[gwbas1c]

I've done front-end web development on-and-off for about 20 years.

One thing I've observed in the past few years is that Chromium (Open-source base of Chrome,) has come to dominate the browser platform: HTML has turned into a boondoggle where everyone's pet use case is integrated into the browser; and curiously, everything works first on Chromium. This makes it prohibitively difficult for competing browsers, (Mozilla, Safari,) to keep up with the evolving web standard.

As a developer, it "smells" like the Windows monopoly all over again; except this time, because Chromium is open-source, and there are plenty of Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, and Chrome,), it's less obvious.

[stale2002]

> This makes it prohibitively difficult for competing browsers, to keep up with the evolving web standard.

Maybe Apple with their 2 trillion dollar market cap should make their browser not suck then?

I'm sure they can fund it.

[youngtaff]

Safari doesn’t suck… it’s perfectly usable for most of my useage (across multiple platforms)

Chrome has some APIs that are more useful e.g. Serial, WebUSB etc. and it’s debugging tools are better plus it’s possible to extract and reprocess the devtools data to build other tools on top

[gwbas1c]

It's not really in their interests: Apple pushes developers towards developing native applications in Swift that target their platforms.

In contrast, Microsoft has a very healthy web development platform. Edge allows debugging in-browser Javascript and C# (via WASM) in Visual Studio.

[stale2002]

I understand that it isn't in Apples interest to make a good browser.

So, in other words, complaints about "Google's broeser is too good, it is unfair how fast they are moving!" Therefore ring hollow.

Yes, Apple could compete if they wanted to. There is no anti competitive pressure stopping them.

But Apple simply chooses not to make a good browser, even though they could.

[wolpoli]

> So, in other words, complaints about "Google's broeser is too good, it is unfair how fast they are moving!" Therefore ring hollow.

It's an interesting concept that a company could gain a dominant position in a market involving an open standard, then lead innovations in a way that would be difficult for other companies to challenge or follow.

It's not embrace, extend, extinguish because the changes are not proprietary. Chrome is simply able to out invest everyone else with their cash from their ad business. I am not a legal expert, so I don't know if this type of cross-market subsidization is legal.

[stale2002]

> Chrome is simply able to out invest everyone else

Go back and read the posts even you just wrote.

We already established that yes Apple could compete if they wanted.

They have a 2 trillion dollar market cap.

[wolpoli]

My point was that Google is taking cash from their ad business to support their Chrome product to protect their ad business.

I was thinking out loud if a case could be made against Google, similar to the EEE logic.

[iamthirsty]

> except this time, because Chromium is open-source, and there are plenty of Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, and Chrome,), it's less obvious.

Wouldn't this be actual market forces at work then, since it's open source? Anyone can use it (as the examples you mentioned).

It doesn't meet the monopoly standards since it's not in the exclusive possession/control of Google. It was extremely smart to make it open source, and very similarly so with AOSP.

[MBCook]

No, because they just repackage the engine. The driving force of the core development is still Google and their whims.

[Spivak]

I think the real market failure is that you can't not do what Chrome does. Having Chromium doesn't mean much if when you diverge from Chrome sites will break. Having a standard rings hollow when a standard generally means having two browsers implement a feature and Firefox gets their money from Google. And to developers a standard means "works on Chrome $current - 1."

It's hard to say that any of this can be pinned on Google like they're somehow to blame but at the same time we've nonetheless found ourselves in a market where users and developers have very little choice and this currently benefits Google quite a bit.

Good engineering discipline I think would ask major browsers to break themselves purposefully by randomly disabling any features that are browser specific or outside of some "core" standard saying you must only use these opportunistically but that's not a law you can write.

[MBCook]

Google didn’t have to promote their browser to hell to ensure everyone was using it constantly. Tying is what got us here.

Open Gmail? Why not use Chrome?

Google chat? Tried Chrome?

Search Google? It’s better with Chrome!

Android phone within 1 mile of you? Use Chrome!

Breathing oxygen? Well…

This seems like using one monopoly (search) to create another (browser). Isn’t that exactly what anti-trust laws forbid? Let’s not forget not bothering very hard to make sure their stuff like Google Docs that you may be required to use at work work with other browsers. “Just use Chrome” they say.

[paintman252]

You’re seriously blaming company for trying to make their product popular. Even if we assume that current Chrome state violates the anti-trust legislation, that’s still a pretty silly moral condemnation.

[MBCook]

The law literally makes it illegal. No matter what you think. It’s in the tiny text of the law.

MS got hit. Apple is going to. Google should be too, but I doubt it will happen.

(I’d argue giving away Android is dumping and requiring Play is bundling, but that’s another rant)

[izacus]

This is some bizarre rewriting of history. We switched to Chrome because it was stupidly faster than competition and more responsive.

It's nasty to now rewrite history claiming it's some kind of conspiracy to make a browser that ran way better than IE and Mozilla one.

[MBCook]

I’m not saying that’s the only reason. Yes it was way better than IE. And FF of the time.

The definition of anti-competitive behavior doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter if 100% of people switched because it’s better and their friends told them and not a single one did it because of the ads. The ads were still illegal.

[user_7832]

I don't think it's not a practical solution but one way to "solve" this is by having folks from mozilla/apple etc sitting on the chromium board where they make decisions.

[gwbas1c]

> Wouldn't this be actual market forces at work then, since it's open source?

The point of open standards is that anyone can implement them in a clean room, from scratch.

At this point, HTML is slowly drifting away from an open standard, to a standard where only one single implementation is practical.

[wolpoli]

> Chromium is open-source, and there are plenty of Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, and Chrome,), it's less obvious.

I agree. In the Internet Explorer days, there were also browsers that were custom UI built on top of IE Trident. The Chromium-based browsers of today actually offer little innovations beyond what browsers building on top of Trident have accomplished in the IE days.

[skybrian]

One the bright side, baseline web API's are good enough that most websites and most web developers can ignore new API's entirely. That wasn't true in the old days. You had to be aware of browser differences due to crippling bugs.

It seems like that also means competing browsers should work on most websites? How bad is it, really? Some cutting-edge demos and games don't work?

I'm under the impression that a lot of idiosyncratic website bugs are due to browser extensions that somehow mess with web pages.