[cnst]

Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to uninstall Chrome from Android; but that's not the case; to the contrary, it's Apple's Safari that's impossible to uninstall from Apple's iOS.

Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to install Apple's Safari on Google's Android because of Google, but that's not the case, either, it's actually Apple that has discontinued Safari outside of their own ecosystem some 10+ years ago. Which, BTW, was a few years after Steve Jobs predicted that Safari will be the only browser on the planet, on both Macs and PCs, and that it'd be good.

Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to use Google's Android without a Google Account tracking your every move; but this is not the case, either, because you can easily sideload F-Droid and Aurora Store, and side-load any of the free Play Store apps as published and signed by Google, without any Google accounts, and uninstall Chrome, YouTube and most of the other pesky apps, yet still have access to your banking apps, to YouTube through free clients like NewPipe or PipePipe, and to lots of other stuff, all without any signs of any Google Accounts. Can you even install a third-party YouTube client on iOS? Ironically, you can on Android. In fact, you don't even lose any major functionality by foregoing Chrome and a Google Account on an Android; even the experience of watching YouTube is actually superior with PipePipe. I have several extra phones without a Google Account, and they're fully usable without any unexpected limitations; sync is the only thing that's missing.

Yet to the contrary, NONE of these things are possible on iOS.

On iOS, you can't even use even the "premium" pre-installed apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand or iMovie, without assigning them to an Apple Account first. You can't install any apps or stores, either. You can't do anything without at least an Apple Account. Yet it's Apple that's the last bastion of our privacy?! How?!

[CharlesW]

> Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to uninstall Chrome from Android…

Wrong. "Chrome is already installed on most Android devices, and can't be removed." https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95319

[cnst]

Google's support article is wrong/misleading. You can uninstall all app updates for Chrome. You can disable Chrome. Once disabled, it cannot run again, unless you expressly enable it. It's basically equivalent to an uninstall for most purposes.

The latest trend in OS design are an immutable system partition, so, obviously, you cannot modify the underlying system image, neither on macOS, nor iOS, nor Android, but what evidence do you have that doing an overlay disable isn't enough?

I've been using Android for years, and have not seen funny business after I disable Chrome. You can use Brave or Vivaldi or Yandex Browser or Opera in place of Chrome at all times. Or Firefox in many cases. I routinely have fully functioning test devices with stock Android without any Google Accounts or any Chrome. Everything just works the way it should. Including the banking apps installed through Aurora Store through F-Droid, as well as the streaming apps like Amazon Prime Video etc. Again, all of this works without a Google Account in any way on my side as an end-user, and it's expected to continue working even in 2027 even if the trial they've announced goes through worldwide. It works on any Pixel device, it works on any Motorola device, it even works on Samsung, too.

[mzajc]

> I've been using Android for years, and have not seen funny business after I disable Chrome.

You have not seen any funny business because Chrome WebView, which many applications depend on, is a separate application. Developer settings let you change it to another application, but only from a hardcoded list of package names and only if they're installed to /system. There are also no non-Chromium WebView implementations available to my knowledge.

So no, unless you're OK with breaking applications that use WebView, you can't remove Chrome from an Android smartphone.

[wpm]

> Which, BTW, was a few years after Steve Jobs predicted that Safari will be the only browser on the planet, on both Macs and PCs, and that it'd be good.

Safari is good. As a user, I could not care even an iota less about how "annoying" it is to develop over-built, shitty websites to work right on Safari. Web developers as a general rule don't really seem like they give a shit about delivering good work, that respects the users wishes and devices and privacy, so if it makes it harder for them to have to write garbage like fucking Confluence or whatever for two platforms claiming to comply with "standards", sounds good to me, I don't care. Works great for reading documents and watching videos. Works great checking a menu of a restaurant from a QR code. I don't want it or need it to be my entire operating system, accessing my camera, my microphone, my location, my goddamn serial ports, running gobs of terrible quality, remote, slow code ensuring my brand new computer feels the same as my brand new computer from 10 years ago, to do what a barebones platform API app could do talking to the exact same JSON-RPC APIs their dogshit React app is talking to.

> Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to use Google's Android without a Google Account tracking your every move

And this argument would hold water if it was solely about being forced to do something horrific to your privacy instead of led to or being tricked into doing it. It holds as well as "well you can just not buy an iPhone". Give me a break! Google is not out to empower anyone. They are out to own general computing and the mountain of data if produces, and turning the browser, the one platform they have control over, into the operating system, is how they are going to do that. And in a stroke of brilliance, for the last 15 years they've "allowed" the "choice" to sidestep their overreach, which leads to braindead arguments like "well, at least you can sidestep it, therefore its really not that bad" from libertarian brained bozos who can't see the forest for the trees.

Apple is by no means free of sin. There are a million things I would change about the App Store monopoly. But that isn't the world we live in. We live in a world where one company controls and inspects the conduit to the internet for a vast majority of the population, and one controls it for the vast majority of the remainder. Whatever their reasons, the latter are holding back the Kraken ready to envelop and consume everything, and I'm not going to poo poo their efforts because it doesn't immediately comply with whatever half-assed, hostile "standard" the former pushes out of its rectum.

[cnst]

I feel the same, I agree that the web has gone downhill with all the endless JavaScript wasting all the available CPU cycles. (With all the rest CPU cycles being wasted by the swap-in/out because of the memory bloat of web browsers, again.) This is why these days I ALWAYS enable Low Power Mode in any browser or system that provides such a functionality; macOS has finally added this a few years ago — better late than never.

But I feel like ALL browser vendors are not doing enough to combat this bloat. There have to be resource limits, warning messages/icons, and stop-gap measures to avoid pointless JavaScript wasting our electricity; but NONE of the browsers do this to an extent I'd wish they'd do; in fact, Chrome has actually been ahead of Firefox and Safari in reigning these sites, probably because it has to run in production on 4GB ChromeOS machines costing $99, whereas all the Firefox and Safari devs are probably using 48GB machines costing $2399 as their benchmarks. So, the reality, is that, ironically, Chrome is again the leader even in this area. Because Chrome on a $99 4GB ChromeOS machine feels snappier than Firefox on a $999 MacBook, given enough open tabs.

Your point about feature bloat sounds good in principle, but is not practical in reality. In reality, if things don't work in Safari, you're simply asked to install an app from the App Store. Or if you have to configure a keyboard on a Mac, you have to use a Windows machine with the native keyboard configuration tool, instead of VIA in Chrome WebHID or WebUSB. Why in your opinion are these alternatives not worse than having these sorts of things as web standards as written by Chrome?