The author doesn’t attempt to address the issue that Apple and iOS are the only remaining effective bulwark against Google’s complete control of the web.
Think about what Google’s end game looks like if they are able to convince lawmakers and regulators around the world to force Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. Google will continue to spam standards proposals and implementations that Apple or Mozilla will be unwilling to adopt for various reasons. Google will continue to advertise Chrome heavily, and push users of its other services to install and use Chrome exclusively. Google search will prioritize sites that use Chrome specific technologies. Google Gemini will generate code that uses Chrome specific APIs.
When Chrome reaches sufficient market share, Google will start to use Chrome to disadvantage computing platforms that they do not control completely. New features will come to Android and ChromeOS first. Bugs may go unaddressed on other platforms.
I realize it’s frustrating as a web developer to have to deal with browser specific issues, or to be unable to take advantage of necessary APIs or platform features from your web app. It is also frustrating to be blocked from the App Store because Apple wants to avoid competition in some area. The current situation is unfair and far from ideal. Apple are not the good guys here.
But, framing the issues as being entirely about Apple and not addressing the situation with Google doesn’t work. And, unfortunately, many commentators (including the author of this article) as well as regulators (including the EU), don’t seem to get this. If these folks get what they are asking for, we aren’t going to enter a golden age with a single web platform that is feature rich and open to all equally, we are all just going to get crushed by Google.
Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to uninstall Chrome from Android; but that's not the case; to the contrary, it's Apple's Safari that's impossible to uninstall from Apple's iOS.
Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to install Apple's Safari on Google's Android because of Google, but that's not the case, either, it's actually Apple that has discontinued Safari outside of their own ecosystem some 10+ years ago. Which, BTW, was a few years after Steve Jobs predicted that Safari will be the only browser on the planet, on both Macs and PCs, and that it'd be good.
Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to use Google's Android without a Google Account tracking your every move; but this is not the case, either, because you can easily sideload F-Droid and Aurora Store, and side-load any of the free Play Store apps as published and signed by Google, without any Google accounts, and uninstall Chrome, YouTube and most of the other pesky apps, yet still have access to your banking apps, to YouTube through free clients like NewPipe or PipePipe, and to lots of other stuff, all without any signs of any Google Accounts. Can you even install a third-party YouTube client on iOS? Ironically, you can on Android. In fact, you don't even lose any major functionality by foregoing Chrome and a Google Account on an Android; even the experience of watching YouTube is actually superior with PipePipe. I have several extra phones without a Google Account, and they're fully usable without any unexpected limitations; sync is the only thing that's missing.
Yet to the contrary, NONE of these things are possible on iOS.
On iOS, you can't even use even the "premium" pre-installed apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand or iMovie, without assigning them to an Apple Account first. You can't install any apps or stores, either. You can't do anything without at least an Apple Account. Yet it's Apple that's the last bastion of our privacy?! How?!
Google's support article is wrong/misleading. You can uninstall all app updates for Chrome. You can disable Chrome. Once disabled, it cannot run again, unless you expressly enable it. It's basically equivalent to an uninstall for most purposes.
The latest trend in OS design are an immutable system partition, so, obviously, you cannot modify the underlying system image, neither on macOS, nor iOS, nor Android, but what evidence do you have that doing an overlay disable isn't enough?
I've been using Android for years, and have not seen funny business after I disable Chrome. You can use Brave or Vivaldi or Yandex Browser or Opera in place of Chrome at all times. Or Firefox in many cases. I routinely have fully functioning test devices with stock Android without any Google Accounts or any Chrome. Everything just works the way it should. Including the banking apps installed through Aurora Store through F-Droid, as well as the streaming apps like Amazon Prime Video etc. Again, all of this works without a Google Account in any way on my side as an end-user, and it's expected to continue working even in 2027 even if the trial they've announced goes through worldwide. It works on any Pixel device, it works on any Motorola device, it even works on Samsung, too.
> I've been using Android for years, and have not seen funny business after I disable Chrome.
You have not seen any funny business because Chrome WebView, which many applications depend on, is a separate application. Developer settings let you change it to another application, but only from a hardcoded list of package names and only if they're installed to /system. There are also no non-Chromium WebView implementations available to my knowledge.
So no, unless you're OK with breaking applications that use WebView, you can't remove Chrome from an Android smartphone.
> Which, BTW, was a few years after Steve Jobs predicted that Safari will be the only browser on the planet, on both Macs and PCs, and that it'd be good.
Safari is good. As a user, I could not care even an iota less about how "annoying" it is to develop over-built, shitty websites to work right on Safari. Web developers as a general rule don't really seem like they give a shit about delivering good work, that respects the users wishes and devices and privacy, so if it makes it harder for them to have to write garbage like fucking Confluence or whatever for two platforms claiming to comply with "standards", sounds good to me, I don't care. Works great for reading documents and watching videos. Works great checking a menu of a restaurant from a QR code. I don't want it or need it to be my entire operating system, accessing my camera, my microphone, my location, my goddamn serial ports, running gobs of terrible quality, remote, slow code ensuring my brand new computer feels the same as my brand new computer from 10 years ago, to do what a barebones platform API app could do talking to the exact same JSON-RPC APIs their dogshit React app is talking to.
> Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to use Google's Android without a Google Account tracking your every move
And this argument would hold water if it was solely about being forced to do something horrific to your privacy instead of led to or being tricked into doing it. It holds as well as "well you can just not buy an iPhone". Give me a break! Google is not out to empower anyone. They are out to own general computing and the mountain of data if produces, and turning the browser, the one platform they have control over, into the operating system, is how they are going to do that. And in a stroke of brilliance, for the last 15 years they've "allowed" the "choice" to sidestep their overreach, which leads to braindead arguments like "well, at least you can sidestep it, therefore its really not that bad" from libertarian brained bozos who can't see the forest for the trees.
Apple is by no means free of sin. There are a million things I would change about the App Store monopoly. But that isn't the world we live in. We live in a world where one company controls and inspects the conduit to the internet for a vast majority of the population, and one controls it for the vast majority of the remainder. Whatever their reasons, the latter are holding back the Kraken ready to envelop and consume everything, and I'm not going to poo poo their efforts because it doesn't immediately comply with whatever half-assed, hostile "standard" the former pushes out of its rectum.
I feel the same, I agree that the web has gone downhill with all the endless JavaScript wasting all the available CPU cycles. (With all the rest CPU cycles being wasted by the swap-in/out because of the memory bloat of web browsers, again.) This is why these days I ALWAYS enable Low Power Mode in any browser or system that provides such a functionality; macOS has finally added this a few years ago — better late than never.
But I feel like ALL browser vendors are not doing enough to combat this bloat. There have to be resource limits, warning messages/icons, and stop-gap measures to avoid pointless JavaScript wasting our electricity; but NONE of the browsers do this to an extent I'd wish they'd do; in fact, Chrome has actually been ahead of Firefox and Safari in reigning these sites, probably because it has to run in production on 4GB ChromeOS machines costing $99, whereas all the Firefox and Safari devs are probably using 48GB machines costing $2399 as their benchmarks. So, the reality, is that, ironically, Chrome is again the leader even in this area. Because Chrome on a $99 4GB ChromeOS machine feels snappier than Firefox on a $999 MacBook, given enough open tabs.
Your point about feature bloat sounds good in principle, but is not practical in reality. In reality, if things don't work in Safari, you're simply asked to install an app from the App Store. Or if you have to configure a keyboard on a Mac, you have to use a Windows machine with the native keyboard configuration tool, instead of VIA in Chrome WebHID or WebUSB. Why in your opinion are these alternatives not worse than having these sorts of things as web standards as written by Chrome?
TL;DR is that the premise of the argument is false, or at least almost entirely so, and deprives Apple of agency, when in fact it has all the power in the equation.
That article also does not appear to have anything to say about the validity of "standards" that are nothing more than Google's feature creep for web browsers. At some point, you need to actually defend the idea that a web browser should be able to enumerate what Bluetooth and USB devices you have connected. Dancing around such issues is what's making your "Assault on Standards" claim sound so hollow. You need to justify how your position doesn't simply boil down to "Apple should follow Google's lead".
That's simply a misunderstanding of how features come to the web. There is no immaculate conception for web APIs. No magical room in which they are dreamt up, or spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus.
Instead, they come from open, honest, iterative design (when done well), and shipping ahead of others is risky, but that's why we designed the Blink Launch Process to demand so much pre-work (specs, tests, origin trials, good faith attempts to include other vendors in design, etc.) in order to launch that way.
You're still dodging the issue. Your article title accusing Apple of an "assault on standards" is implicitly treating Google's proposals as a fait accompli that Apple is resisting, which is not at all what the situation is for many of the Chrome features you are trying not to be specific about.
You say that shipping ahead of others is risky, but can't seem to acknowledge when the negative outcome comes to pass and other browser vendors aren't interested in adopting questionable feature proposals.
I'm simply pointing out that Apple declined to try to constructively solve the problems developers expressed, demurred from engaging in design work in many areas, and did not ship alternatives instead (as it could have, and did in the past when Safari/WebKit were not on a starvation budget).
The downsides to this are not lost on me. Why do you think I'm making an issue of it publicly now? We tried literally everything else. This is last resort stuff. The goal is always more collaboration, and through it, better, better-funded, and more capable browsers. Apple is the unique obstacle to all of that today.
Please consider the possibility that some proposed features should not exist. The objections to many of Chrome's features are fundamental, not aesthetic, or complaints about nuances of how it's implemented. Many people outside Google simply do not want the browser to be a full-fledged OS, especially if that means weakening privacy or security controls of the host OS.
Sometimes, the right response to a feature proposal is simply "no". But you're seemingly unwilling to accept that as a valid answer. The alternative you're not seeing is that of not having the dubious features in the browser.
I'd much rather have to switch to Brave or Vivaldi for a video phone call, or keyboard configuration, or NFC, than install half a dozen of outdated third-party XXX-only apps with full permissions and questionable security practices or distribution methods.
The better question to ask here, is, why would you NOT want to have a CHOICE to have these things in a secure browser by SEVERAL distinct major vendors like Google, Microsoft, Brave and Vivaldi, and Yandex, and Opera, and others?
Again, I don't even use Chrome. I replace it even on Android. So, I am not concerned with Google taking me over, because they clearly aren't.
But how am I more secure when I have to install lots of dodgy apps to get the most basic things like video conferencing working?
Alas, I think you and I are probably too far apart on the premises we accept to have a useful discussion, but I appreciate learning about your perspective and I appreciate your reply.
This was a brutal read. It's as if someone wrote a simple thesis and ran it through an LLM to make it so pretentiously over the top it's unreadable. I suspect almost no one who actually upvoted this read the content, but instead just like the title and hit the arrow.
"Apple has poisoned the well through a monopoly on influence which it has parleyed into suppression of browser choice. This is an existential threat to the web, but also renders web and internet standards moot."
This is patently ridiculous, and sounds like the sort of tired nonsense that was the norm maybe a decade ago. Now, in 2025, to still be railing this off?
Apple's influence on the web hasn't been lower in two decades. This is ridiculous. It's one of those "no one likes my PWA, and somehow Apple is to blame" busted logic breaks we see on HN daily.
"Apple alone must be on the hook to implement any and every web platform feature shipped by any and every other engine."
I get that this is rhetorical bombast to try to make Apple eat crow for their Safari/webkit monopoly on iOS, but it falls apart given how laughably silly of an idea it is.
Apple absolutely should be forced to allow alternate browser engines, presuming those browser engines are not Chromium/Blink based. Firefox should have their engine. Anyone else who actually makes an engine should be able to deploy it to iOS.
Chromium/Blink? Absolutely no way. And anyone who doesn't understand why has absolutely no idea how Apple's malicious greed has paradoxically protected the web from a "Made For Chrome" world.
Someone elsewhere on this page posted some details of the author's bio. They worked on Chrome/Blink for years. So of course they're upset Apple kept them from being the only browser anybody targets, and any crap they tried to push on us from being instantly adopted nearly everywhere. I'm sure that was frustrating, that they weren't able to capture the entire market, just nearly all of it.
Monopolies suck, but since regulators are asleep at the wheel and have been my entire (no longer brief) life, Apple's my chosen kaiju to fight the other kaiju on my behalf. Sure it might smash Tokyo sometimes, but the others are trying to smash Tokyo and then some, so, I wish it well (while also wishing we didn't have kaiju at all)
Like how you'd rather not have any giant monsters around, but when a really bad one shows up, you're glad Godzilla's there anyway.
> Apple absolutely should be forced to allow alternate browser engines, presuming those browser engines are not Chromium/Blink based.
The last phrase still lets Apple gatekeep, and offer only the selected “fig leaf” alternatives it chooses.
Tuned:
Apple absolutely should be forced to allow users to choose alternate browser engines, and alternate apps in any category, by not using its App Store to gatekeep alternate implementations.
Or, if Apple chooses to continue curating choices on its app store, by allowing alternate app stores not under Apple curation to exist.
And any API that Apple uses for its own app implantations, must be available for alternate implementations.
It isn’t ridiculous it’s true. 2 billion devices can’t run anything but Safari or skinned Safari. if Apple chooses not to support a standard then it’s effectively not a standard. This is only possible because they disallow other browser engines. Allow them and people would switch, forcing Safari to compete to keep users
You’re ignoring their point about the greater harm if Blink can spread its tentacles into iOS and complete its own monopoly- a true monoculture would harm every platform and user.
The TL;DR at the top is what made me decide to not read the rest of it. It's clearly overwrought writing, designed to sound sophisticated without getting down to the root of the issue as clearly as I would like. Plain language is better when discussing topics like this, I think.
Agreed, this post is overly verbose for no real purpose and makes several claims that are laughable. It reads like a the position of someone inside the tempest in a teapot.
While the article seems to have a histrionic tone, it’s essentially correct that Apple have been unwilling to cooperate on standards (despite overtly signalling the opposite) and have had to be forced by regulation or market forces. There are plenty of examples of this, Safari/iMessage/lightning port etc.
> …it’s essentially correct that Apple have been unwilling to cooperate on standards (despite overtly signalling the opposite) and have had to be forced by regulation or market forces.
That's a strange take on Apple's actual relationship with standards. Like every tech company, Apple has used proprietary technologies when necessary to deliver an experience that meets its (including its users') requirements. But Apple also has a long, well-documented history of adopting, participating in, and pioneering the use of standards.
If, in your view, Apple is incapable of doing anything Not Evil, you can still frame its contributions to the history of computing standards as "commoditizing their complements".
> Like every tech company, Apple has used proprietary technologies when necessary to deliver an experience that meets its (including its users') requirements.
That's a very rosy, even naive, view of the relentless move to proprietary walled gardens over the last 30 years.
Apple, like nearly every tech company, uses proprietary extensions to lock users into their ecosystem and to lock out standards-compliant open source implementations.
In 1990 everything interoperated with everything based on open, standard protocols published in RFCs. Today, interoperability is a legacy exception and the norm is proprietary walled gardens that only serve their owner. Everything the Internet was not supposed to be. We on the Internet used to make for of the people locked inside AOL, and now the whole Internet is basically AOL.
Anyone who’s actually being in the room with people from Apple when talking about standards I’m sure would be more than happy to correct you on the fantasy you have constructed here.
The author of this post is one of them who actually has a long list of these horror stories which I don’t know he has talked about much publicly but he has very good reasons for making the claims he is making.
> Anyone who’s actually being in the room with people from Apple when talking about standards I’m sure would be more than happy to correct you on the fantasy you have constructed here.
FWIW, you're saying this to an ex-Apple person who has actually been in the room with people from Apple when talking about standards, both internally and during standards committee discussions and meetings.
I might have chosen my words slightly differently but my point still stands. Apple has an incredibly well known horrible reputation inside of standards meetings and bodies from their peers. It has been that way for well over a decade at this point. It’s not a one off thing and it’s not a subtle thing. It’s a very strong and very bad reputation they have built.
To be fair to them, I think a very meaningful part of that comes from upper management and is not necessarily the fault of the representative in the room and multiple people have gone out of their way to make that point to me explicitly and I think it’s worth repeating here.
But there is absolutely 100% a huge culture problem inside of Apple on this specific topic.
Original author of the article here; I went out on a limb to document a bit of this in a footnote to a post a few years ago. Saying that it is unusual to call this behaviour out is a drastic understatement:
Safari, iMessage and Lightning are all pretty nice and I like using them. They look and feel better than the rest. Google and Firefox make me feel like I am using a Fischer-Price toy computer. I wish that there was interoperability and that all parties would resolve their differences in good faith.
I always find it funny how people say they got an iPhone because they have a Mac, when, in fact, Android has for years been more compatible with the Macs, since you could charge both your phone and your laptop from the same charger.
I've been charging my Android with my Apple's 96W USB-C charger from my work's 16in MacBook Pro for "free". What's exactly so nice about not being able to do that with an iPhone? Why would you carry a separate cable/charger just for the phone, when you could share with an Android?
BTW, there's no Firefox or Chrome on iOS, either; the stuff you'd find in the App Store are simply skins for Safari, and they have the exact same rendering bugs as Safari does, so, there's little reason to use either one on iOS.
When traveling I use the same charger and cable to charge my Mac, iPhone and iPad, since they're now all USB-C. I can't say it's really changed much from when I also needed a lightning cable.
Around 2010, you had to use Mini-USB for digital cameras and Micro-USB for phones, and the super-ugly non-standard 30-pin dock connector for the iPhones and iPads. Mini-USB has remained popular for car dashcams until very-very recently.
It's hard to believe anyone would defend a time when you had to have a separate charging cable for each device.
Yet evidently, every iPhone used is happy to do just that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>Google and Firefox make me feel like I am using a Fischer-Price toy computer.
I get that sentiment with Google given their primary color palette, but Firefox? The selling point of the browser, for me at least, has always been that I can configure it however I want and avoid the abomination that was/is IE/Safari/Chrome.
Yep, they cooperate to a point and then decide that they're doing their own thing anyway. This isn't new.
When they were small nobody cared about firewire (even if it was better). Then they did it with lightning to keep hold of their devices again. Then there is the whole not supporting USB 3.X but 3.0 and 4 for "reasons". Now they also don't care about software and web standards, same company, same problems. They clearly see "standards" as "competition" at a corporate/management level.
While the article rightly critiques Apple's strategy of kneecapping the web to protect its App Store, it overlooks the user-centric view of these "crimes."
Many users don't want websites having deep hardware access like Bluetooth; they see it as a necessary security boundary. The "Lightning frustration" was also largely a tech-media narrative, not a pain point for those invested in the ecosystem.
We also can't ignore Apple's massive open-source contributions (LLVM, Swift, WebKit), and in many regards the most faithful adopter of the USB and Thunderbolt standards.
Ultimately, it's a security trade-off. There's a reason iOS exploits command millions more than Android's. That best-in-class security is a direct product of the walled garden. For many, that's a more valuable feature than the total interoperability the author champions.
Nice catch. I rarely respond to anything without research and in this case my research lead to the off-topic but twin issue of hardware standard adoption. You caught me. It looks silly. Sorry. I'll be better :-)
Lots of dismissive comments just because the author works in the industry, but who else will be able to shed the light on these things if not the people in the know?
BTW, consider this: on Android, you can install any browser with any rendering engine. The only reason you cannot install Safari, is because Apple won't make it for Android.
On iOS, the only rendering engine available is Safari's WebKit. Apple won't allow any alternatives. It wouldn't be a problem if Safari was perfect, but it's clearly not.
The first thing I do on an Android is skip the Google Account screen (bypassing the Play Store), open the pre-installed Chrome browser to install F-Droid, and then uninstall/disable Chrome. You can then install any other browser from F-Droid, or through Aurora Store through F-Droid, without any login credentials for any service.
Can you do that on an iPhone or iPad?
Can you install any app without having an Apple Account?
Can you uninstall Safari and replace it with any other browser? (For those unaware, Chrome and Firefox on iOS in the App Store are simply skins for Safari, having the exact same rendering bugs and issues as Safari; so, there's actually no way to install any other browser besides Safari on iOS.)
I'm not a fan of Chrome, or some of the choices they made for ChromeOS, but if they're willing to provide "proprietary" hardware APIs, that are fully documented and open-source, and can be used free of charge, and free of mandatory centralised control mechanisms like on iOS, then I'm all for it.
Mozilla had the opportunity to do the same with Firefox OS; but, of course, now they don't quite have the resources to do that anymore, so, instead they get to tell us that we cannot have nice things?
There are other OSes out there where Mozilla doesn't do WebNFC, exactly because it isn't a Web standard, it is a ChromeOS feature that Mozilla doesn't agree with.
> Chrome and Firefox on iOS in the App Store are simply skins for Safari
They are not. They are required to use WebKit, which means they use the same rendering engine as Safari, but there is far more to a web browser than just its rendering engine. They are not just skins.
The "Chrome Commit Tracker" linked is a pretty interesting set of visualizations that I hadn't come across before. Makes it a lot easier to get a feel for the sizes of the various teams, and how they change over time.
I think a good argument can be made that the standards somewhat move a bit too slowly to add things? (Or, conversely, can be too eager to add some features.) Probably a bit of a struggle between de jure and de facto.
It can be frustrating, as many of the more important standards out there were de facto. We try and pass them off as otherwise, but "div/span/XmlHttpRequest" and plenty of others were in practice before they were part of the standard.
None of which is to excuse players from not at least accurately advertising what standard they support. There should be consumer protections involved on that. And I think a decent argument can be made that stricter compliance can be expected from the big players.
> The result has been API enclosure; appropriation of commodity capabilities that themselves are standards-based — e.g., USB, Bluetooth, NFC, file storage, etc. — by a proprietary ecosystem and denial of even the safest and most privacy-preserving versions of those features by open, interoperable, and standards-based application platforms.
WebUSB, WebBluetooth, WebNFC are not standards. They are Blink-only non-standard APIs.
Google employees wrote these specifications and proposed that they become standards. In order to become standards, they need more than one independent implementation. So in practice, this means that they ask their counterparts at Mozilla and Apple for feedback and approval.
Both Mozilla and Apple rejected WebUSB, WebBluetooth, and WebNFC on privacy and security grounds.
This is what Mozilla has to say about WebUSB:
> we believe that the security risks of exposing USB devices to the Web are too broad to risk exposing users to them
This is what Mozilla has to say about WebBluetooth:
> This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
This is what Mozilla has to say about WebNFC:
> We believe Web NFC poses risks to users security and privacy
This is not Apple’s doing. The reason these things are not standards is because Google have been unable to convince anybody outside of Google to implement them, even when they pay Mozilla half a billion dollars a year.
Perhaps you think that Mozilla and Apple are too sensitive about potential privacy and security issues relating to new protocols proposed by the world’s biggest ad company. Did you know that after Google wrote a spec. for WebMIDI and shipped it in Chrome, porn companies started using it to fingerprint and track people?
> Apple alone must be on the hook to implement any and every web platform feature shipped by any and every other engine.
This is basically the author saying “Hey, you know those specifications we proposed that nobody wanted to implement but us? Let’s force Apple to implement them! Now we’ve got two independent implementations and they can be standards now!”
Why on earth would he do this?
> Hi, I'm Alex Russell, a Microsoft Partner Product Architect on the Edge team and Blink API OWNER. […] From 2008-2021, I was a software engineer at Google working on Chrome, Blink, and the web platform.
And if you look at it, this is part of a long series of articles (running for several years, since 2021) titled "Browser Choice Must Matter" that seems to primarily (perhaps solely? haven't read them all) focus on Safari.
Without iOS Safari, Blink would have a greater market share than Internet Explorer had at its height. People’s “choice” would be between Blink, Blink, Blink, and Blink. I’m not sure why somebody whose job it is to work on Blink can’t see the problem with that.
We’ve seen a web monoculture before; it was terrible for the web and took years to recover from. Let’s not do that again.
What if the reason for this monoculture is because every other browser vendor was forced out of business because they cannot go after the most sought-after customers?
Personally, I uninstall Chrome whenever I see it (on Android, I first use Chrome to download the F-Droid app store, then I uninstall/disable Chrome promptly).
But if you do agree with the author that Safari is so poor that noone would keep it, if other browsers were available on iOS… Isn't that a pretty weak argument against browser choice? You're basically agreeing with the author that Safari is so poor noone would use it if it wasn't mandatory? How's that a good thing we're all forced to keep using such an uninspiring piece of software?
> I’m not sure why somebody whose job it is to work on Blink can’t see the problem with that.
I believe this is one of those self-answering questions. He can't see the problem because for him it's not a problem. The Blink monopoly is the goal and the phrasing around choice is disingenuous. This would give Google effectively full control over web standards because no one would be around to slow them down.
Just because you don't see a problem with Apple's monopoly, doesn't mean that everyone for whom it's a problem is a Blink admirer or works for Google or Microsoft or Chrome or Blink.
I'm typing this in Firefox on a Mac; I usually uninstall Chrome even from Android, usually after first using it to install F-Droid, then Aurora Store; then it's disabled promptly. Why should I not be allowed to disable Safari?
Apple's iOS monopolies are a far bigger issue than Chrome. These issues you guys talk about, don't really exist for me. I use YouTube regularly without Chrome, I use Android without a Google Account, I use all the banking apps without Play Store. None of this is possible on iOS. On iOS, you cannot preserve your privacy at all, because everything depends on having an Apple Account, and being monitored by Apple. Hence, I don't take iOS or iPhone as a serious contender for a daily driver for me.
That is exactly why I started complaining about the Web being turned into ChromeOS Platform, thanks to all Chrome advocates (including devs using Blink like good old IE), and naturally Electron (aka MSHTML).
Can you kindly explain why Blink's monopoly is bad, but iOS Safari's monopoly is good?
Whilst at it, can you kindly explain how Blink is even a monopoly if it's actually separately distributed by 6+ distinct and unrelated/competing vendors, namely, Google, Microsoft, Brave, Vivaldi, Yandex, Opera, etc? Out of these 6 vendors, a total of at least 3 are running an entirely independent search engine, so, these aren't just "fronts", but real competitors.
Whilst at it, can you kindly explain why is it better than I have to use a Windows machine to configure my keyboard or mouse, or the Bluetooth headset, instead of using a web browser on any device with any OS? Or why do I have to download extra apps to get video conference access instead of using a Blink-based web browser from one of like half a dozen vendors?
I never have to use Chrome on any device besides ChromeOS; how exactly is it a monopoly when I can uninstall it once, and never see it on the same device ever again, even on Android, which is made by Google? How is it a monopoly when I don't even lose anything by replacing it with another browser, even on Android?
How exactly is Chrome the same as Edge or Brave or Vivaldi or Yandex Browser or Opera?
Why are there no browsers on iOS besides Safari, and how is that not a monopoly?
The "Internet Explorer" issue culminated with Microsoft attaining a market share that allowed them to stop all innovation and investment into the product, where the browser became substantially lagging behind the competition, as well as lagging substantially in standards compliance. Something that's currently an issue with Safari, not Chrome. (Please enlighten me if that's not the case — which exact standards does Chrome NOT support today? Else, how is supporting EXTRA experimental standards a bad thing?) Chrome and Blink, on the other hand, became market leaders not because they couldn't be uninstalled, but because of superior engineering; Blink is the only browser engine today where you can configure your gaming keyboard, for example. How's that NOT innovation?
Why do you have to keep redefining words according to some laws some politicians wrote, or misplaced analogies that turn things upside down, in order to sustain your points? The only Internet Explorer of today is Safari — severely lagging behind in most modern features, without any ability to be uninstalled or replaced on the iPhones and iPads. Again, I'm actually typing this in Firefox on desktop. As I said, I don't use Chrome, it's not even installed on my machines; because it doesn't have a monopoly in any way, on any device besides ChromeOS. (If you're curious on why I don't use Chrome or Blink on any desktop, it's because I cannot stand blurry text, and there's no way to disable blurry text in Safari, WebKit, Chrome or Blink, which have mandatory antialiasing, making all text super blurry and ugly; that's the actual monoculture we should be talking about.)
Nice character assassinations, but whose fault is it where ChromeOS is pioneering the field, and is alone in writing and implementing these sorts of standards?
You've conveniently omitted the wider effects of Apple's monopoly from this analysis. There's plenty of evidence of the actions they've taken to wall-garden anything and everything possible.
For example, let's talk about NFC. It's been acknowledged that NFC adoption by major third-party apps on Android is severely constrained by the notion of feature parity with iOS; meaning, since NFC cannot be done on iOS in an app, it's almost pointless to support NFC just on Android. About a decade ago, I could pay at Trader Joe's and other NFC terminals for my groceries directly with my Wells Fargo app; but, today, I cannot do that, because Wells Fargo no longer supports NFC in their app. Many other vendors in many countries went directly to the QR codes given the realities on the ground. (If Apple had unrestricted NFC access, would Walmart forgo NFC?) Yet now you're telling us it's Google's fault that "noone" wants to implement WebNFC, depriving it of the standards status, due to the lack of the independent implementations?
Now, let's talk about Mozilla. You're implying that Google is Mozilla's master, because they pay them half a billion a year. But is Mozilla allowed to ship a proper browser on iOS? And, even if they did, would they have a capability to access NFC, and implement WebNFC? Whose fault is that if not Apple's? So, who exactly besides Apple and Google are even capable of implementing WebNFC given the realities on the ground? Because clearly that's not Mozilla, since Apple won't let them, in more than one way.
And, BTW, what actual solutions or alternatives do you propose? Simply not have any standards for these things at all, since security and privacy?
Because without these "proprietary" "standards" that no other vendor wants, or has the capability, to implement, what exactly are we left with?
Are you serious in implying that Apple's fully proprietary APIs are better than Google's open standards that noone else wants to implement, simply because of the Apple/Google duopoly, since noone else is big enough, and since Mozilla has abandoned Firefox OS and Boot2Gecko?
Worth pointing out that this was written by the "Microsoft Partner Product Architect on Edge", a product which Microsoft speed-ran its enshittification.
Summary of the original author's (Alex Russell) background from his about page (https://infrequently.org/about-me/) (it seemed odd to me to just focus on his most recent role):
> Microsoft Partner Product Architect on the Edge team and Blink API OWNER. It is my professional mission to build a web that works for everyone.
> From 2008-2021, I was a software engineer at Google working on Chrome, Blink, and the web platform. I served as the first Web Standards Tech Lead for Chrome (2015-2021) and was a three-time elected member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (2013-2019) and a representative to TC39 for a decade.
> Market competition underlies the enterprise of standards. It creates the only functional test of designs and functions as a pressure release valve that enables standards-based ecosystems route around single-vendor damage. Without competition, standards bodies have no purpose, and neither they, nor the ecosystems they support, can retain relevance.
This is a strange rant about Apple specifically, because Apple, Google (the author's former employer), and Microsoft (the author's current employer) collectively monopolize both web browser market share and consumer OS market share on desktop and mobile. There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a coup d'état against the W3C standards body. Worldwide, Android has higher market share than iOS, Windows higher than macOS. I'm not trying to defend Apple, but I do think the author neglects to mention the essential role of his employers in this monopoly, destruction of competition, and assault on standards.
The author calls WebKit a "sham" of an open source project, not mentioning that Google used to participate in WebKit but then abandoned it, forking into a Google-controlled browser engine. Google's dominance of the web is so complete that even Microsoft was forced to abandon its own browser engine and adopt Google's. And we've seen the results of that: websites that only work in Chromium—thereby forcing browser vendors to adopt Chromium, furthering Google's monopolization—and worse, the debilitation of web browser extensions via the deprecation of Manifest V2. And if Apple doesn't happen to implement whatever Google decides, the author complains about it; why doesn't the author complain about how Google is driving all of the so-called "standards"? Why is the author not complaining about the lack of diversity in web browser engines? And even Firefox is ultimately beholden to Google, ironically arguing in court to preserve Google's monopoly so that Firefox can continue to receive Google money, Mozilla's main source of financing, even while Google continues to monopolize and force browser engines other than its own into obscurity. Firefox is a shell of its former self.
Again, this is not a defense of Apple. But Google and Microsoft are equally bad. Apple is at worst a duopolist, so how about talking about the other side of the duopoly?
The author seems to think that Apple is specifically targeting the web, trying to undermine it, but as a Mac user and developer for almost 2 decades, I don't think this is specific to the web or Safari. Whether it's malice or incompetence, Apple has been undermining the Mac too. Their software quality overall is now atrocious. And their UI is becoming atrocious too with "Liquid Glass", on all of Apple's platforms. If you focus only on Safari and WebKit, you're missing the forest for the trees.
> There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a coup d'état against the W3C standards body.
The remarkable thing is how the WHATWG gang successfully got lots of observers to cheer this on as a good thing. (Relatedly, are there any archived copies of the old, disappeared "Last Week in HTML5" blog floating around out there?)
Overall the Web is a classic (probably by now the classic) example of Too Big To Fork https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259 : as the size and interconnectedness of a piece of software or a protocol go up, the power of incumbents and those with deep pockets over it increases, effectively nullifying more and more any legal open-source or open-standard status it has. The glass-half-full implication is that this is a to a large extent a technical problem: it can be ameliorated by making the Web more modular and/or easier to independently reimplement. The glass-half-empty implications are that this is a difficult technical problem—it's not straightforwardly obvious how this can be done even starting with a clean slate, let alone how to get there from here—and that without technical improvements, any attempts to solve this with regulation, antitrust action, consumer activism or whatever is going to be unsatisfactory in one way or another.
To be fair... the W3C at the time was only starting to recover from their fascination with all things XML and Semantic Web. To the extent a standards body has an innovation budget, theirs had been in serious deficit for a while.
In the meantime, innovation was desperately needed to catch web standards up to the "2.0" evolution of the web into a vaguely usable app platform.
That shift was largely developer-driven, not standards or browser vendor driven: The magic enabled by XMLHttpRequest was more or less a happy accident.
> Their software quality overall is now atrocious.
People have been saying this for a while, and maybe there is a degradation of performance and UI consistency, but I'm a little confused when people describe it this way. What are you referring to?
> Both Apple and Google can be guilty of anti-competitive and anti-freedom behavior.
I said as much. I mentioned twice that I wasn't trying to defend Apple.
The article is nominally about web standards, but the WHATWG—whose steering committee includes Google and Microsoft—hijacked web standards. The article is painting a picture where Apple is largely acting alone, but that's not even remotely true.
> Android is caving to the pressure to follow suit more and more every day.
Pressure? What pressure? Are you claiming that Apple is somehow pressuring Google into locking down Android?
You were trying to re-focus the discussion away from Apple's behavior by pointing to Google.
Yes, both stepped over the line trying to anti-competitively make their browser dominant. Everyone had an ostensible choice to not use Chrome but if you spend enough money to be pre-installed, bundled, advertised, etc everywhere, you can take over. Good old fashioned monopoly tactics, right?
Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice. Since then, we've seen a huge expansion of DRM, integrity checks, eFuse, etc to strip everyone of their freedom. Companies got a taste of that sweet total control with iOS and wanted more.
> Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice.
Users who disagree with the concept of walled gardens have the choice of buying into an open platform.
As long as the platform creator is honest and doesn't try to yank away the supposed freedom to run any software you like that they fraudulently promised when they announced and marketed the platform.
> You were trying to re-focus the discussion away from Apple's behavior by pointing to Google.
No, I was trying to re-focus the discussion on all of the monopolists: Apple and Google on mobile, Apple and Microsoft on desktop. To talk only of Apple is to ignore the crucial roles of Google and Microsoft as monopolists.
I didn't say they invented the walled garden. I said Apple made it acceptable and successful for general purpose computing. "I can't use Firefox on my phone" doesn't quite have the same ring as "I can't use Firefox on my Switch".
Ask yourself who was the adversary for this DRM model? Game console lockdowns were built to target publishers. Mobile lockdowns are squarely targeted at users. Both are bad but the implications, magnitude, and overall consequences are very different, IMO.
> I said Apple made it acceptable and successful for general purpose computing.
So why did Windows Phone fail as a walled garden?
I'd say that it was because of Google's fraudulent promise that Android would be the platform that allowed users to run anything they liked. Google traded false promises of "openness" for market share.
(As well as Google using it's internet video monopoly as an anticompetitive weapon to prevent Windows Phone from having a YouTube client)
Why did Windows RT fail in the tablet market if walled gardens were so acceptable?
It turns out that users were perfectly capable of rejecting walled garden platforms even after the iPhone.
Your average person who wants to use Snapchat, if given a choice between a phone that runs Snapchat versus one that doesn’t, simply chooses the one that can. (Windows Phone never had Snapchat.)
Same with Photoshop. Neither Windows Phone or RT had any software support. It’s like buying a game console with no games — what’s the point?
No regular person even knows what a walled garden is. It’s not a decision factor.
By that logic, Windows RT/Windows Phone should have succeeded since they supported running versions of Microsoft Office and the other platforms did not.
This is a nonsequitor. You fear a loss of control (someone will force you to install Google and MS apps) so you choose iOS because it has less control.
That’s not true for me. And I get my family on Apple devices because it’s vastly easier to be their de facto IT department that way. When I go to visit my sister, I know my nephew hasn’t sideloaded a virus into her iPad, except that if he somehow did, it’d be so unlikely that we’d have fun talking about it.
I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t use more open portable devices. I contend that there are practical reasons why I greatly prefer them.
(But lock down my laptop to a degree that I can’t install and run software from wherever, and I’d fling it out the nearest window. The above applies to tablets and phones and that’s it.)
I'm on it for the software + hardware combo. Take either away and I'd just get whatever cheap crap instead, and probably use my computers, phones, and tablets a lot less (wouldn't bother with a tablet at all, most likely).
FWIW my intro to computers was DOS and later Windows, and Linux was my daily driver for a little over a decade before I finally gave Macs a fair shot. My first three or so smartphones were Android, before I ever tried an iPhone.
This is all true if you only look at 1-2 countries. However taking the rest of world into account and this quickly falls apart. In China for example you can use a custom rom and still use digital payments like Alipay no problem.
So you’re saying Apple legitimized some bad behavior, and now Google does it too, but we should only blame Apple, but Google does it too. You’re seriously blaming Apple for Google locking down Google pay on android?
> That's a long response that boils down to whatabout-ism.
When someone's saying "X is destroying Y!" and you point out that A and B have at least as much culpability for whatever is happening to Y as X does, that's not whataboutism. It's accurate assignment of blame.
Think about what Google’s end game looks like if they are able to convince lawmakers and regulators around the world to force Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. Google will continue to spam standards proposals and implementations that Apple or Mozilla will be unwilling to adopt for various reasons. Google will continue to advertise Chrome heavily, and push users of its other services to install and use Chrome exclusively. Google search will prioritize sites that use Chrome specific technologies. Google Gemini will generate code that uses Chrome specific APIs.
When Chrome reaches sufficient market share, Google will start to use Chrome to disadvantage computing platforms that they do not control completely. New features will come to Android and ChromeOS first. Bugs may go unaddressed on other platforms.
I realize it’s frustrating as a web developer to have to deal with browser specific issues, or to be unable to take advantage of necessary APIs or platform features from your web app. It is also frustrating to be blocked from the App Store because Apple wants to avoid competition in some area. The current situation is unfair and far from ideal. Apple are not the good guys here.
But, framing the issues as being entirely about Apple and not addressing the situation with Google doesn’t work. And, unfortunately, many commentators (including the author of this article) as well as regulators (including the EU), don’t seem to get this. If these folks get what they are asking for, we aren’t going to enter a golden age with a single web platform that is feature rich and open to all equally, we are all just going to get crushed by Google.