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The Browser Monopoly


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2019 Aug 21, 7:43am   1,385 views  16 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

http://blairreeves.me/2019/08/20/the-browser-monopoly/

There is really only one Big Tech monopoly that I actively worry about. It’s not Amazon, Facebook or Apple, though they are all extremely dominant in their respective fields and do act in anti-competitive ways that merit regulatory remedy. Rather, the tech monopoly that I wonder about is arguably one of the more mundane parts of the modern internet experience: your web browser, and its most likely source – Google. ...

But crucially, Google’s grip on the browser market extends far beyond Chrome. Google is also the owner and developer of the free, open-source web browser Chromium, which is now the underlying code behind not only the Opera browser, but Edge, Microsoft’s successor to the much-maligned Internet Explorer. (As well as two dozen other browsers you probably don’t care about.)

In short, Google – the world’s largest advertiser and keeper of personal data – now also enjoys substantial control over the vast majority of the world’s portal to the internet. I don’t think that’s a good thing. ...

In The Internet As Television, I lamented the drift of the modern web towards favoring passive consumption of “content” over all else. But we should also bemoan the gradual sacrifice of user privacy and security as well. Despite highly visible examples of how easily personal data is tracked, recorded and weaponized by the advertising-ravenous web, the harms are hard to understand and extremely opaque to most people.

Comments 1 - 16 of 16        Search these comments

1   GNL   2019 Aug 21, 7:46am  

How difficult is it to create your own web browser?
2   georgeliberte   2019 Aug 21, 7:54am  

I use Firefox almost exclusively. For one thing some of the software at work is Chrome based, so I cannot have both open simultaneously. Beside, Chrome never impressed me.
3   RWSGFY   2019 Aug 21, 8:03am  

I use mostly Safari and (occasionally) Firefox.
4   EBGuy   2019 Aug 21, 11:58am  

Did anyone else get the login screen on Chrome about a week ago. That freaked me out. It appears they rolled it back. I had to fire up Chrome as I couldn't post to a website I frequently use with Firefox (which is locked down pretty tightly with an adblocker and NoScript).
5   Tenpoundbass   2019 Aug 21, 12:10pm  

I quit Firefox after the fags took over and fired the founder. After that their updates increasingly took 100% of my computer's processing power.
I'm sure Firefox is the most guilty out there, at snooping at your computer folder's contents and reporting back to them.

Since I have quit FF and don't have it installed on my computer. I rarely if ever run out of computer resources while browsing using Opera.
I think Opera uses less features of the Chormium browser out of all of them.
6   SunnyvaleCA   2019 Aug 21, 1:23pm  

I use Chrome with ad blocker and script blocker for most of my routine browsing. If you're using 3rd party extensions for blocking, it's already unsafe, so might as well use Chrome and be doubly unsafe.

For things where security matters (or websites that block my blockers) I use Safari. That's for things like banking and stock broker websites. I don't run any 3rd party add-ons in Safari.
7   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2019 Aug 21, 4:21pm  

I use whatever is on the iPhone, safari i think
8   Hircus   2019 Aug 21, 8:07pm  

Tenpoundbass says
I rarely if ever run out of computer resources while browsing using Opera.


I'm a long time (15+ yr) Opera fan, but I ditched it because the Chinese recently purchased it. I switched to Vivaldi, which is very similar.
9   Hircus   2019 Aug 21, 8:10pm  

SunnyvaleCA says
I don't run any 3rd party add-ons in Safari.


This is good advice to not use extensions for your banking browser.

I've personally had very popular extensions go rogue on me when the owner sold out to a new owner who decided to monetize the trusting user base. The code updates happen automatically so you're blindsided by it.

Someone could steal a lot of money using that strategy of buying a popular extension then attacking your user base to steal their banking credentials.
10   GNL   2019 Aug 22, 1:37pm  

WineHorror1 says
How difficult is it to create your own web browser?

This is a serious question.
12   MisdemeanorRebel   2019 Sep 2, 10:56am  

When you search for an extremely popular reddit group with a million members, but the site link doesn't come up

13   MisdemeanorRebel   2019 Sep 2, 10:56am  

But it's the first result on DuckDuckGo

14   Tenpoundbass   2019 Sep 2, 11:07am  

WineHorror1 says
How difficult is it to create your own web browser?


Extremely easy. If you just want to parse HTML and be complaint with the latest specs.
The hard part is to make a Browser that can interpret JavaScript and be complaint with the latest release and can parse CSS and present the page uniformly as it does in other browsers. Then there's all of the Video and other Multi media to deal with. Mime types and how you handle them.
All of this stuff used to be controlled by a Consortium. Now it's pretty much Google setting the standards, so other Browser competitors appear inferior when they don't display as well as Chromium based browsers.
15   Heraclitusstudent   2019 Sep 3, 12:52pm  

Firefox 69 Dials Up Privacy Protections – Cyptomining, Tracking & Fingerprinting All Blocked
https://wccftech.com/firefox-69-dials-up-privacy-protections-cyptomining-tracking-blocked/
16   Hircus   2019 Sep 3, 11:04pm  

WineHorror1 says
How difficult is it to create your own web browser?


Most of the smaller name browsers just reuse the rendering engine and other major components from the big browsers. For example, the open source webkit rendering engine is used by tons of browsers.

I've never looked into the specific details, but judging by how much behavior and features Opera and Vivaldi share in common w/ Chrome (a TON), I think they copy most of it, making it fairly low effort to make a high quality browser w/out spyware. They're all based on the common webkit base, including Safari.

There's also other browsers that seems to be based on the firefox code, likely following the same copy the open source code strategy, where they just make some small changes to give their browser a few unique features.

Coding your own from scratch, assuming you want to make a browser that supports most modern web pages and standards with high quality, is an enormous undertaking, especially if high performance is desired. Supporting most modern browser standards is a real big task.

Making something hackyfrom scratch that follows the 80/20 rule and kinda works on some basic sites is doable for someone motivated. Maybe a poor performing, low quality but kinda works hack could be made in 1 to 5 thousand hours.

IMO making a new browser totally from scratch that could compete with the big name browsers has become difficult. Wild guess would be many 10's of thousands of man hours. Google Chrome probably has hundreds of thousands of hours by now, maybe even a million. But, I guess a lot of this depends on how much you read open source browser code to use as a guide to base your own code on. You could probably copy the code, but make small changes to it just for the purpose of making the code different enough to claim it as your own creation, in much less time.

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