it is not). This does not help another person understand you, which I'm assuming you want since you seem to care a lot about this subject.

[bduerst]

Perhaps you could explain what you don't understand about it rather than talk about me?

[krageon]

I've told you twice what would help me understand, so at this point I'm going to have to respectfully decline to discuss it further. I hope you have a nice day.