The last thing Google would want is the web to turn into a Chrome platform. Unlike with Microsoft or even Apple, their source of revenue is web, and they they are doing everything in their capacity for this platform to win. This is exactly why they open-sourced most of Chrome and almost fully finance Chrome's biggest competitor.
>Unlike with Microsoft or even Apple, their source of revenue is web, and they they are doing everything in their capacity for this platform to win.
I feel like there's a missing step in the argument here. Yes Google's revenue comes from the web, yes Chromium being open source and paying for search deals are a hedge against anti trust, but why does it follow that they wouldn't want to dominate the browser space? They do, and it seems to be working quite well for them. But it feels more like a minimum effort hedge against antitrust then a demonstration of a healthy ecosystem.
Also, every time Chromium comes up you have people pointing to it like it's a counterpoint to their browser dominance. It's open source, so what's the issue? But the issue is that Chromium as a body decides whether commits make it into the browser and the decision making body is an invite only group of full time Google developers. So it is controlled by Google after all.
>But the issue is that Chromium as a body decides whether commits make it into the browser and the decision making body is an invite only group of full time Google developers.
I understand that "just fork it" has been the canonical response to disagreements over direction of open source software. Sometimes that's the right call, the world is better for having a forked Syncthing, forked Nextcloud, and so on.
But I think there are cases, such as Chromium where the "just fork it" response is unrealistic about the burden of maintaining a codebase or the ongoing relationship to new updates, or not having capacity to solve new problems or comply with new standards in Google-independent ways. Part of the problem of Chromium is that it's normalized a velocity of development and of codebase size in exactly the way you would if you were going for embrace-extend-extinguish.
And the foundational point is still true, Google controls commits to Chromium, so the core project itself is not ever going to be an organic manifestion of community desires for an egalitarian internet. It's going to be whatever helps consolidate Google's monopoly.
You're not wrong, but there are organizations which could hard-fork Chromium, it just happens to be more productive to collaborate as long as Google remains a good steward.
The only reason Safari has any market share is because it's the default on every iPhone.
4/5 top browsers by market share are there because they are preinstalled on millions of devices and none of them are terrible enough for an average person to look for an alternative.
Exactly right and I wish more people understood this as the key dynamic driving change in browser adoption. Just for one more example, what little toehold Edge and Bing have right now are from muscling those in front of people as defaults.
Which I think is important as it relates to Mozilla. Because a lot of the arguments back and forth about Mozilla assume that change in browser adoption was about what features they did or didn't add. But I think that completely ignores powerful actors leveraging monopoly positions to drive users to their browsers, which is more important by several orders or magnitude. Any explanation of that history which leaves that part out is revisionist history in my opinion.
I disagree wholeheartedly, the current state of browser market share has nothing to do with how good any of the browsers are, it's just monopolistic behavior. Device manufacturers should force you to pick one during setup, which is absolutely a reasonable policy decision away.
In fact, as of this year, Apple devices in the EU already have to ask you which browser you want to use during the setup process, while Android devices don't have to ask you which browser you want to use, but do have to ask you which search engine you want to use. It is a bit inconsistent and arbitrary, but it's a step in the right direction.
What do you mean? It is on many Androids and every Chromebook.
I just checked some website stats I have access to and ~78.6% of iOS users use Safari. On Android on the other hand, ~76% of them use Chrome, ~8.1% uses the Samsung Browser, and there's a marginal amount of people using other manufacturer-provided browsers like Huawei Browser and MIUI (Xiaomi's default). Of course I don't know the exact manufacturer of Android phones to be able to tell what percentage of say Samsung devices switched to Chrome, but I'd say the pattern's still pretty clear.
The only people likely to switch browsers are desktop users, but they total to <20% of the traffic. Funnily enough Chrome isn't even the top browser overall, it's Safari, but that tells you more about my clientele (richer than average for my target market).
An alternative explanation is they fund Mozilla to avoid a monopoly breakup. The evidence? The fact that everyone currently knows exactly how much Google pays Mozilla because of the recent attempt to do a monopoly breakup.
