If you are correct, let's ensure the browser duopoly is broken up first, rather than forcing Apple to open the market for Google to corner it. Then it will truly be a monopoly and all consumers lose.
Apple's monopoly is currently harming competition/consumers. Why should a potential monopoly that doesn't exist (yet) and doesn't hurt competition or consumers be a higher priority?
As an Apple user and web dev, I like some of their restrictions because I prefer incentive to build native apps for things I do all the time. They’re usually showing a lot more polish and integration.
Every time Twitter or Instagram bring up their custom share sheets I get super annoyed it’s not the default. PWA’s can probably get a lot of that, but a ton of web UX is arbitrary, unique, and more likely to feel janky in ways.
Even for well done web apps, like Notion, it stands out like a sore thumb when parts of the editor don’t work like normal Mac input controls.
I think PWA’s will have a lot of uses, but I don’t want them to take over either or Google get a browser monopoly. It’s bad enough how many devs don’t use anything but Chrome when testing. The web is what it is because it is not beholden to one company like the IE6 days
Why would the Chrome engine being dominant be all that problematic? And as a user, I'd like to make that choice for myself.
Also, Safari wouldn't vanish just because you'd be able to use a different browser engine. I strongly disagree with your "scary" (not scary) scenario: Only a small percentage of users is ever going to change defaults.
The growing number of device/browser combinations in use, legally-mandated web accessibility, as well as the expansion of expected web functionality to essentially require DOM and scripting abilities, including AJAX, made web standards of increasing importance during this era. Instead of advertising their proprietary extensions, browser developers began to market their software based on how closely it adhered to standards.
As soon as one browser dominates, one company gets to dominate how the web works. If you, as a user, want to be able to choose your own browser you should oppose one engine becoming dominant.
....how? Just saying "better anti-trust" isn't a usable solution.
Chromium is an open source project. What's the government to do, split the codebase in half/thirds? Chromium got to where it was because of the downstream decisions of developers not wanting to waste months/years of their lives reimplementing something that was already implemented.
"Someone else had already done the laborious legwork with Chromium, let's just use that."
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If you want to actually solve this problem:
- Purge and ban software patents & copyrights. No entity should have total control as to how to implement efficient H.264 playback in the browser, nor native GPGPU support.
- Rewire human behaviour to inherently fear any market share of > 60%. Humans will continue to want to concentrate around a few choices as a result of network effects.
- STOP WITH WANTING NEW FEATURES. Every new shiny object that you desire will inevitably be replaced by the next shiny object, with only 10% of them sticking around in relatively popular use for any notable period of time. Browser devs, meanwhile, can't have the luxury of dropping support for <rarely used feature X>, and have to keep maintaining each one for some niche case.
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I've already said my response to this: STOP wanting more features. The number of features that a browser dev has to support right out of the box is the major contributor for there being so few browser engines to choose from.
> There's an argument to be made that the extreme breadth of scope that modern web browsers are obliged to support (in order to gain/retain market share) heavily contributes to there being no worthy contenders against Chromium's web monopoly.
> When you're the leader, you can further widen your lead by bolting on additional functions & features that require at least X amount of effort to implement. Any new contender will have to put in SUM(X effort for each feature) to match feature parity with the existing leader, and existing competitors will have to put in at least X effort to catch up. Existing OSS work can help bridge the gap, but only for what's already been done.
