The Chromification of the WWW.

[ThomasG]

I wonder how the whole thing will work out in the end.

My first web browser was NCSA Mosaic back in the days, then we went through the whole "Netscape Special" standards and feature creep in the following years, before there was Phoenix, which then became Firebird and then Firefox...

Now with not only Chrome being the dominant browser, but others like Edge, Opera and Vivaldi also switching to the Chromium engine, I thing we have reached something even worse than the "Optimized for Netscape" or "Optimized for Internet Explorer" of the old days, the "Meh, everybody is using Chrome anyway..." on the side of website developers.

Google in control of that much is obviously bad in my opinion. Too much power concentrated in one entity, and to much mono-culture is also bad for security. But on the other hand it would be very hard for another browser to take an even marginal market share in the current situation. Perhaps with Microsoft also investing in Chromium at least it's not only one company which has all the influence on the rendering engine.

Hard to tell how the hole thing will look in a few years from now....

Anyway, Happy Holidays, hopefully without any relatives that need help with their computers.

[moonbat]

Perhaps with Microsoft also investing in Chromium at least it's not only one company which has all the influence on the rendering engine.

Nah, it's only Google. Microsoft has long since reconfigured itself as a cloud services company. Windows, let alone any browser, is quite low on their priority list as well as for contributing to their bottom line. Their main money printer now is Azure, which competes with Amazon AWS; and Office 365 subscriptions. You can see how less of a shit they give about Windows from its catastrophic decline in quality over the last few years, from updates that hang the OS to totally user hostile practices like telemetry and resetting file associations and preferences arbitrarily (reminds you of a certain browser vendor?). Their whole Windows testing team was fired, now users are their unpaid beta testers while the entire OS remains in a perpetual beta with breaking updates every fortnight, a practice pioneered by Google.

[ThomasG]

Nah, it's only Google. Microsoft has long since reconfigured itself as a cloud services company.

That's kind of the thing. Google is mainly a cloud service company, Microsoft is trying to become more of a cloud service company. ( The only slight difference between the two is whether the person using their browser is more of a customer or more of a product .... )

[moonbat]

Why do you think Microsoft dumped Edge's own browser engine and based it off Chrome instead? Browser wars are not a priority for them - they're content to let Google handle that and just add window dressing. So given who controls the browser space these days, of course you are the product, not the customer (when was the last time you paid for a browser?)

[Drugwash]

We're the product anyway no matter who is that milks us.