Night Wing wrote:Have you ever heard the old saying, "What is good for the goose, is also good for the gander".
I've also heard of the saying "Two wrongs don't make a right".
Microsoft had legal and regulatory rulings that went against it in both the US and the EU based on this type of behavior when they attempting to use their operating system monopoly to give themselves a browser monopoly. Google has been busily attempting to use their search and video monopolies to give themselves a browser monopoly, and, largely, it's working, and though it's a clear violation of anti-trust law, we're not yet seeing governments step in to stop it or penalize Google forit.
Note that a monopoly does not mean that something has to be on the market. Being the only thing on the market is just the easiest most extreme example of a monopoly to point to. There are situations short of that which still clear the monopoly threshold. And what you look for if you are a regulator or someone else charged with preserving a fair competition is exactly the thing that the ex-Microsoft Edge engineer pointed out YouTube was doing. Pale Moon's developers have had similar complaints about Google in the past, so it's not *just* Google targeting Microsoft's browser or *just* Microsoft developers who have mentioned problems like this.
The good and bad news about most browsers now or soon being based on Blink/Webkit from this perspective is that if Google does something to artificially throttle another browser, it'll be very obvious, which means they probably won't do it, but the bad news is of course exactly what we already covered upthread- a one size fits all monopoly on rendering engines that will make it incredibly hard on anyone trying to do something different and will give Google almost complete control of the future of the web, and to a lesser extent the future of computing. That's a lot of power for one company to have. And, of course, if there is an unpatched vulnerability in Webkit, in theory that could be used by the bad guys to stage an attack on basically every web browser one earth. Slight exageration there, but when we combine the current Blink and Webkit numbers with Edge on desktop and mobile, it's well over 90% of installs. Basically, Gecko and forks thereof (Like Goanna) are going to be the only alternative left- unless one wants to count legacy browsing engines like Internet Explorer's Trident, which I doubt is getting much active development these days- and how long they will be able to exist and still access most websites is in question, given that web developers are more and more just designing for and testing with Blink/Webkit.
