Google search was revolutionary. Gmail was revolutionary. Chrome was revolutionary. We haven't handed the web over to google, they initially won the web with superior services. What's happened...
Google search was revolutionary. Gmail was revolutionary. Chrome was revolutionary.
We haven't handed the web over to google, they initially won the web with superior services.
What's happened after, leveraging that position to build an empire, that's what anti-trust and competition law hasn't been equipped to deal with.
Edge isn't new in that history, or a course change in that history. The author's arguments are good, but the news analysis making this even more relevant now don't stand up to scrutiny as far as I'm concerned.
If Microsoft or Apple or Intel had succeeded in locking down the 'web' with their various attempts I daresay all three would have done far worse with that power than Google did. At least with...
If Microsoft or Apple or Intel had succeeded in locking down the 'web' with their various attempts I daresay all three would have done far worse with that power than Google did. At least with Google we got a young, reckless company that hadn't been around long enough to atrophy and become fully corrupt, though that's clearly changing as it inevitably does with all for-profit entities.
Wait, when did Apple or Intel attempt to lock down the web? I guess there’s an arguable case for Microsoft during the era when Internet Explorer enjoyed a majority share of the browser market....
Wait, when did Apple or Intel attempt to lock down the web?
I guess there’s an arguable case for Microsoft during the era when Internet Explorer enjoyed a majority share of the browser market. But, since IE’s heyday, Microsoft seems to have actually hunkered down and tried to be a good browser-citizen.
As far as I know, Intel has never built a browser.
And Apple, since it forked KHTML to create WebKit, seems to have demonstrated an interest in making a standards compliant browser such that if everyone adhered to the standards, the web would work consistently on every browser, including Safari—basically the opposite of locking down the web.
Intel did have a browser project (based on Mosaic) in the mid-90s but they canned it almost as fast as they launched it once IE took over. Everyone had one back then, even IBM. Several companies...
Intel did have a browser project (based on Mosaic) in the mid-90s but they canned it almost as fast as they launched it once IE took over. Everyone had one back then, even IBM. Several companies were trying to become the 'standard' for the web. IE won out just because it shipped with Windows. Microsoft lost anti-trust lawsuits over that in several countries, just like their sabotage of Java on Windows that bought them time to get .net started. Clever business tactics. Once IE became the 'standard' all of the other companies simply gave up and killed their projects. Netscape morphed into Mozilla when open source finally got off the ground and then Google came along and decided to join the party.
Apple's threat wasn't so much from making a browser as it was trying to take over the PC market. Once people reverse engineered Apple and IBM's bios/systems and started making clones the threat of those two gaining dominance evaporated. The clones were far cheaper, so the PC revolution happened, and the rest is history. Apple decided to settle for a niche market and IBM got chased out then gave up.
Had any of these other companies succeeded in locking down the web, I think we'd be in a much worse place today. Google's 'lock' is nothing like the kind of proprietary hell we were facing back then.
Ok I hadn’t considered that we were talking about history that far back. As far as I can remember, Netscape had the browser game locked up in the 90s, and once Windows XP rolled out, IE took over....
Ok I hadn’t considered that we were talking about history that far back. As far as I can remember, Netscape had the browser game locked up in the 90s, and once Windows XP rolled out, IE took over. I was a kid then, but I do remember using Navigator at school with the animated lighthouse icon when loading web pages. IIRC, at that time the web wasn’t really in danger of being locked down because the real web was literally just static HTML pages. The scary stuff was the proprietary interactive extension layers that were being developed. Stuff like ActiveX, Shockwave, Flash, or god-forbid, Java applets. It still is funny to me that JS ended up being the ‘good guy’ in that regard. (I hate JS and think the web would be a lot nicer if we could use better scripting languages in the browser.)
You're confusing the web/Internet with a browser. Microsoft did try to make IE the paramount browser over all others (really at the time it was just Netscape). But they never tried to take control...
You're confusing the web/Internet with a browser.
Microsoft did try to make IE the paramount browser over all others (really at the time it was just Netscape).
But they never tried to take control of what makes up and makes the Internet work and be so valuable to most people.
Some of those things being, Domain registration records, DNS records, search queries, website hosting on their hardware and infrastructure, etc.
Sorry, none of those were "revolutionary". Like Apple, their products were almost direct copies of other existing products. Just implemented with a different GUI. But I agree, we've given Google...
Sorry, none of those were "revolutionary". Like Apple, their products were almost direct copies of other existing products. Just implemented with a different GUI.
But I agree, we've given Google too much power over the Internet. NO single company should have anywhere near that much power or control over the Internet. That defeats one of the major purpose of the Internet.
What? Google, at the time, was leaps and bounds better than any other search engine on the market. That's why it caught on quickly and became the defacto standard. It was just that good. Gmail...
What?
Google, at the time, was leaps and bounds better than any other search engine on the market. That's why it caught on quickly and became the defacto standard. It was just that good.
Gmail caught on because at the time, there was no other service quite like it. While it's main competitor, hotmail, was offering 20mb of storage space for your mail, gmail came in with a minimum of 1gb, which quickly grew to 5, and so on. The service itself wasn't all that revolutionary, but the way it was presented, and what it could do, was.
Now Chrome is something else. It wasn't that it was revolutionary, it was better than Internet Explorer, faster than Firefox and got pushed on by google like the next messiah.
I was there, in IT professionally when Google's products came out. They weren't "Revolutionary". They originally offered exactly the same features and scope that existing products offered. It took...
I was there, in IT professionally when Google's products came out.
They weren't "Revolutionary".
They originally offered exactly the same features and scope that existing products offered. It took a number of years before Google's products exceed it's competitors.
Gmail originally came with 100MB of storage. I know, I got stuck there for months after they started giving new accounts 1GB. And there were MANY other services like Gmail. I had at least six, not counting multiple aliases.
STILL, Chrome is not approved in most enterprises and for those where it is, it's not the standard their web-apps are written for.
Uh, what? One fact there does not follow the other. Edge never had significant market share (it only had ~4% desktop marketshare despite being the default browser on an OS with ~40% desktop...
With Microsoft's decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google. That's a worrying turn of events, given the company's past behavior.
Uh, what? One fact there does not follow the other. Edge never had significant market share (it only had ~4% desktop marketshare despite being the default browser on an OS with ~40% desktop marketshare), there are plenty of viable alternatives to it that already have more marketshare than Edge ever did, it was a shit browser with terrible standards implementation, and google had a lock on the web browser market well before Edge even came into existence.
I agree with almost everything else in the article, Google has way too much control over the web, especially regarding the browser market, search, advertising, analytics and video hosting. And Google's behavior is becoming increasingly troubling lately, e.g. Chinese censored search engine development, rampant sexual misconduct allegations against their execs, developing military AI, etc.. that has only been stemmed by their employees protesting, threatening to resign and signing letters of opposition/petitions. But that's not a great way to start off an article, with a patently ridiculous statement.
Maybe not yet, but it is bad for users when a single browser (or browser engine) has too much market share because it means that web devs will prioritize that browser and treat others as second...
Maybe not yet, but it is bad for users when a single browser (or browser engine) has too much market share because it means that web devs will prioritize that browser and treat others as second class citizens. If you recall when IE had a lion’s share of the browser market, many sites would only work on IE. Other browsers would just get served a 'this site is not optimized for your browser' page. That is bad, and essentially makes the web broken. If a website does not work on a majority of browsers, it’s effectively not part of the world-wide-web—it’s effectively a proprietary site for the subset of users who are running the browsers that the site is not broken for. This is the situation that I fear, and many others fear. It’s already halfway there with Google’s web apps like GDocs, GCal etc. not really working totally 100% outside of Chrome. If that situation begins to extend beyond Google-backed sites, that is problematic.
Google search was revolutionary. Gmail was revolutionary. Chrome was revolutionary.
We haven't handed the web over to google, they initially won the web with superior services.
What's happened after, leveraging that position to build an empire, that's what anti-trust and competition law hasn't been equipped to deal with.
Edge isn't new in that history, or a course change in that history. The author's arguments are good, but the news analysis making this even more relevant now don't stand up to scrutiny as far as I'm concerned.
If Microsoft or Apple or Intel had succeeded in locking down the 'web' with their various attempts I daresay all three would have done far worse with that power than Google did. At least with Google we got a young, reckless company that hadn't been around long enough to atrophy and become fully corrupt, though that's clearly changing as it inevitably does with all for-profit entities.
Wait, when did Apple or Intel attempt to lock down the web?
I guess there’s an arguable case for Microsoft during the era when Internet Explorer enjoyed a majority share of the browser market. But, since IE’s heyday, Microsoft seems to have actually hunkered down and tried to be a good browser-citizen.
As far as I know, Intel has never built a browser.
And Apple, since it forked KHTML to create WebKit, seems to have demonstrated an interest in making a standards compliant browser such that if everyone adhered to the standards, the web would work consistently on every browser, including Safari—basically the opposite of locking down the web.
Can you explain what you mean?
Intel did have a browser project (based on Mosaic) in the mid-90s but they canned it almost as fast as they launched it once IE took over. Everyone had one back then, even IBM. Several companies were trying to become the 'standard' for the web. IE won out just because it shipped with Windows. Microsoft lost anti-trust lawsuits over that in several countries, just like their sabotage of Java on Windows that bought them time to get .net started. Clever business tactics. Once IE became the 'standard' all of the other companies simply gave up and killed their projects. Netscape morphed into Mozilla when open source finally got off the ground and then Google came along and decided to join the party.
Apple's threat wasn't so much from making a browser as it was trying to take over the PC market. Once people reverse engineered Apple and IBM's bios/systems and started making clones the threat of those two gaining dominance evaporated. The clones were far cheaper, so the PC revolution happened, and the rest is history. Apple decided to settle for a niche market and IBM got chased out then gave up.
Had any of these other companies succeeded in locking down the web, I think we'd be in a much worse place today. Google's 'lock' is nothing like the kind of proprietary hell we were facing back then.
Ok I hadn’t considered that we were talking about history that far back. As far as I can remember, Netscape had the browser game locked up in the 90s, and once Windows XP rolled out, IE took over. I was a kid then, but I do remember using Navigator at school with the animated lighthouse icon when loading web pages. IIRC, at that time the web wasn’t really in danger of being locked down because the real web was literally just static HTML pages. The scary stuff was the proprietary interactive extension layers that were being developed. Stuff like ActiveX, Shockwave, Flash, or god-forbid, Java applets. It still is funny to me that JS ended up being the ‘good guy’ in that regard. (I hate JS and think the web would be a lot nicer if we could use better scripting languages in the browser.)
You're confusing the web/Internet with a browser.
Microsoft did try to make IE the paramount browser over all others (really at the time it was just Netscape).
But they never tried to take control of what makes up and makes the Internet work and be so valuable to most people.
Some of those things being, Domain registration records, DNS records, search queries, website hosting on their hardware and infrastructure, etc.
I really don’t think I am. The comment I’m replying to mentioned the web, not the internet. I am talking about the web and browsers, not the internet.
Sorry, none of those were "revolutionary". Like Apple, their products were almost direct copies of other existing products. Just implemented with a different GUI.
But I agree, we've given Google too much power over the Internet. NO single company should have anywhere near that much power or control over the Internet. That defeats one of the major purpose of the Internet.
What?
Google, at the time, was leaps and bounds better than any other search engine on the market. That's why it caught on quickly and became the defacto standard. It was just that good.
Gmail caught on because at the time, there was no other service quite like it. While it's main competitor, hotmail, was offering 20mb of storage space for your mail, gmail came in with a minimum of 1gb, which quickly grew to 5, and so on. The service itself wasn't all that revolutionary, but the way it was presented, and what it could do, was.
Now Chrome is something else. It wasn't that it was revolutionary, it was better than Internet Explorer, faster than Firefox and got pushed on by google like the next messiah.
I was there, in IT professionally when Google's products came out.
They weren't "Revolutionary".
They originally offered exactly the same features and scope that existing products offered. It took a number of years before Google's products exceed it's competitors.
Gmail originally came with 100MB of storage. I know, I got stuck there for months after they started giving new accounts 1GB. And there were MANY other services like Gmail. I had at least six, not counting multiple aliases.
STILL, Chrome is not approved in most enterprises and for those where it is, it's not the standard their web-apps are written for.
Uh, what? One fact there does not follow the other. Edge never had significant market share (it only had ~4% desktop marketshare despite being the default browser on an OS with ~40% desktop marketshare), there are plenty of viable alternatives to it that already have more marketshare than Edge ever did, it was a shit browser with terrible standards implementation, and google had a lock on the web browser market well before Edge even came into existence.
I agree with almost everything else in the article, Google has way too much control over the web, especially regarding the browser market, search, advertising, analytics and video hosting. And Google's behavior is becoming increasingly troubling lately, e.g. Chinese censored search engine development, rampant sexual misconduct allegations against their execs, developing military AI, etc.. that has only been stemmed by their employees protesting, threatening to resign and signing letters of opposition/petitions. But that's not a great way to start off an article, with a patently ridiculous statement.
I too dislike that Edge is becoming a Chromium clone but the Web is in no way "handed over" to Google.
Maybe not yet, but it is bad for users when a single browser (or browser engine) has too much market share because it means that web devs will prioritize that browser and treat others as second class citizens. If you recall when IE had a lion’s share of the browser market, many sites would only work on IE. Other browsers would just get served a 'this site is not optimized for your browser' page. That is bad, and essentially makes the web broken. If a website does not work on a majority of browsers, it’s effectively not part of the world-wide-web—it’s effectively a proprietary site for the subset of users who are running the browsers that the site is not broken for. This is the situation that I fear, and many others fear. It’s already halfway there with Google’s web apps like GDocs, GCal etc. not really working totally 100% outside of Chrome. If that situation begins to extend beyond Google-backed sites, that is problematic.
Exactly. I think this was a pretty good post that discusses it: https://daverupert.com/2018/12/edge-goes-chromium/