this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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wait, the steam browser is chromium? no way
Basically every in app browser is.
How the fuck has everyone so easily allowed so few tech companies to dominate?
That's just late stage capitalism.
Do you just keep that on the clipboard?
Honestly my google auto-type keyboard suggests that any time I post.
No, that's just people don't want to pay for anything and expect everything to be free.
Have you tried developing your own web browser?
The Web has become so complex, you need a huge team of talented developers to keep up with it, and for that you need a lot of money.
How hard can’t it be just put scrum on GitHub and let it work from there
Strange that nobody's doing that, then. Especially since so many people want more competition for Google.
The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.
When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.
Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.
The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?
What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That's why they switched to Chromium.
Oh... so to answer your question no one is "allowing" a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You're free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you'll do it you'll probably just use Chromium.
And if you were to actually create an innovative or competing product, Google would just buy you out like Android, Waze, Nest, etc
Tech giants are buying everyone left and right because people don't want to pay for these innovative products. Imagine paying a monthly subscription for Waze! Who would do that? Literally no one. Innovative products can't exist without paying customers.
Not on browsers, probably. It's one of the areas where antitrust still has some echoes. They'll probably pay you to stay afloat.
Robert Bork:
....What the fuck?
Yeah, it's fine if you drive all your competition out of business, as long as the consumer "isn't harmed"^TM^ . But, of course, how are you going to prove that the consumer isn't harmed?
Software development is very expensive. And everyone just wants free stuff. Imagine the outcry if Firefox would drop revenue from Google search and switched to a subscription model a-la Adobe! People would literally lose their minds and call Mozilla Nazis.
Chromium/Electron is just super easy to integrate. Afaik Mozilla wanted to make Firefox more easily embedable as well, but that project was killed.
Closest these days is an extension for Firefox that enable progressive web apps.
Was IE for the longest time
Not only the browser. The whole app was built with CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
It used to be only the browser/store. Now it's the whole app.