Everybody choose convenience over efficiency and standards, because apparently nobody understood what “being lazy” actually is.
The FTC / DOJ should strip Google of Chrome.
Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:
- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"
- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)
- Google search is the default search
- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search
- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser
- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services
- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising
- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android
- Made Google accounts the default
- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer
- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google
- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)
- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues
- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results
- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise
- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android
... and that's just scratching the surface.
Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.
I am confused.
- The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article.
- The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps instead of learning web standards; but react apps work equally well (or poorly) in all major browsers.
- Finally, how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.
Google should get slapped too, and they might be headed that way...
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/20/nx-s1-5367750/google-breakup-...
Safari is also pretty user-hostile, which is why Apple is getting sued by the DOJ for purposely hobbling Safari while forbidding any other browser engine on IOS. They did this so that developers are forced to write native apps, which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.
They have so much market share that they control the standards bodies. The tail wags the dog.
Shipping Electron junk, strengthens Google and Chrome market presence, and the reference to Web standards, why bother when it is whatever Chrome is capable of.
Web devs with worthy skills of forgotten times, would rather use regular processes alongside the default system browser.
- Sometimes the standards don't define some exact behavior and it is left for the browser implementer to come up with. Chrome implements it one way and other browsers implement it the other way. Both are compatible with the standards.
- Sometimes the app contains errors, but certain permissive behaviors of Chrome mean it works ok and the app is shipped. The developers work around the guesses that Chrome makes and cobble the app together. (there may be a load of warnings in the console). Other browsers don't make the same guesses so the app is shipped in a state that it will only work on Chrome.
- Sometimes Chrome (or mobile Safari) specific APIs or functions are used as people don't know any better.
- Some security / WAF / anti-bot software relies on Chrome specific JavaScript quirks (that there may be no standards for) and thinks that the user using Firefox or another browser that isn't Chrome or iOS safari is a bot and blocks them.
In many ways, Chrome is the new IE, through no fault of Google or the authors of other browsers.
I can't fathom how there are so many devs that don't use adblockers. It is so strange and when I look over their shoulders I get a shocking reminder how the web looks for them.
Or actually learn how we use to ship software on the glory days of 8, 16 and 32 bit home platforms.
Now I do agree there are no alternatives for people that only care about shipping ChromeOS all over the place.
I don't even hate Electron that much. I'm working on a toy project using Electron right now for various reasons. This was just a bizarre angle to approach from.
The pattern is this:
- Google publishes a specification.
- They raise request for feedback from the Mozilla and WebKit teams.
- Mozilla and WebKit find security and privacy problems.
- Google deploys their implementation anyway.
- This functionality gets listed on sites like whatpwacando.today
- Web developers complain about Safari being behind and accuse Apple of holding back the web.
- Nobody gives a shit about Firefox.
So we have two key problems, but neither of them are “Google controls the standards bodies”. The problem is that they don’t need to.
Firstly, a lot of web developers have stopped caring about the standards process. Whatever functionality Google adds is their definition of “the web”. This happened at the height of Internet Explorer dominance too. A huge number of web developers would happily write Internet Explorer-only sites and this monoculture damaged the web immensely. Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
The second problem is that nobody cares about Firefox any more. The standards process doesn’t really work when there are only two main players. At the moment, you can honestly say “Look, the standards process is that any standard needs two interoperable implementations. If Google can’t convince anybody outside of Google to implement something, it can’t be a standard.” This makes the unsuitability of those proposals a lot plainer to see.
But now that Firefox market share has vanished, that argument is turning into “Google and Apple disagree about whether to add functionality to the web”. This hides the unsuitability of those proposals. This too has happened before – this is how the web worked when Internet Explorer was battling Netscape Navigator for dominance in the 90s, where browsers were adding all kinds of stupid things unilaterally. Again, Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
The web standards process desperately needs either Firefox to regain standing or for a new independent rendering engine (maybe Ladybird?) to arise. And web developers need to stop treating everything that Google craps out as if it’s a done deal. Google don’t and shouldn’t control the definition of the web. We’ve seen that before, and a monoculture like that paralyses the industry.
Yes, Windows supported Electron-like applications back in the 90s with HTAs. If you want something modern and cross-platform, Tauri does this:
I don’t believe the lawsuit claims this, does it?
> which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.
This is untrue.
- Most developers pay 15% for in-app purchases. Only the tiny proportion of developers earning more than a million dollars a year pay 30% and even then, it’s 15% for subscriptions after the first year.
- This is not any purchase made through an app. This only applies to digital goods and services.
No it isn't. If you want your capitalism to be liberal, you need antitrust, true. If you only want capitalism, and don't really care about the 'liberty' part, you can check the mercantile capitalism of old. It worked quite well for people with power.
It’s actually kinda simple: they don’t, at least not continuously. It’s “what you use” because you decided that’s true at some point in the past. All you have to do now is decide that some other browser is “what you use”. You can even take it a step further and decide that Chrome is “not what you use”.
(And actually, if you go through with it, you might discover reasons for why you don’t want to switch like “bookmarks” and “saved passwords”. In my opinion, if it is not easy to transfer those things, that is further reason to switch because vendor lock-in is user-hostile.)
Businesses who hire such web developers will lose huge amounts of sales, since 90% of visitors are on mobile and half of those are on Safari.
I think you’re wrong about Safari itself being the reason chrome isn’t a 90%+ market owner; rather, it’s apple’s requirement that no other browser engine can exist on iOS.
What exactly do you mean by this?
IE was horrible to use which is why so many people switched to Firefox. It wasn't because of web standards.
IE didn't have tabs when every other browser moved to that.
IE didn't block pop ups when every other browser would do that.
For a normal user they would just switch back to chrome because that is what works, they don’t care about our complaints, they care that what they want to use works.
Everyone focused on short term gains. Optimizing for browser with 30% market share, backed by Google makes more sense than a browser with 20%. Repeat with 40% and 20% respectively. And so on, and so on.
There isn't a lesson to learn. It's just short term thinking.
Now Google has enough power and lacks scruples that would prevent it from exploiting.
This is a little disingenuous because Apple often falsely claims security when it’s to hold back tech that could loosen the App Store grasp.
Easy when they make Chrome do whatever they want and call it a living standard (whatever that is). There is no such thing as web standards now.
It sounds like capitalism has so far saved us from a Chrome monopoly, then.
My lament is more about the current situation and our apparent inability to escape it.
In this case, I may also be annoyed a bit about your rant on ideologues. Just because people don't make decisions based on their ideology doesn't mean they don't make decisions based on ideology.
There can be no free market if your government intervenes in every transaction.
Apple are by far the worst offender and I can't wait for Safari to die
One failure mode of unchecked and unregulated capitalism is the establishment of monopolies that can starve oxygen from the rest of the ecosystem.
In order to have maximally efficient and broadly beneficial capitalism, you need strong anti-trust mechanisms to reoxygenate the environment for new competition. Regular enforcement also means that labor and investment capital reap the most rewards instead of calcified, legacy incumbents.
Companies need to be constantly fighting to survive. If they're sitting comfortable and growing without controls, something went wrong and the rest of the fitness landscape is being distorted by an invasive species.
Antitrust Regulation is incredibly pro-market and pro-competition.
I made a reader app for learning languages. Wiktionary has audio for a word. Playing the file over web URL works fine, but when I add caching to play from cached audio blob, safari sometimes delays the audio by 0.5-15 seconds. Works fine on every other browser.
It’s infuriating and it can’t be unintentional.
webdev in 2025: OMGWTF NOTHING WORKS WITHOUT THIS NEW SHINY FEATURE RELEASED YESTERDAY AAAAAAAAA!!!!!111
Mozilla did it with Gecko even earlier, really — but they gave up on it to focus on browser itself. (There were a number of Gecko-based browsers like GNOME default browser Epiphany using it)
Apple built WebKit on top of KHTML just as Gecko stopped being updated: I guess they invented it too.
Tools like Windmill (web rendering automation for testing) took programmable concept further.
And Sun did very similar things with Java applets and Java applet runtime for desktop.
I really like being able to install websites as apps too so my WM can manage them independently.
There is no such thing as an anti-war movie, because anti-war imagery is the same imagery that pro-war films use, it’s just the interpretation and meanings are reversed.
Might it also be true, that there is no such thing as effective antitrust enforcement, because the one doing the investigating and enforcement is unwilling or unable to kill the goose that lays golden eggs, because their own employer’s budget and state apparatus directly and indirectly relies upon taxing golden eggs. Perhaps we’re all just carrying water for giants and giant-collaborators, whether or not giants even exist.
I don't think that's true at all - usually brand comes first and ethics are not even considered.
> the product itself still has to a good choice for the customer to make a purchase
Not at all, the consumer only needs to be made to believe that it's a good choice which is very far from being the same thing.
This is what Mozilla has to say about Web Bluetooth:
> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth
Again: Generally speaking, when Apple rejects a proposal, Mozilla do too. What’s Mozilla’s motivation for doing this and lying about it?
There should be a name for this kind of fallacy, where you look at a snapshot of a dynamic system (or worse, at initial conditions), and reason from them as if they were fixed - where even mentally simulating that system a few time steps into the future makes immediately apparent that the conditions mutate and results are vastly different than expected.
> True capitalism can never exist
I just mention this because it's not a problem exactly limited to capitalism. It's a problem that exists in many forms of government and economics (like socialism). It just relies on asymmetric power
It's not ideaology to want things to work. Last time IE lost because it lost sight of the fact that it was utter dogshitte.
Chrome is now utter dogshitte, users will (eventually) be unable to ignore that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
> His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. Critics argue that his involvement in Guatemala facilitated US imperialism and contributed to decades of civil unrest and repression, raising ethical concerns about his role in undermining democratic governance.
> He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations. His uncle was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
> The Century of the Self is a 2002 British television documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It focuses on the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, and PR consultant Edward Bernays. In episode one, Curtis says, "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04&list=PLktPdpPFKH...