I have no wish to defend Apple. However, I have no wish to defend Google or Microsoft either. Collectively, those three have a monopolistic market share for operating systems and web browsers on both desktop and mobile.
My fundamental problem with this author is his massive conflict of interest. He's not an outside observer but rather a Chromium engineer, former Google employee, current Microsoft employee. He talks about "competition" and "competitors" while basically ignoring the monopolistic landscape of the industry and the role of his own employers in that monopolization. Nobody has clean hands here, not Apple, not Google, not Microsoft. I don't see any of them really acting in the best interest of consumers. Let's not pretend, for example, that Chromium doesn't push a bunch of shit that consumers never wanted.
Progress would be breaking up this triopoly, not allowing Blink/Chromium to dominate everything.
The web "standards" bodies are a joke now because of the dominance of these few companies over web browsers. I don't even want to hear about standards anymore. So-called standards now are just the monopolists coming to agreement among themselves. All we have here is the employee of one monopolist complaining about another monopolist.
As far as I'm concerned, the web standards should be so simple that a little indie developer could write a full-fledged web browser. But people like the article author want web browser engines to become entire operating systems, which in effect excludes almost everyone from writing a web browser. That's not openness and freedom. It's inherently monopolistic.
A "little indie developer" hasn't been able to write a web browser in several decades. An implementation of 2005-era CSS and JS would be a complex task surely requiring a fairly sizable team to implement.
The fact is, all three major browser implementations are open-source and that has allowed any company to come in and release or embed their own browser with minimal effort. Chrome/Blink is dominant but that is not due to technical barriers that make it difficult for other companies to ship their own browsers. In fact it is now easier than ever to do so.
> A "little indie developer" hasn't been able to write a web browser in several decades.
IMO that's a major problem.
> The fact is, all three major browser implementations are open-source and that has allowed any company to come in and release or embed their own browser with minimal effort.
And they're all beholden to Google's decisions, for example to wreck the web browser extension API. Of course you can fork the code, but forks become increasingly difficult to maintain as they diverge significantly from the original code. Google can make things extremely difficult for forks.
1. "Lil' indie dev can make an engine" is irrelevant in terms of standards or browser/engine marketshare unless he can obtain significant browser/engine marketshare. He can't. So framing the current state of the browser engine market/"monopolies" as a barriers-to-entry problem with engine/standards complexity is completely nonsensical. Especially when engines are fully open-source.
2. Super-simple engines that any indie can solo-code means disregarding 95% of feature demands by web developers (your audience, remember?), even basic things like encryption, video/audio streaming, chatting, conferencing, that users (your "actual" audience) expects and demands. It means killing basically every part of the web that isn't text documents, which means turning everything else into native apps beholden to their own monopolies, that are mostly crappy (contractor-made, less sandboxed/secure than on the current web). That's also nonsensical, if your objective is "consumers". And it means making every company's revenue dependent on Apple/Google/MS instead of a web domain they control.
Really you should examine your assumptions and logic far more thoroughly.
> "Lil' indie dev can make an engine" is irrelevant in terms of standards or browser/engine marketshare unless he can obtain significant browser/engine marketshare. He can't.
How is market share relevant?
What would be wrong with designing simple web standards and as a result having 1000 options each with 0.1% market share?
> Super-simple engines that any indie can solo-code
This is a straw man.
> video/audio streaming
There used to be browser plugins for things like this.
> web developers (your audience, remember?)
> users (your "actual" audience)
Which is it?
Catering almost exclusively to web developers, as the browsers have done, unfortunately, is not in the best interest of web users.
> native apps beholden to their own monopolies, that are mostly crappy (contractor-made, less sandboxed/secure than on the current web)
This is false.
> And it means making every company's revenue dependent on Apple/Google/MS
This is true regardless, native or web.
And people like the article author like to claim that Apple is forcing companies to write native apps, but notice that on Android, where there are alternative web browser engines, these same companies still write native apps. That's not because WebKit is bad, because WebKit is irrelevant on Android. Rather, it's because smartphone browsing is generally inconvenient and also native apps offer some inherent advantages over web pages.
To be clear, monopolies are bad, both for operating systems and for web browsers. But turning web browsers into operating systems won't break the current monopolies, because it's the same companies in either case.
The unfettered market has failed. We really need democratic governments to break up the monopolies. Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen.
> instead of a web domain they control.
Do you even "control" a web domain? Web browsers can throw scary warnings over http and force you to adopt https certificates. Then the web browsers can decided which certificate vendors to trust or distrust. And all the web browsers have so-called "safe browsing" that can arbitrarily decide, with no warning and no resource, that your domain is unsafe.
Market share is relevant to your argument because it determines the standards that determine engine complexity.
> turning web browsers into operating systems won't break the current monopolies, because it's the same companies in either case
False. Linux is a perfectly great mainstream desktop option thanks largely to web apps (+Electron). Basically everything's available. How incredible is that? Or swap Linux with any other alternative.
The fact is you can make an indie engine right now. It won't support most of the web, but then again you don't want any of that to exist because of the additional barriers to entry for engines. So what's the problem? Make it.
In your world, somehow every platform vendor stops making web browsers, and we might have a bunch of browsers with 0.1% marketshare. How? Ludicrous. And proprietary browser plugins, really? So you're not looking to reduce complexity after all, then?
> Market share is relevant to your argument because it determines the standards that determine engine complexity.
I talked about two different things, (1) what is and (2) what should be.
(1) "The web standards bodies are a joke now because of the dominance of these few companies over web browsers". (2) "the web standards should be so simple that a little indie developer could write a full-fledged web browser."
You appear to be criticizing (2) by assuming (1), but (1) is the opposite of (2). The latter is an ideal, not the sad reality.
> Linux is a perfectly great mainstream desktop option
Linux is not a mainstream desktop option, because consumers can't walk into a computer retailer and buy a desktop running Linux. That's why Linux has a practically nonexistent consumer market share.
Of course techies can run Linux, though I wouldn't call Electron apps "great" by any measure.
> In your world, somehow every platform vendor stops making web browsers, and we might have a bunch of browsers with 0.1% marketshare. How? Ludicrous.
It was purely a hypothetical scenario. The point of the hypothetical scenario was to explain why market share shouldn't be relevant to standards (as I also explained at the beginning of this comment).
> And proprietary browser plugins, really?
They were in fact not all proprietary and are not necessarily proprietary.
What's wrong with modularity? Some software vendors can specialize in HTML/CSS, some in video, etc.
> Again I don't think you've thought it through.
You can disagree with me, but these continuing, unnecessary, personal, condescending comments are in violation of the HN guidelines. Please stop.
Do you have any arguments that are not? The article presents actual evidence, whereas you seem to be intent on littering this thread with hypothetical counter points and abstract versions of reality.
> > Again I don't think you've thought it through.
> You can disagree with me, but these continuing, unnecessary, personal, condescending comments are in violation of the HN guidelines. Please stop.
This is absurd, you need to stop invoking HN guidelines inappropriately just because someone (far more respectfully than me) disagrees with you. Grow up.
> This is absurd, you need to stop invoking HN guidelines inappropriately just because someone (far more respectfully than me) disagrees with you. Grow up.
I don't know how a discussion about browser engines ended up here, but please don't comment like this, no matter who or what you're responding to. You're a longtime user whom we've not had to warn for several years, but we need everyone to avoid behaving like this on HN. Longtime users should be the ones to de-escalate heated discussions and raise the standards on HN, not drag them downward.
> And proprietary browser plugins, really? So you're not looking to reduce complexity after all, then?
Maybe they haven't lived through the world of pain that was Silverlight, Flash and Java Applets et al. I suppose from a more innocent position without any history it might seem like a good idea to break complexity out into little modules, but the reality was poor integration, more platform lockin, and a security nightmare.
Eh... the author is not operating in good faith. Just for starters, this little jab, re web usb:
> This is far from the Hacker News caricature of "letting any web page talk to all of your USB devices."
The author is a meretricious liar. OSes do not randomly download code and run it. More importantly, unlike the author's employers (google and microsoft), they are not in the habit of allowing randoms to pay 1/1000 of a cent per install to run their spyware if you don't use adblock.
Nobody comparing what code gets run on an OS to what code gets run in a browser (eg every time you load a web page) is operating in anything approaching good faith. The risk exposures are nothing alike.
No, the worst offender (by far) does not get a free pass just because the world is not perfect.
All of the main contributors have corporate interest and are not acting out of the goodness of their hearts, yes. But Apple's level of anti competitive, vertically integrated, gaslighting bullshit goes above and beyond.
> does not get a free pass just because the world is not perfect.
Nobody is giving Apple a "free pass". I started by saying literally, "I have no wish to defend Apple." I also said, "Nobody has clean hands here, not Apple".
> But Apple's level of anti competitive, vertically integrated, gaslighting bullshit goes above and beyond.
I would note that the US Department of Justice is currently pursuing two monopoly cases against Google and suggested that Google should divest Chrome.
> > the worst offender (by far)
> This is disputable.
It really isn't. This has been argued to death, this is the point of this article (to provide data) because so many people (fans or not) buy into Apple's marketing, token browser feature releases and virtue signalling. They even have the cheek to boast about Safari's a11y feature releases while simultaneously ignoring long standing bugs that have broken overall a11y experience for years. To anyone on the ground who's been making web content and apps for a decade its clear as day, for everyone else Apple has done a good job of making it very unclear what's going on.
> Nobody is giving Apple a "free pass". I started by saying literally, "I have no wish to defend Apple." I also said, "Nobody has clean hands here, not Apple".
Yes, then go on to describe and focus on a "monopolistic landscape", and paint a picture where Apple is just another generic, monopolistic, self serving player - while completely ignoring the reality of the affect those individual players have on the web - which the article actually does investigate, but you would rather discount it's evidence because the author is involved enough in the ecosystem to have insight and form a strong opinion.
In summary you seem to be rejecting an evidence based argument (but not due to it's evidence), in favour of a philosophical perspective, entirely in the abstract, absent of detail, that equalises responsibility. To me that feels like giving Apple a pretty big free pass.
> I would note that the US Department of Justice is currently pursuing two monopoly cases against Google and suggested that Google should divest Chrome.
Yes, and I would agree, but that does not negate the reality of Apple's far worse affects on the web. I (also) don't want to defend any of them, but if you want to get philosophical, Google's monopoly is more aligned with the interest of web users', yes they will try to throw anti user and anti-competitive things in there (and they should be shamed for that), but they have also done a ton of work to move the platform forward, not out of the goodness of their heart, but that's the reality. Compare that to Apple's business, which is not aligned with the interest of web users', quite the opposite. Both companies manipulate the web in ways that benefit their business, it just happens that Apple's is so negatively aligned with the web that they do so through inaction while anti-competitively blocking other vendors, and blocking standards progression.
> Google's monopoly is more aligned with the interest of web users', yes they will try to throw anti user and anti-competitive things in there (and they should be shamed for that), but they have also done a ton of work to move the platform forward
I disagree, and it appears that you're approaching this mainly from the perspective of web developers, whose interests are not necessarily aligned with web users either. In fact, web developers nowadays are notoriously user-hostile.
As a web user, I'm perfectly fine with continuing to miss many of the features that the article author believes are "missing".
My fundamental problem with this author is his massive conflict of interest. He's not an outside observer but rather a Chromium engineer, former Google employee, current Microsoft employee. He talks about "competition" and "competitors" while basically ignoring the monopolistic landscape of the industry and the role of his own employers in that monopolization. Nobody has clean hands here, not Apple, not Google, not Microsoft. I don't see any of them really acting in the best interest of consumers. Let's not pretend, for example, that Chromium doesn't push a bunch of shit that consumers never wanted.
Progress would be breaking up this triopoly, not allowing Blink/Chromium to dominate everything.
The web "standards" bodies are a joke now because of the dominance of these few companies over web browsers. I don't even want to hear about standards anymore. So-called standards now are just the monopolists coming to agreement among themselves. All we have here is the employee of one monopolist complaining about another monopolist.
As far as I'm concerned, the web standards should be so simple that a little indie developer could write a full-fledged web browser. But people like the article author want web browser engines to become entire operating systems, which in effect excludes almost everyone from writing a web browser. That's not openness and freedom. It's inherently monopolistic.