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AFAIK in the current setup, only the UI is Apple's; any time you message customer service or open a dispute, that is handled directly by Goldman employees, and decisions to raise/lower your credit limit are also made by Goldman. All of those parts will be handled by Chase now.

AFAIK, "email HTML" isn't standardized either; most organizations that make nice-looking HTML emails have to do a ton of testing across different clients and come up with workarounds to make everything look consistent.


It's fascinating how much "email HTML" is trapped in about HTML ~2.5, with limited CSS support and still a ton of FONT tags and TABLE layouts.

HTML 2 might be an interesting subset of HTML to "focus on" for smolweb, but it would be a big retro throwback, and not feel at all modern.

If you were starting today, might be more interesting to start with the most modern stuff and work backwards. HTML 2 TABLE could be implemented as a specialization of CSS Grid, for instance.


Could we standardize email HTML?


If you can convince Apple, Google, and Microsoft to implement your standard: sure. Attempts have been made with varying success.

Your standard still needs to render in Outlook on Windows, though, which means you need to support the weird Office version of IE11 as an upper limit.


Google has recently been pivoting AMP which nearly broke the web towards email. It might actually be a better use of AMP than the web, but I'm still skeptical about some of its privacy stance and ad-injection focus: https://amp.dev/about/email


Does the email client on Windows still use IE11? (Some older versions might still have significant market share, but I’m not sure it would be for much longer?)


"Outlook (New)" (aka "One Outlook") is React Native with a full Chromium webview, and the transition from out-of-the-box Windows-provided "Outlook Mobile" (Windows 8-10) to "Outlook (New)" has mostly completed, but the transition from Outlook (Classic) (aka "Bloated Corporate Outlook") seems somewhat stalled because a few big corporations have extensive plugins and cranky IT admins. (Also Outlook Mobile had a better than IE11 support and also has been Chromium on most platforms, it is "Outlook (Classic)" that continues to haunt us all with its ancient Word-based micro-browser fork of IE.)


Sometimes I really wish MSFT broke backwards compatibility in the places that matter, not places their corporate customers don’t care about.


You could write a standard.

If it actually gets mainstream adoption or goes into the standards pile it another question entirely.


My personal favorite UX-failure-of-the-moment in Teams: If I open the teams tab > Browse, it shows a big list of company-wide channels that I could join. There's a search box, but unlike any normal search box, it only does a prefix search, so if your channel is named "some test channel", and you search for "test", it doesn't find it! Several times I've given up at guessing the right channel name and had to ask coworkers to tell me the exact name in order to join.


The number of new and novel ways companies (Microsoft and Apple specifically) have found to screw up search is mind boggling.

And we're not talking edge cases, just "It's been solved since the 60s" meat and potato use cases.


> to screw up search is mind boggling.

it's because they hired "frontend" developers to develop these features, likely someone with little actual compsci experience, and have little to no room to make the feature and under a tight deadline.


Ah the good old us vs them thing popping up again. Manners


Don't expect sprinters to care about marathon issues.


The article is about a product written in Express(Node) and React.

Tell me more about "frontend" developers please.


Two of my team Channels completely vanished last week. Not in the recycle bins, just gone. The only way I knew was because I got a sync notification from Onedrive.

I contacted support two weeks ago. So far they have asked me to check the Teams admin recycle bin (3 days) and then the SharePoint recycle bin (7 day). I had shared screenshots of both of these in the initial support request, both are empty.

Only 3 people have admin rights in the company, one of us deleted the channels, and even if we did there's supposed to be a 93 day recovery window. But they're just....gone.

I asked for them to escalate 3 days ago. No reply.


My favorite bug (still unsolved!) is that maximizing the window on a video call only shows the top left quarter of the video feed. I have to manually resize the window to that exact region of my screen just to see someone’s full face or screen share. Nobody can fix it, my teams install is just stuck like this. Another one: when using airpods, everyone’s voices sound super slowed down, like the audio samples are being played back at half speed. Google meet and Slack huddles work fine. Cherry on top: sometimes the entire window just vanishes mid call (no video, audio, or any UI) but I’m still broadcasting. This isn’t just bad, it’s repeated complete failures of basic functionality that happen on the regular. Frankly, it’s the most incompetently written piece of software I’ve ever had the displeasure of using.


Your video window issue may be related to display scaling and/or video hardware acceleration. If you care enough, try tinkering with those settings in teams, windows, and your display driver (if it has them…).


I used to have a problem very similar to this, where the "working hours" Teams showed on my profile were in the wrong time zone. It turned out the solution was to go deep into some submenu of the Microsoft account settings website (_not_ anywhere in the actual Teams app) and edit the account time zone preferences, so perhaps look into that and make sure those match the local settings in the Teams app.


I appreciate it but at this point I’ve given up on it. It doesn’t cause any issues, or hasn’t thus far, outside of the annoying nag. That said, if I ever get to digging in again I’ll check in to those settings - thanks!


In the US, most rentals (except for very cheap ones) include a fridge/washer/dryer/dishwasher, but if you're buying the property, typically only the dishwasher is included unless you negotiate with the seller.


This is regional. In much of the US, the refrigerator is included when purchasing a house.


It varies on an individual sale level, any appliances can be included when selling a house, but other than built in ones (which refrigerators usually aren't) its hit or miss for new houses that aren't models, and for existing houses it really depends on the seller (owner occupied, they may want to take it with them, depending on the circumstances where they are moving, as it previously an equipped rental, then they’ll more likely offer to include all the major appliances, etc.)—and buyer (may prefer unwanted personal property be removed prior to move jn rather than included, if they want to buy something new that suits them or being their current unit.)


I haven't lived in that many places in the US, but everywhere I've lived -- rental or bought -- the refrigerator came with the house.

Ditto for the dishwasher, and clothes washer and dryer. The microwave, too, if it's a unit attached to the cabinetry, and not a freestanding on-counter model.

I suspect -- and didn't know this! -- that this arrangement is regional, even inside the US.


Odds are your realtor just negotiated those details for you. It is pretty standard everywhere. Very few people want to move those heavy things, so realtors just put them into the contract, if you don't pay attention (you should!) you may not even realize this happened.


When I bought my home, I know that was mentioned explicitly.

Though my understanding is the sale automatically includes all fixtures unless specifically excluded, and I suppose there's a little disconnect there: most major appliances are technically not fixed, but I think most people think of them like they are.

When I sell my home, I was thinking I'd definitely need to put a note on my washer/dryer and smart thermostat, saying I was going to take them with me and they weren't included.


Reducing this to age is overly simplistic. When Linux was younger and simpler, it may've been easier to fork, but today it's a massive system with huge inertia behind it. Even if you are right in principle regarding your changes, it's extremely hard to overcome that inertia.

In the related submission on this topic [1], the author makes this argument in a lot more detail, that it's essentially impossible to make a Linux fork sustainable without massive investment that no one can realistically obtain.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036904


> I am 100% sure you, as a manufacturer, could develop a very lightweight shim over a linux or BSD kernel that has significantly better performance than Android does

I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features. Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements, and most manufacturers aren’t exactly known for being able to produce high-quality software.

There have been a couple projects that have tried to make phones based on pure Linux (Librem, Pinephone). Their performance is limited a lot by not having good CPU options, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to achieve much performance improvement on the software side either.


> I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features.

Sorry for not making it clear but I was implying exactly that. There are a ton of features that are really nice but a person spending that little on a phone probably doesn't need. I would likely even put "big touchscreen" on that list...

  Really a phone that:
  - makes phonecalls
  - has support for WhatsApp/Telegram etc even without video calls
  - has a real keyboard
  - has my banking app
  - commits to long term support and repair(5+ years preferably 10)
Would be number one on my list of things to buy because thats exactly what I want. I would absolutely still own an iPhone that I use day to day. But that cheap phone is exactly what I want when the iPhone needs to sit in a drawer for two weeks and I'm using a burner number out of town.


> Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements

They spend a lot, yes, but the results are in "useless features improvements".


I think it may be linked to the Bing integration. If I ask about my location in a new conversation, I don't get back anything. But if I start with your example query, and then follow up with "is it available where I am?", I get

> To determine if Stripe Connect is available where you are, could you let me know your country? If you prefer, I can also look up Stripe's support availability based on the country linked to your query.

[me] yes, do that

> Yes, Stripe Connect is available in [my country], including [my city].


This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?

Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.

But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers: > As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products

With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:

* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.


The most likely answer is that it will take the Linux model, with a foundation put together to fund Chrome's development. Then all of the parties interested in people having access to the Web, including Google, will have an incentive to fund this without requiring it to push their specific products.


Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does. I struggle to see how they get paid - except again, by charging search engines to be the default browser or something.


Chrome does a lot of things. I know there are downsides and many people don't agree, but I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.


> I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.

I wish browsers moved faster so that I don't have to download so many native apps. Native mobile apps are monitoring me continuously, and way more opaquely than web apps. More importantly, they can't be thwarted by plugins. As a mobile Firefox and Desktop Chrome user, I wish browsers (especially FF) moved faster.

So, no - for privacy reasons I don't agree with your view.


Lots of native apps could be websites right now, it's not a matter of technical limitations.


I'm not sure browser improvements would help here. App authors need discoverability and a sales channel. Android and iOS could provide that for web apps without wrappers, but they don't. So developers don't have any incentive to go with browsers. This is a business/social issue, not a browser tech one.


IMO, Chrome does not move fast enough.

The fact of the matter is that the web has been dying because people have moved to mobile devices, where they prefer native apps.

If you're advocating for slower development of browsers, you're also advocating for the death of the open web.


A significant number of my "native apps" on mobile are just webview wrappers. Some are really fancy and slick, but still. I think the mobile OS handling web apps in a more integrated way would help here more than making browsers more complex.


Almost nothing Google ships at neck-breaking speed makes the web better, or faster, or a better open web.


All the features that Google ships are necessary for web apps. E.g., open this webpage in different browsers: https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/ — Note that Firefox was once on top of this development, during the days when they also had an interest in developing FirefoxOS. Those days are long gone.

As for what Google has done historically with Chrome, it's trivially easy to point to developments that have improved the web.

You can start with the fact that it's the most secure browser, see for instance: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...

You can also read their original marketing material, in which they describe the isolation of plugins, extensions, or tabs, i.e., a crashing Flash movie or a crashing website no longer crashed the browser — then count the years it took for their competition to catch up: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

On “speed”, not sure what you mean, but Chrome has been demonstrably the fastest browser. It always was, with V8 being the fastest JS engine since launch, but also in benchmarks testing more “real” experiences, like Speedometer 3. The only area where it needs improvement is battery efficiency on macOS machines, where Safari has the lead, but even there it made great strides.

Speaking of PWAs, Chrome was also the first to deliver a good PWA experience on mobile devices and on the desktop. For mobile devices, the first one was Apple's Safari, but then Apple crippled the experience by not implementing much needed functionality, such as notifications. Firefox, BTW, still has unfixed bugs on Android and provides no SSB support for the desktop.


> E.g., open this webpage in different browsers: https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/

... and see a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards

> On “speed”, not sure what you mean, but Chrome has been demonstrably the fastest browser.

Re-read what I wrote. I was talking about the speed of releasing new features and APIs. They ship ~1000 new APIs a year

> Speaking of PWAs, Chrome was also the first to deliver a good PWA experience on mobile devices and on the desktop.

There's no such thing as PWA. It's a marketing term used extremely loosely to prove anything, and nothing. It's a random collection of 20 or so standards, and everyone choses their own favorite subset to say ah yes, this is crucial for PWA support".

---

On the other hand we have documented cases of Google sabotaging competitors (https://archive.is/tgIH9), forcing their tech decisions on competitors under the threat of retaliation (https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...), selling user data to advertisers (from FLOC to current plans to sell first-party cookie data: https://bsky.app/profile/thezedwards.bsky.social/post/3las7o...) and so on


> ... and see a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards

That's one way of putting it. The other perspective is that those are necessary features and that Safari and Firefox are now holding the web back. When IExplorer 6 was the most popular browser, with Firefox being the underdog, I don't remember people complaining that Firefox was implementing non-standard features.

Let's also remember that by standards, we mean W3C standards, that organization that was once deemed so slow and irrelevant that Mozilla, Apple, and Opera decided to just initiate WHATWG (back when Opera still existed and Apple still wanted a better web).

The irony of the backlash against Chrome's Privacy Sandbox is that Firefox has started shipping similar features, too: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/

And it's understandable why because the alternative is a web centralized in closed gardens (Facebook), locked behind paywalls, or a dead web.

---

I mean no disrespect, but the people advocating for a slower web progress sound just like the people advocating for degrowth, all being a bunch of nonsense that only a tiny elite minority actually wants.


JS has been moving at excellent speeds and Google has moved the web to evergreen. If anything I’d argue that without the specter of regulation then we might’ve had Dart or something new in the browser by now.

The biggest existential risk to the web is that it’s not good enough. It’s being threatened by sharp innovation in other spaces - may the Vision Pro never come down in price or improve in UX.


What do regulations have to do with Dart? You got WASM in the browser which is a much better outcome than a language even Google doesn't know what to do with.

The biggest existential risk to the web is Google themselves: it's the world's biggest advertising and user tracking company having outsized influence on where the web is headed, and moulding the web for its own profit.


I don't disagree that Google is a risk; however, note that all browser engines are right now funded by Google's Ads, yes, Firefox and Safari included. If that search deal is undone, at least Firefox is as good as dead.

And while they are "moulding the web for their own profit", at least they are interested in keeping the web alive, and I don't think anyone interested in the health of the web will like the alternatives, which are actually winning right now (closed app stores delivering native apps with spyware and unblockable ads).

By doing this, the DOJ may invalidate one business model that keeps certain FOSS projects alive — commoditized complements to proprietary products and services. You can hate Google, and still see why this will be a huge problem, especially for projects as complex as browsers are.


I, for one, do not prefer native mobile apps, I'd be happy to use web, but companies actively degrade my experience there, and shove their apps in my face because this way they can track me and serve ads.


Simpler browsers sound not good to me. It's a bit of a rallying cry on HN it feels like, often in sharper terms.

But computing is so intermediated. There's so many checks to do anything on an iPhone that isn't in the dead code your phone already runs. An Oculus has cool experiences, but we can't shape and share our own easily. There's always someone else's data center between you and your device today.

The web is largely still an experience of data centers too. But it's a neutral platform. Where we can go to any data-center we please. Where anyone can tap the amazing web platform & it's amazing APIs to build all kinds of cool experiences.

In a world where tech defines what the user wants for them, I feel so much like the web & every web platform API is stealing just a little more fire from the gods. It's promethean, giving to humanity prowess & capabilities we wouldn't otherwise have.

The pace is confusing. Sometimes things happen fast. Often they are left sort of unfinished. Fast & slow, fast & slow. I'd love if there was a huge source of funding the societies of the world were putting up to help make this critical human capability, to to fund long careful slow healing and helping as well as fancy new features (es2015/esm modules in the browser tool sooo long & still has so much to fix for example). These things are hard, complicated, and we try so hard to keep going forward without causing too much unfixable undislodgesble bad. But this spirit of bravery is necessary, to keep going. Simpler isn't good. The versatility of the web is too important. There's no other viable substitutes for the capabilities being available on the web, no other paths we have to stealing fire from the gods, no other Promethean dreams. This platform is it, and we need the persistence & drive as a society to keep ourselves improving our shared interactive media form, to keep from being swallowed by the darkness that most computing brings in.


I agree. They jam everything but the kitchen sink into the damn browser these days. Chrome being so well staffed and fast moving means everyone else gets to play catch up and it's bullshit.


Google can keep engineers working on Chrome employed without having control over Chrome.


But why would they if they're forbidden from getting any benefit from Chrome?


Maybe AI changed this, but..

Google is entirely where they are because the web is a powerful capable rich interesting place, that was able to rise & grow & flourish without the typical platform gatekeepers.

In my view, Google's whole reason for making and continuing to fund Chrome have never ever changed: they want a great (and powerful, not small/retrogressive) open web. Because if the web falters, the proprietary platforms from yesterday can come back & reassert their control. Because if the web falters, information will be someplace where a Google can't index and link you to it.

Google's existence depends entirely upon the web being a good place, a place for good sites, that people want to find & go to. The couple hundred million a year Google pays engineers to make the web good is a very affordable existential hedge, upon which the entire company of rests.

A corollary to this is that attempts to tilt the web towards themselves - to take advantage o Chrome - risk poisoning the web & killing the golden goose. Which is why - imo - Google has taken web standards so seriously, and gone to such lengths to create an air of transparency around browser standards, starting the Intent to Ship process.


A huge amount of their products require browser access, having a good UX to access them off in their best interest.


Why does everyone contribute to Linux?


Linux is foundational to everyone and there isn’t an obvious alternative. What companies care about Safari vs Chrome? From the perspective of other companies, what’s wrong with Safari and Edge taking command?


For starters, there's no Safari for anything other than Mac OS and iOS, and Edge is Chromium with some cosmetics from Microsoft.


They are selling computers, distros, support, etc. built with/for linux.


I am not sure that is a good thing. Do we really need so many people working on it, or adding more and more features?

IMO more engineers = more bloat, rather than more engineers = a better product.


> Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does.

Are you sure? Do you know how many people work on Chrome? 2,000 people contributed to Linux 6.12. only a small portion of those will be full time but it's still likely many hundred full-time-equivalent engineers.


I think so. About a decade ago I remember hearing that the chrome team had about 1000 full time engineers. I suspect the number has grown over time.

Looking at the number of lines of code, the linux kernel is just barely ahead of chromium now (39m loc vs 36m). But that doesn't include all the proprietary parts of chrome that aren't in chromium - like their binary updating system, h264 decoder, built in google account support, and so on.

https://openhub.net/p/linux/analyses/latest/languages_summar...

https://openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summa...


That may be, but Firefox certainly doesn't, and it's not that far from Chrome in terms of feature set, particularly in terms of supported web standards, or security. So I don't feel that a smaller Chrome team would be a catastrophe for Chrome.


At the same time, if every company that actively make money from the web where to pitch in, we would have the most funded foundation in the world.


One minor nit, it will be all parties interested in influence over future web standards and their eventual implementation.


Right, those would have the biggest incentive. But I'm sure good fundraisers will be bale to even get some large companies that aren't engaging in the standards at any level to throw some money to support a standard web browser, if they can convince everyone that without this there won't be a good way for people to access their web sites.


I suspect that the leading reason browsers require so much investment and development effort is the ongoing effort to engineer them into heavily surveilled application delivery platforms.

Most of the browsers in this list were developed by the open source community without major funding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers

Though the same browsers tend not to support many of the newer standards.

I kind of miss SGML, myself, and wonder if a slower pace of browser development and associated code churn might actually be more benefit than harm.


There's always the Opera model: attempt to sell inserted ads, fail, sell it to a Chinese holding company, and have future development funded by the Russians. What could possibly go wrong?


Can you please share a details about the part related to Russians? I used to be big fan of Opera browser, but don't follow theirs recent news


Opera has always been relatively very popular in Eastern Europe. I don’t know if there is any clandestine Russian operation behind it (unlikely), there are just many comments and reviews about Opera and its extensions in Russian language.


> Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements.

Safari is funded by Apple's hardware sales. It can afford to develop its own browser because it's table stakes for devices and gives Apple the ability to do deeper integrations and targeted performance optimizations. The search revenue is the cherry on top.


> Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google.

That doesn't seem like a narrow reading, but the only possible one. How could the order be applying to deals strictly between companies neither of which was the party of the lawsuit? That doesn't seem like anything that could possibly be within the court's powers.


> Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain.

The reason? Infinite[1] complexity. To Google that is a feature: as long as they can outspend competitors, they can control the complexity in their favor.

The question should not be "how do we fund development of operating system in a trench coat?", but rather "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs.

In theory, we should expect browser complexity to converge on available funding, with the upside that webpages created two hours ago would continue working. In reality, some foundation, funded by majority chromium supporters, will be set up and distribute compensation for Google employees working on open-source Chromium "totally on their free time, mr. prosecutor".

[1]: https://xkcd.com/285/


Parity with other application platforms demands more than just showing static HTML. Imagine the world with no XMLHTTPRequest because Microsoft wasn't allowed to innovate on the web.


> "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs

Sorry, but we're not going back to Lynx...


> the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers

The remedy document does not ask this.

What you cite after "> As detailed in..." does not ban any and all payments from a search engine (or only from Google) to a browser. The remedy doc is based on the antitrust case's finding that Google violated U.S. Law by abusing its monopoly through "tying", and in particular by forcing partners to lock out competitors through exclusive (default search only) deals.

This does not mean Google cannot pay for search traffic, and indeed Google has a relatively open, albeit lower-monetizing, system called Adsense for Search, which allows a toolbar to monetize -- but not a browser via queries entered into its address bar (aka Omnibus). Bing does many API deals, or did (it hiked prices last year). Brave has an API business (not yet an ads feed, just search).


I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining what kind of payment Google could make under this structure. Do you have something in mind?

I agree that if Google was paying a browser for something other than default search placement, that would likely fall outside the scope of the proposal. But historically, default placement = traffic, and is also the only leverage the browsers have - ie if Google wasn't the default, Google would only get users who explicitly selected it, and if Google knows all of their users are actively selecting them already, they have no reason to pay extra for that traffic.

API access seems like a good alternative way for Google to monetize, but it doesn't solve the problem of providing funding for browsers (except in your case, since you're combining a search engine and browser in one company). Or am I missing something?


Yes, you are missing how browsers without search engines could do fair and non-discriminatory pay for traffic deals with Google in a remedy that follows the spirit and letter of Sherman-Clayton and Robinson-Patman.

Again, the document does not say "no payment of any kind under any terms".

Fair and non-discriminatory (standard rate card, open ad confirmation/reporting tech using least-tracking and first party scripts, no native Chromium tracking crap) search and search ads feed API deals would let 1000 browsers bloom.


I mentioned Adsense for Search (AFS) and toolbars, but it seems Google now limits AFS to websites with search boxes. In pre-Chrome era, it let many toolbars for IE (7 or even 8, they both sucked) monetize this way. This toolbar support went away around 2012 as the Chrome Hegemon took over. AFS never allowed a browser (vs. a toolbar) to monetize from omnibox-style UX, no surprise. Monopoly behavior was on display even before Chrome took 2/3rds of the browser market.


Spellcorrekt got me: "Omnibox".


Unfortunately the real answer is:

* Only operating system vendors can ship web browsers. (But not Google.)

The USG in general seems to love giving Apple more monopoly power. This will effectively constrain browser development to just Apple and Microsoft, since as you note, the DOJ is also trying to regulate Firefox out of existence; and Apple has huge incentives to simply pause browser feature development (and has been dragging its feet on Safari for years).

Incredibly, this will also hamstring Android even further, since its parent company can't even make a web browser for it anymore! Only Apple, the Biden administration's favorite company, can do that kind of thing.


Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't. Now Google is forbidden from developing web browsers while Apple is free to continue monopolizing browser engines on iOS and holding back the web from competing with native apps?


> Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't.

1)Because Apple didn't conspire with (potential) competitors to Google Play - both cellular providers and device manufacturers - bribing them with payments and revenue sharing agreements on condition they not pre-load their own app stores, thus maintaining a monopoly that caused injury to Epic. Motorola is a competitor to Google Play. F-droid and whatever other alternative app stores are out there, are not. https://mashable.com/article/google-epic-antitrust-play-stor...

Nobody, and I mean nobody, considers "you can install non-play-store apps if you go deep into menus, click past scary warnings, and the app developer will not get access to a huge swath of APIs and toolkits" to be "competition" to Google Play.

2)The matter in Epic v. Google was about Epic's app being removed after they added in-app payments - forced to use Google for in-app payments because of the monopoly Google was actively maintaining - not "Google won't let us run an alternative app store."

3)Apple was not a defendant in Epic v Google. That was a separate case. In Epic v Apple, Epic lost on all but one of their claims - Apple was found to have violated California's Unfair Competition Law in barring app developers from "steering" users to purchase content in places other than in-app (and thus through Apple's payment processing and their 30% cut etc.)

Maybe the next time you can't figure out why something is the way it is, your reaction should be "I should try to learn about why this is, see what experts in this incredibly complicated field have to say on the matter, or at least google it and read major tech industry news coverage" instead of forming an incredibly strong opinion rooted in complete and total ignorance of the matter at hand.


> Apple didn't conspire with (potential) competitors

Of course not, instead Apple forbade competition by fiat! The fact that antitrust law rewarded this behavior is perverse. The whole point of antitrust law is to promote competition, after all.

> you can't figure out why

Your assumption of ignorance is incorrect. I know exactly why. Nothing in your post is news to me and none of it contradicts what I said in the slightest. It's all completely irrelevant to my point. Apple dodged being ruled a monopoly by forbidding a market to exist at all, while Google was ruled a monopoly because they allowed a market to exist. (Note that whether or how they exploited the monopoly is irrelevant to the question of whether a monopoly exists).

Also, frankly, your tone violates the HN guidelines. Do better.


> Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

Chrome already has paid offerings - chrome enterprise and educational products. It's quite common for enterprise customers to subsidize free tiers.


Advertising deal with google/others to pay for full time staff along with volunteers?

And the underlying chromium will be maintained by all the browser companies that are using it


> This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?

How about... just don't fund them and let it "die"?

Everybody is using Chromium -- Microsoft, Google, Opera, Electron, etc.. Some of them will step up and fork chromium.


Or just don't fork Chromium at all and Google can make the upstream their recommended browser.


Display ad insertion would be legal and there are definitely ways to do it all client side.


Just like scraping the entire Web for AI training is totally fair use? Enjoy ten years of lawsuits to prove it. Web sites would never tolerate ads being inserted that don't pay them.


> Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

I would gladly pay for Firefox, but I only found a way to donate to Mozilla, which also finances many other things that I am not interested in.

> Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

Adds are legal, but "selling user data" is more tricky. Many news websites are currently paywalling access to their website unless a monthly fee is paid. As far as I know, there has been no ruling yet whether that is legal.

> Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Firefox tried to sell a VPN product that way, but it was not priced competitively.


The same way ff does. Google will pay to be the main search engine and to ensure all their Web apps continue to work performantly.


Google will be prohibited from doing that under the DOJ's proposal.


Yes it is, see page 12 of [1]:

> As set forth in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from offering Apple anything of value for any form of default, placement, or preinstallation distribution (including choice screens) related to general search or a search access point.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...


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