I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again. You'd need a constant pressure to prevent this situation and given that the USA would be in the best position to do that I'm not holding by breath.

The internet started decentralized because there was no money to make and we were still figuring things out. As soon as it became mainstream it started to coalesce and we're just now reaching the final stage of this evolution. Even here on HN you have threads full of people coming up with excuses for why they won't run Firefox, and that's a community that should understand the implication of those things. Good luck convincing the internet population at large.

Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh.

Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago:

https://imgur.com/a/gQ2mxOM

Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers:

https://imgur.com/a/aEtU7AB

This is not definitive, but it's something I guess. Here are a few observations based on that data:

1. On the desktop, it looks like Chrome and Firefox are at about parity for HN users. I kind of doubt this actually, and think it's more likely that Chrome still beats Firefox by a sizable margin. But even if this is off, it looks like HN users actually do use Firefox significantly more than the general population, which means the evangelization here isn't just a vocal minority among HN users.

2. On desktop Safari is a distant third. It would appear more people browse HN in any mobile category than browse HN on desktop using Safari.

3. On mobile, mobile Safari dominates. Then mobile Chrome has about half as many users as mobile Safari, and mobile Firefox again half as many as mobile Chrome.

EDIT: I pulled an Athena report of the referrer breakdown as well, if anyone's curious:

https://imgur.com/a/1dworVj

As a user Safari is fantastic and basically the whole reason I even own an iPhone. It’s just stupidly faster than Chrome on any Android flagship.

A world where there’s “choice” of browsers on every platform in practice just cements Chrome as the web because if you didn’t have to develop for Safari nobody would. On every other platform it’s “have bug-for-bug compatibility with Chrome or die.”

Not only is safari full of bugs, the bugs won't be fixed, and if they do, it will take years.

Current serious bugs: 1. Add a site to the home screen, go to another app for 20 seconds and then switch back: congratulations, it's frozen. 2. You can't even stop scrolling on the body element, so tens of thousands of developers resorts to ugly hacks like eg. https://github.com/willmcpo/body-scroll-lock that kinda works in some situations. 3. The lack of features. Who doesn't as a developer feel bad for the person who spends forever trying every single browser in apples app store in an attempt to find a browser that supports push notifications. Of course none of them do, it's all Apple's shit.

You really can't have much experience with web development if you don't know how terrible iOS is for web as a result of Safari.

Heck, Safari isn't even behaving close to Safari. You have safari on desktop, safari on iOS and safari standalone on iOS. All of them behaves completely different and has different bugs and feature support.

I wouldn't even bother owning an iOS device if it weren't for the third-party app selection (specifically for art production). Which is the most infuriating part: devs could do all of this stuff on Android, they just refuse to.

That's not fair. There are good reasons Android doesn't have art production apps. The biggest is that Android users don't pay for apps like that and devs like eating, but iOS has several other advantages like the Pencil, the better graphics APIs, the better graphics performance, etc.

This is more the result of Android being the budget option.

You make it sound as though developers have some grand scheme against Android. Devs do prioritize iOS, but if you want it to change you (and Google) should understand the reasons for it. ARKit vs ARCore is a great example.

Tango launched on a single phone that no one bought, it required specialized hardware, and it had serious performance issues. Google forged ahead with the hardware requirements for years, in which the market for Tango apps was zero. They gave it limited support and it was clearly not a priority. It was only after Apple launched ARKit all at once for every modern iDevice, in a big presentation to make it clear this would be a major iOS going forward, that Google killed off Tango and screwed over all the devs who had bought in (with a tweet, for the extra insult to injury). They launched ARCore instead, which still didn't run on the majority of Android phones and still didn't track as well as ARKit.

ARCore isn't the only time Google has behaved this way, it happens with nearly all of their efforts. Do you see why developers don't engage with these kinds of practices?

No, it's simply the same sort of tribalism that drives so much of American culture. The black-and-white, good-vs-evil format warring is nothing new; as always, it's driven by a kernel of legitimate difference and a whole lot of snowballing bias. What needs to happen is for developers to pull their heads out of their asses, realize just how enormous the Android market is, and supply experiences that justify paying for software (especially in a climate where most users don't see anywhere near the value they give in personal data returned in software utility).

>Tango launched on a single phone that no one bought

That doesn't matter. Tango was the cutting edge of mobile XR, which is a space that still won't be mature and profitable for years from now. The point would have been to get a jumpstart on developing port-able technologies and UX norms. Can you imagine how much more solid app development would have been if someone had showed up in 2003 and said, "In 10 years, multi-touch display smartphones will become the norm. Here's a dev kit that approximates what will be possible."? That's Tango. I don't know how you can argue that opportunities weren't missed or pushed back years because of this platform bias. Now the space is even contracting somewhat because Apple marketed ARKit (and forced Google to market ARCore) as a consumer-ready platform, and companies are realizing that it isn't (control isn't figured out, UX isn't figured out, applications aren't figured out; we're JUST getting the basic technology layer above ARKit/Core figured out). If we'd taken Tango seriously, we'd be so much farther ahead.

This goes for so much in the iOS/Android dynamic. It's dumb.

I really like addons and that's why I don't use chrome on mobile.

Surprisingly I also started using Firefox Focus. At first it looked like nonsense to me, no addons. But then I found out it sometimes makes sense to start from scratch, focus on some topic and delete all tabs with one tap when done. And if I find what I searched for or want to read it later, I share the page to Saved messages on my Telegram. This workflow works surprisingly well for me.

But then, with Bush Sr and then Clinton, the rules changed; Microsoft started playing the political game, and essentially avoided a similar fate.

There is no antitrust enforcement anymore. Breaking a company once indeed only buys a little time. But getting regulation workiNg again WILL work, and will likely include breaking them.

If only the US would vote in politicians that cared about competition. I can’t find any amongst either presidential or congressional candidates, though.

From what we've seen with GPT-3, we can train one machine learning model by ingesting the entire scraped web and a whole lot of (online/offline?) books, and it can often produce correct answers to questions. The accuracy of those answers, presuming the questions are not subjective ones, is only going to increase. Google's status, as a search engine, in 2025 is not something I would bet money on.

The iOS/Safari thing is another issue, which perhaps other anti-trust regulators will address in Google's favor. Assuming they do not, consider that if Google stops paying Apple many billions of dollars a year and another company (or Apple) replaces the default iOS search, Google's search ad business will be severely and irreversibly damaged. Removing iOS defaults would not only remove a large chunk of Google's US mobile search traffic, it would be the more affluent chunk. Everyone who knows about marketplace dynamics knows how damaging that would be to Google if that inventory ended up with Microsoft or Facebook.

Even without regulatory intervention (which is almost 100% guaranteed at this point, barring some act of god, though I don't know how large that intervention will be) Google's days atop the mountain are certainly drawing to a close. Perhaps the ground has already given way, they know it, and the maniacal stupidity of trying to coral the web into some AMP graveyard is a reaction of desperation.

To address the original blog post, I think the author is way off the mark on video. Youtube is big, but far from the king. Google has repeatedly flopped on the social side, and isn't going to be allowed to buy TikTok. They don't appear to be taking any ground paid streaming services like Netflix or Amazon. They are big, but no where near as important relative to their dominance in search.

Hopefully those same anti-trust regulators also have statistics for browser market shares :)

What other alternatives are there for Youtube, that are even in the same region as Youtube?

[0]: https://activitypub.rocks/

Additionally, separate to instagram / facebook / whatsapp ; possibly also facebook social / facebook marketplace / facebook events ; They should have a level of access that others have. Imagine Yahoo users could subscribe to Facebook events without ever setting foot in facebook.com ... I know it sounds like science fiction, but it's possible. like email....

Or you could break up search / browser / advertising / mobile; search and browser would need to invent other ways to monetize themselves.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/introducing-our-exper...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-...

It's actually pretty cool, and earnings from web monetized users now cover ~3% of the operation of the site during the first month of having it implemented.

You basically just have to add a meta tag to the site that directs to a payment pointer (you also have to sign up with one of the wallets for the payment pointer).

Definitely not getting rich from the implementation, and the earnings are much lower than if I just ran ads, but it is a nice feeling to have the users of the site directly contribute to supporting the product. Plus it is such a low barrier to set it up that there is very little downside to having it added to the site.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com

Implementing simple "Web Bucks" is not pedestrian at all. There are real reasons why all Paypals suck, and you can't simply ignore them and hope to build an open cash alternative unbothered.

"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. Because chat is addictive, relatively easy to implement, and easy for users to access via website or app, there's huge incentive roll your own chat service, and then incentive to differentiate from innumerable competitors. Many users are on half a dozen chat sites.

Email is going strong, even tho it's seen rather little UX investment. Decentralization is one feature keeping it afloat in a world of uncountable chat alternatives.

I'd still argue that it correlates with centralization. We could argue about causation but it still goes hand in hand IMO.

A company is much less likely to invest resources into improving IRC or Jabber because if you made huge breaking changes you'd end up with an incompatible, custom fork of the protocol (negating the benefit of using a standard protocol, since you'd effectively lose the interop with third party client) and even if you kept the standards open and federation possible you're basically hurting your own business since you make it easy for people to use your work without giving you a way to monetize it.

If your objective is to be profitable it makes a lot more sense to just create your own centralized, proprietary protocol and clients that you control end-to-end. Standardizing and federating your protocol is a massive amount of headache in the long run for very little benefit in terms of $$$.

Except most emails end up at Gmail SMTP servers (@gmail.com and hosted G Suite).

slack/discord will probably disappear and be replaced by another closed system until we find the right way to do real time chat in a decentralised way.

I don't know if it's still in the pipeline but I remember that Google proposed an "AMP for email" not so long ago, with basically self-updating email contents.

Open email can be severely damaged if good old SMTP is only used to tunnel proprietary formats, especially if those formats are effectively just metadata that's used to fetch the actual content of the email from 3rd parties.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...

Most companies use mail internally or to interact with customers usually using some type of external mailing service.....

If SMTP is only used to tunnel proprietary content à la winmail.dat, it doesn't really matter that it's still technically open.

Isn't that what IRC was supposed to be? But as others have pointed out, it's trivial to roll your own chat software and monetize it. You can't do that with a decentralized standard.

> I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again.

The natural course of humans is to walk around on the ground too, yet we fly. Regardless of whether it takes energy to do, it's something we should obviously do anyway because the alternative is worse. Sorry for the bad analogy but "it's natural" and "hard" isn't a valid argument against doing something about something.

I don't really buy your story anyway though. It assumes it was a fair fight and I simply don't think that's true in the case of the web.

Genuine question, do you mind saying (or pointing to something) what are the implications of browser choice of individuals reading HN?

I think at some point Chrome became significantly better than Firefox and did a better job listening to users, so power-users (developers) started switching, once they switched, they primarily developed for the browser they use themselves (it's just more convenient when you get a link to look at to open the inspector in the browser that is set as system standard), so support improved further on that platform, so market share would constantly rise. This in turn leads to more devs reducing their focus on Firefox, so users turn away when a site looks or functions worse.

Now, Firefox has caught up on a bunch of things, yet Google's market share is huge both in browsing and advertising. It would be good for more developers to actively support the strongest alternative platform, because this in turn might affect adoption of that browser, even if it's just small numbers (every site that doesn't work might lead to a user switching to Chrome). It would keep them at least a little more safe from a monopoly that might start imposing policies that are bad for their business, the same way app stores are causing issues because they are the only way to access mobile phones (outside of web app - which is the point of the whole discussion)

Edit: note there's probably many reasons - this is just one way of looking at it.

Easier to monetize means you can fund all the work required to achieve superior user experience, and user experience is the most important differentiator. People have repeatedly shown that UX is more important than security, privacy, cost, freedom, openness... anything. If it "just works" and can be adopted with little or no friction, it wins.

Yes, central structures allow capturing of monetary value, which provide economic incentive to people and that is a powerful motivator for attracting good UX/UI/Designers to make the product improve mass appeal

For whatever reason, good UI/UX hasn't been the FOSS's strong suite. Until that changes (and there's also no reason why it can't change) it will continue to lose ground on anything that is user-facing. Anything that requires expertise however, FOSS will continue to shine.

Just like democracy, you are never "done". "Oh great we are in a democracy nothing can remove that from us!" nope, gotta fight to keep it that way...

I know that your parent explicitly mentioned the US, but let's not pretend either that the US found the, or even a, right answer to structuring government, or that no other country has found their own answers.

There's not one right answer here.

For many people, it probably is—the key to its longevity (and it's very young on the global stage) is working well enough for enough people enough of the time—but there are plenty of people for whom it's not working—me and plenty of other people in the US, but also the global victims of the international policies of the US. (Before the whataboutism comes in, this is not to say that other countries don't also have dissatisfied residents or bad international policies. I was responding specifically to a comment whose wording could be read as saying that the US, rather than any other country one might want to discuss, had found the right answer to government.)

> There's not one right answer here.

I agree, and that's why I was urging against wording that seemed to imply that the US's answer was the answer to 'correct' government.

Personally I'd like to live under a much more European model of governance, but that, too, isn't perfect. (And, of course, one way to do that is to move to Europe. But this thread started not from a debate about the best place to live, but from my response to a post whose wording, "we figured it out ~250 years ago", could be read as suggesting that the US had found the right solution to government.)

But it is meaningful to disagree with "we figured it out ~250 years ago" (a quote from the post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24178311 to which I was originally responding), which says that we already know the answer, even if I don't know the answer (and even if, as I suspect, there isn't just one answer—if there is even one).

> good luck with research on fixing things like covid, ebola, and polio.

Polio is gone. Ebola, to the extent that it is gone, is because of a massive worldwide effort, not because of any one government—it literally, scientifically, could not have been eradicated by one government. It's not clear to me that the US's record on dealing with COVID is such that it can afford to sneer at anyone else's ability to deal with it, "anarchy enclave" or otherwise.

Don't get me wrong, I'm totally uncomfortable with a monopoly of this scale; I'm a Firefox user, a Pihole user, a non-FB user. But when people (non nerds) ask me why, it's hard to answer. They're all happy enough: Chrome is fast, AMP is faster, they get to find out the stuff they want to find out from incredibly accurate search, or Facebook - so what's the actual problem here?

My answer is normally about principles or competition or fairness but in practical terms, I haven't got a lot of answers.

Help me out here.

Once Google feels comfortable with doing so not allowing arbitrary routing in Chrome will be on the table to control what websites people visit. The only things stopping that is a feeble threat of state intervention or the threat of competition in the browser space reclaiming market share as a result.

They can, and probably will, take Chrome wholly proprietary at some point. Microsoft kowtowing to their engine is in their favor for now, but long term its in their business interests that Microsoft not have a browser anymore. That they present Chrome as the only option to users.

We can mire in the details of what a browser is, but for 99% of people Chrome is a program you run that shows you the stuff you want. The http, html, etc underpinnings are totally irrelevant. Chrome could be doing anything as long as it were showing the content the user of it expects. Google has already done this in the past with things like SPDY. I'm sure standards realize this - its why http/2 was a thing after all - that at this point if Google creates a new protocol it is de-facto required to become a standard because that is the only way for alternative browsers to keep pace with Chrome.

As such Google gets to dictate the future of hypertext. Not the users of the platform, not standards bodies formed to collaborate, the board of directors of a publicly traded US company.

As for SPDY, standards bodies like to "pave the cowpaths" so they codify existing implementations. Apple and Mozilla supported SPDY, it eventually became http/2 as you say, and then everyone dropped support for SPDY. This sounds like everything worked as intended.

It won't help much if a huge part of Chrome's proprietary new future involves running on proprietary content as well. Just wait until Chrome has some special non-HTTP integration with "lightning fast AMP pages" that other browsers can't serve, or serves a lot slower.

When one entity controls the web and you run a web based business, then you have to live in constant fear that they will destroy it. By accident or by malice.

One example how this is already happening is AMP. Google says "Give us your content or we will send people interested in it to your competitors instead". And they get away with it.

This is the opposite of freedom.

"Once they have wiped out all competition, they can start charging you."

It frustrates me, why not just give me a link to an actual web page?

Facebook, Uber, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. None of them are optimized for Google index.

Most top consumer internet applications don't take place in your browser.

And I'd argue that google's about the only thing propping up the internet. Chromium's a reasonably open platform (certainly more so than internet explorer, which not that long ago looked destined to become the dominant platform), gmail has kept email viable, android is somewhat open (and without it, apple might own that space entirely), etc

Every other player that's gotten traction has set up a walled garden

In fact it's exactly the same reason why Mozilla is increasingly not sustainable. Email hosting is simply not a lucrative business. That's why it's all run by large portals like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc. which use them not to make money but to collect information about people, and monetize through ads or other indirect methods. Of course, this only becomes profitable at scale, and there are not that many companies at that scale.

As for Mozilla not being sustainable: I think they could be, but not the way they run their business.

Email hosting is lucrative enough for Fastmail.

Fusing the two never seems to work well. See blog comments for an example.

Think about what would be left if you took away all "social" apps from the internet.

Even if we don't go that far, think about non-social online apps that don't use the "web".

For example, iCloud, Dropbox, Microsoft Office, Adobe creative cloud, etc. Most users of these apps use native apps instead of a clunky browser.

Some people think Microsoft Word is a clunky native app, others that Google Docs is a clunky browser app.

Maybe they are both right.

Using Firefox here with a few hundred tabs open, working just fine. I suspect your setup has other problems.

Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.

For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse?

Total “get off my lawn” complaint but how do you turn the damn AMP off? :)

It only makes sense in terms of trying to lock marketers and publishers into a Google-led ecosystem.

This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm interested to know whether that would work. As I see it AMP can be just as big a problem just by being there by default on Google properties as by being something you, the consumer, can't turn off.

I haven't found a simple way that works on both my mobile and my desktop devices yet but I'd be interested in any recommendations.

Content would furiously jump around as the page was overcome by advalanches, videos on autoplay would pop up in all the corners, as you scrolled, the page would often break at paragraphs as even more videos would load, secretly sliding in the content like some infestation. If you tried to highlight text to copy, you'd see interstitial popups of yet again more ads and then discover your clipboard was populated with ad after ad.

Then when you copied the URL, it was full of fingerprints and UID hashes from all these providers so it was hundreds of excess bytes, usually leaking personal information. You'd have to chop it off or just give up and share the extra tracking garbage at the end of the url

And this was essentially all of the local news sites. They were indistinguishable from the click here to download virus typosquatting sites. It was horrific. Often loading an article would lock up and crash the browser, it was totally completely unusable. This was the post-flash web that we all desperately wanted, here ya go!

I really don't like amp, but it has fixed that problem so effectively that you have to remind people in detail that it actually once existed.

The only way around a centralized solution is a magical "disable garbage" ad block extension in the browser, and those also exist, and are maintained once again, by a centralized group.

Ok so another solution, just stop indexing or boosting the garbage sites forcing them to change, that's what amp does yet again.

I agree that I want some greener pasture alternative from over yonder, but what?

I also think you have an exotic definition centralization.

> sites

Sites is plural, so this is not a centralized solution. There are multiple competing options.

> just stop indexing or boosting the garbage sites forcing them to change, that's what amp does yet again.

No it doesn't. AMP is faster, so AMP sites get boosted based on being faster. It's an indirect effect, at least according to Google. Google could have stopped at applying a big penalty to dog slow sites. No lock-in promoting tech required.

There was a huge missed opportunity for Firefox here to do some aggressive garbage removal in these sorts of pages. They'd probably have a much bigger share now if they had

I always say there are two parts in AMP, a very sensible set of guidelines for good design, enforced by code, and Google services. The first ones benefit users, the second benefit Google.

The unfortunate thing is that when I hear complaints, it is more often about the former than the latter. Something about "creative freedom", like the freedom to put up annoying pop-up ads and mess up with the "back" button and scrolling I guess.

As a user, I am very happy with AMP. Now we just need someone to take all the good bits, remove all Google crap, and make websites that are even better. AMP is open source, at least the good bits are.

Having it enforced by Google actually makes it easier to get funding by organizations since now administrators can’t simply just tell their devs to ignore standard.

It’s too bad the sites just couldn’t do that on their own and avoid the need for amp.

Instead they created their own monster in response.

A reasonable person might ask why they didn't go the simple route.

Use DuckDuckGo.

That sucked.

They want your canonical web page to be AMP.

Call it antitrust.ly! :)

"Accelerated Mobile Pages" should not be showing up on desktop at all. If they do, that's poor coding by the website itself. Just like how you often get stuck on website's mobile version when browsing on desktop.

> it’s completely broken

That's a pretty big statement, could you specify in which way it is "completely broken"?

> friction increasing to grab a link

This has been mostly fixed, I haven't had an issue in the past year. On Chrome and Firefox I believe, it works natively, and in other browsers I believe it adds an extra bar at the top to grab the link.

> Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.

Quite the opposite, in my experience it's often a far simpler and focused page with less crap. The only slight disadvantage is that comment sections on articles are often disabled, but they are usually a click away. It makes sense anyways to not load those by default on mobile.

> A theoretical page load time improvement?

It's definitely not theoretical. It's also a way to bundle websites allowing easier edge caching which helps tremendously.

> we already have “request desktop mode”

Partly because the majority of websites never gave a shit about optimizing their mobile experience without an incentive.

> seemingly even worse?

I truly believe this is a case of "assigning downsides you notice to AMP, but upsides being mostly invisible". You wouldn't have anyone to assign it to when you see a mobile page on desktop, but if it's an AMP page, then you have someone to get angry at.

Another example would be how a spam protection could be blocking 99% of the spam, but if a couple bad content get through, you'll think the spam protection is doing absolutely nothing and it sucks, because you don't get to see the 99% of work it's actually doing.

Since it’s been a few days, just to respond to only the easiest point, copying a link to the non-AMP website so socially share takes 3 to 4 incremental clicks on mobile, so that’s what I meant by that.

But reflecting you’re spot on, since I can’t quantify the benefit AMP has had on the internet it’s hard to claim the negatives are so eggregious. Thx for that perspective.

For better ranking in the dominant search engine, so you make more money from your participation in the dominant advertising network.

I think google is overplaying their hand in many areas, and this will inevitably lead to the downfall of their dominance. Just like most other large businesses in history.

Likewise Microsoft still is a massive player in enterprise software even as AWS became a virtual synonym for cloud computing.

An interesting thing I have noticed is that Amazon has made staggeringly little progress at user facing SaaS -- think salesforce.com. I went to an AWS conference years ago and the gap between the speaker's enthusiasm for zocalo and the crowd that couldn't care less (e.g. The crowd that was pumped for IAM and T2 instances) was striking.

In desktop & laptop Windows still holds a 87% market share.

"Consumer computing devices" is such a vague market. If you study markets at such a big scope something like Texas Instruments wouldn't even make a blip while if you're paying more careful attention you'll find they absolutely dominate the scientific calculator market.

(edit/sidenote: along with SSO - my org has thousands of users.)

That's a very interesting observation. Google will thus prevent a native payment option at all costs, which leaves a huge opening for Brave or another payment provider. (Which is enhanced by content providers being threatened by AMP.)

I don't see Google in a very secure position. Their employees nowadays don't seem to care which will become a huge problem once Google has to actually react to a changing market. Amazon is getting product searches and Facebook can take over everything else whenever they want because Google's results don't come from analysing the web but from showing the pages that other people with the same queries are visiting.

Additionally, Huawei is forced to setup their own app store. If they have the better TikTok app, and online payment with wechat, the next generation of users will switch. China has so much more developers that a Chinese app store will become the more interesting place for new apps. With Zoom and TikTok, they have shown that they can create competitive apps.

There are obviously subsets of the web where this doesn't apply (twitch and YouTube where patreon is common, onlyfans, etc.), but that's almost solely for video and live interaction.

Micropayments are, apparently, not what the textful web wants.

Can you elaborate on what a native payment option would entail? How would it be different from non native payment options? How would it be different from crypto or other payment options that already exist?

>Wasn't it that the creators of Netscape wanted to put some kind of payment protocol similar to crypto in the original browser but ran into trouble with the government, can't remember anymore. 402 error was famously reserved for money trouble.

You could have one standard, in the same way that webpages are standardized. Then you could use your preferred option on any webpage. It would come with your browser, so no need to install anything. Unlike the Apple app store, you wouldn't have one player controlling everything, so the payment network wouldn't take 30% of all profits.

Of course, whatever is feasible as a standard is also feasible as a plugin, or at least, like Brave, as a new Browser, if Google limits the plugin api. The difference is that nowadays, every payment option tries to be the winner, preventing every other player from advancing. With a standard, those fights would be over and users could start paying for everything.

I think the biggest difference would be that people would pay for single articles and videos from obscure sources. Nowadays you have to hand out your credit card or register for an obscure payment network like Brave or patreon. People register for Netflix, but not for a blog they visit one time in their life. It's very likely that a webpage and a visitor use different payment options, thus payment is not possible. As a consequence, everything is paid with adverts, like the article states. With a standard, that would shift and the default option would be a clean article without ads.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24177888

I don't know? Was it?

> With a standard, those fights would be over and users could start paying for everything.

What prevents anyone from making a standard? Why do we see standards for everything else but this? What would the standard entail?

I think the real issue here is that payment is a hard problem, open payment systems like bitcoin is horrible to use, and closed payment systems like visa is closed due to trust and security concerns.

To me it seems like the author is just dismissing the inherent complexity and accusing the people who put in the time to standardize the protocols we have of being incompetent. This is not worthy of hackernews.

Good question. hakfoo's answer seems to be a good start.

I would include something for automated micro-pre-payment. If you are just browsing news sites, it would be inconvenient to constantly confirm payment. Likewise, confirming payment for every played song is annoying. But that would also require some form of trust-network to take care of spam and fakes.

Like html, I wouldn't worry about getting it right the first time. It just needs to be usable and can be refined from there.

>What prevents anyone from making a standard?

Nothing. But where's the benefit for anybody to push it? If it is a standard, then all competitors can reap the profits without any investment.

This could have been Mozilla territory: Join Brave and make micro-payment a valid option for content creators.

Something like <payment name="transactionId"> <amount>30.00</amount> <currency>USD</currency> <ordernumber>123456</ordernumber> <method name="WireTransfer" account="234567" routing="3040567" /> <method name="PayPal" destination="company@company.com" /> <method name="CreditCard" url="https://secure.gateway.com" merchantid="123456" /> <method name="Dogecoin" walletid="D0304050600405kgjfd" amount="2600" /> </payment> This would render as a group of buttons representing the payment choices. The browser would pop up an appropriate form-- potentially in an isolated context where the fields can't be sniffed by on-page scripts, perform the remittance, and submit a structure of verifiable confirmation details in the field transactionId when the form was submitted. Since the flow is steered entirely by the user's browser, there's a stronger degree of trust and control; I could imagine, for example, bank-provided plugins that required a seperate authentication before relaying the card details, or more sophisticated 3-D Secure style checking and fingerprinting. The entire PCI compliance and trusting merchants with the card number problems would never have come into play.

There is the Web Payments API now, but it's a clunky ball of JavaScript with limited support. This could have been demoed in 1997 and universal by 2000.

If it is so simple, why was it not? Are you suggesting it was purely incompetence of the people who standardized the web back then?

I feel like this was the same stall-out that created "it took until HTML5 before we had a more or less universal slider form control" and "there's still nothing resembling a OS-native dropdown menu or rich-text widget in pure HTML."

That time period sort of coincided with the window of a couple years-- when we still had to think about 40-bit and 128-bit crypto offerings, you had to explicitly navigate to a SSL domain to check out, and things like Flooz were still considered a viable idea. Nobody really knew how to take a payment online, so we ended up basically copying the payment from from a mail-order catalog in HTML. A strong "this is the secure and easy way with big clicky buttons" proposal, supported by the leading browsers, would have steered the nascent market effectively.

but is Zoom chinese ?

Search and payment are important as well, but only really become relevant when the content is on the web.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner

https://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/79408?hl=en

The simplest approach to something like this is Apache homedirs or finger plan files [0]: you write some text in a file in your home directory and a service makes it accessible to anyone who connects to your machine. Apparently plan files were somewhat popular thing at one point; you could finger the machines at id Software and read what John Carmack was doing on any given week [1].

The problem with this approach is that the internet (not just the web) is not end-to-end. Assuming your ISP isn't using CGNAT, I have to:

- Punch a hole in my firewall or setup up a DMZ host. Unless my workstation is the only thing on my network and hooked directly into my modem, but nobody does that. Everybody has a LAN with private addressing.

- Setup dynamic DNS, since there's no guarantee that my ISP has given me a static address. In practice this isn't that bad, but if I lose power in a thunderstorm you need to have the same name you had before.

- Harden and update whatever service I run. It'll get probed regularly, and is a high value target since it presumably runs on the same machine where I run my password manager or buy things using I credit card.

A VPS is just a convenience and security measure here. You get a public IP address without any additional management (default-deny firewall, NAT) and can isolate your private data from the VPS which is more likely to be compromised.

The alternative would be to make a new network which gets rid of all the extra layers of management - just your machine, with a publicly accessible name that you can point people to. No smart network appliances in-between imposing NAT, DHCP, or firewalls beyond the one on your machine. I think there are P2P networks which work like this, or Tor if you give your machine a name in the .onion namespace. I don't know of any which are better on the security aspect though.

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html

[1] https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

If the network hosted “just your machine”, then your website (or whatever published content you have) would disappear when your machine shut down for the night.

In a way, what you did was describe a few of the benefits that IPv6 offers. I'd say "that's coming" or "it being actively rolled out" but we are about 25 years in & usage is still an underwhelming figure.

Which is a good thing, because these devices can actually run different browser rendering engines.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that devices ship with Chrome pre-installed instead of asking the user at device set-up time what browser they want to use.

I imagine if you told the user they could have a browser with extensions, ad-blocking, background playback etc they might be a bit more inclined to consider using Firefox.

In theory yeah, in practise it looks a bit murky to me right now due to the state of the web. Apple is under a lot of fire right now (quite rightly) but I have a suspicion if other browser engines are allowed to run on iOS there will effectively be no incentives to develop for any other browser engine and we'll start seeing "Works best / only in Chromium" type websites and apps (I've already experienced this a fair bit using Firefox).

All the devices I've purchased have been Nexus/Pixel devices, so Chrome is a given there.

I assume at the end of the day Samsung Browser is just a reskinned Blink, though?

Agreed, but I think the native Google Maps app is superior than any browser experience.

Weird questions that they got asked already on their Windows machine as part of BrowserChoice.eu?

They're only "weird" because this practice of forcing your own browser (IE, Edge, Chrome, Safari) down the throat of your users has become commonplace.

There seems to be an implicit assumption by those commenting on Mozilla's downsizing that the antitrust case against Google is going to take the same path as the case against Microsoft.

Google's anti-competitive conduct under examination will not be focused on Chrome, it will be focused on the markets for search and advertising.

Mozilla does not provide any potential competition in those markets.

The case against Microsoft focused on the software industry. Today, the focus is on the onlilne advertising industry.

Netscape was a software company, like Microsoft. Mozilla however is not an online advertising services company like Google.

Of course search is really hard, but how is it possible that huge companies with nearly infinite money and talent (MS / Apple / Amazon) were never able to do it? MS actually tried; it's unclear if the others even gave it a thought.

The rest of Google is different. I use Gmail but could easily switch. I've not used Chrome for over a year now and really don't miss it (either on desktop or mobile). Google maps are the best but others would be good enough if need be.

But search? Every time I try to use Duck Duck Go I'm extremely disappointed. Google search is something I don't think I could live without.

Without giving away any trade secrets, part of it is the power of search behavior data (for example, what you click on after a search, how long before you go back to the search page, etc.). The more popular your search engine, the more search behavior data you have, which makes the search results better especially for tail queries (the less common searches).

So then you attract more searchers, and it's a cycle that is hard for a newcomer to break into. It's why academia has given up on competing with commercial search engines in the web space, and why alternative search engines are just begging at the table right now.

Google's search is the way it is now because they've now had 20 years to work on it. To create search of similar quality you'll need to spend a comparable amount of time (during which Google will not rest on laurels, but will continue to evolve).

It would've been great if someone took the pains to implement, maintain and evolve a search similar to Google's at the time when Google became available (or a few years after that). Then it's possible we would have two high quality search engines now.

But even that is a simplistic view of things. Everything that Google ultimately has feeds into its search. Google Translate? Helps Google understand pages in multiple languages. Google Maps? Helps Google learn people behaviour, places of interest, businesses etc. Google Patents, Groups, Books? Provide vast amounts of natural text to train models on. And so on and so on. A "just as good" search needs all (or nearly all that) that to become just as good.

ie., people have spent years writing their sites explicitly with google SEO in-mind... add-in all the data google has via adwords...

What if selling phones and cloud compute is a superior business to search and they are smart to realize it? In reality both Apple and Amazon are bigger companies than Google, and Google is actually the one trying to chase selling phones and cloud compute?

Maybe because google's market is everyone, disruption can no longer exist?

What exactly is the expectation here, that there is one integrated protocols stack that covers all of this? I don't see why.

Nothing is stopping someone from building P2P distributed search engines, and nothing is stopping someone from building "safe and easy way of exchanging funds".

Given that we still don't have good solutions to either of these problems it seems the right answer according to this person would be to just skip the internet.

This feels like a gripe without substance, yes we know these are hard problems, saying that Google's dominance is a consequence of the IETF not integrating these into HTTP is absurd and baseless.

There is also a reasonable argument to saying that search/payments are so fundamental to what the web became that a solution at the protocol-layer would be appropriate.

If the author wants to integrate it into HTTP, well they can actually try and make that case through the open standards process.

The questions of what does native suppoert imply and in what protocol should it be integrated are still unanswered. It seems very low effort to me, at least give a high level rundown of what that practically means and what he expects to see.

Bitcoin runs on open standard protocols, why is it not native? Is it because it is not ratfied by the IETF? Same question goes for existing P2P search engines. And even with protocols, you still need infrastructure. HTTP being an open protocol does not give me free HTTP hosting, and search indexing and lookup similarly won't be free.

I think if it was easy to solve these problems and integrate them into HTTP it would be easy to solve them outside HTTP and it is not clear why the solutions must be integrated into some existing protocol like TCP, IP or HTTP.

It is not stated as a counterfactual either, it is stated as direct criticism, e.g.

> The Web’s orignal architects were off base on hyperlinks; it turns out people just want to skip right to the answer they’re looking for.

Who are the original architects? Should we remove hyperlinks? Who suggested hyperlinks as an alternative to search, or even "native search".

I expect substance, this article has none.

As for what would native payments look like:

1. I put the element <pay-me>$1.00</pay-me> in my HTML 2. User clicks on Pay Me button in any browser and I get $1.00

Something like that. Anything more complicated and for most people it might as well not exist. Grandma isn't loading up a Bitcoin wallet.

And then what? If all that is needed is a tag support then why is the problem not yet solved? I mean if it is so simple to add support in HTML, why not just add it outside HTML?

I'm not asking for the actual final RFCs, but just some idea of what everyone except you is missing which makes this an easy problem to solve for you. Just broad strokes will be awesome. At the moment all you are saying is that the architects did not know what they were doing, but can't explain what they missed.

I really hope it's not the case, because then Google will cancel it. /s

Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. If when performing a search I could ask my contacts to look in their history if they have something matching, and then they ask their contact to do the same, who ask their contact to do the same, I think we could have fast and massively parallelized trust based searches. Then you can rank the results based on how many times they appeared.

Right now I'll settle for a centralized search engine/service that works like Google did before all the crazy, like before Amp, and before penalizing non-mobile-optimized sites, and so on.

Federated search scares me because it might constrain search results by being tainted with a localised world view.

Basically affinity groups maintain lists of links (sort of like social bookmarking) that are the crawl root urls. Crawling comes from Common Crawl plus updates for recency. Groups can pool resources to run their own indexes and receive a share of the profits from text display ads.

A more realistic dream would be finding good algorithms for "webscale" search engines, that all competitors (Bing, DDG) can use such that any one of them can't have excessive advantage over the others.

Secondly, human curated directories may still have future. If I search Google for interesting links or just programming blogs on specific topic, I find lot of SEO optimized low quality content instead of deep technical content so that I often have to search through HN, reddit etc.. and sort by popularity - but searching for particular topic is difficult.

I've used file sharing software which has the same "tree style" query forwarding. I think latency would be the big issue though, we're used to getting a result instantly -- and the right result too (Google does a lot of extra work knowing what you actually mean, not just keyword search).

Has this been attempted before? does it have a name?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella#Design

Respectfully, not really. Arguably search is much worse now than in 2010.

What if someone could come up with a simple search that could easily understand “hey this is a paywall” or “hey this is a paywall but somehow securely and with privacy I checked and you have a login to this site in your password manager” or it could do time based searches better than “last day / last week / etc”.

Consumers have insatiable needs and are never satisfied. It’s not clear someone can’t create something unimagined yet that’s vastly technically superior based on solely focusing on customer experience. Even if you just assume NewEngine(tm) is venture backed and can lose money in the short run until it monetizes later it should still theoretically enable it to be closer to consumer desires than Google which has to post quarterly ad revenue figures to wall street and the SEC.

And lets not forget that a very large portion of the population would need to hear about that product on an AMP page in their Chrome browser on their Android phone, probably following a Google search or noticing a story on Google news.

That seems fairly unlikely to me. Google gives you what you're looking for immediately for the average query, and anything beyond that is a power user detail not relevant to most people.

This insight seems highly plausible and sad at the same time.

The result is that large swaths of the web are essentially inaccessible. It's contracting. I feel it as acutely as amnesia.

This 'Constitution' will give us the Web of a few giant tech companies, for those few giant tech companies, by those few giant tech companies.

Many here on HN, including me, wish we could have a Web of the people, for the people, by the people.

The issue, as always, is relative power—which absolutely skews heavily in Google's favor. Individuals accessing the web today have far less relative power than 25 years ago, even if they can accomplish "more" with less effort.

In the past it was Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, XFire, .. I mean those companys were so big (e. g. XFire for gaming streaming) but they failed to stay ahead of time - lets see whats up with Google or Facebook or Amazon in 15 years.

Are you proposing that we don't do anything about a specific problem because there may be other theoretical problems?

That's like saying, "If this guy in this dark alley doesn't kill me now, a heart attack might eventually kill me, instead; so I'll just stand here and make it easy for his knife to find me."

They put plenty of effort into their software and at that scale it is amazing how fast it returns results.

For my websites I achieve better ranking placements in Bing then I do in Google - we should probably all start using Bing from now on?

I’m not happy with the current situation and would hate to see Mozilla fail, but I can’t fault Google for the current situation.

Google misusing their position to dictate web standards, that’s Googles fault. But Google-centric standards didn’t cause Mozillas current problems. Poor management did.

Doesn’t that strike you as a poor move?

I don’t see why we should be relegated to put up with another x-number of years of these companies behaving (arguably) badly, just so things can change and they can be replaced with another company that will do the same thing.

Dont use AMP? Well you will lose money / power.

Dont use search? Maybe miss out opportunities. How can I as marketeer convince my clients as Google traffic is 90% source of income?

I get your point but I'm not sure what could be done without harming economy (aka people).

Obviously those tools are important, not debating that, the problem is that they’re all the product of a single hegemony with an agenda, partitioning it so that it can no longer push the likes of AMP to the detriment of everyone else.

Always worth reading:

https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-theory/

Whenever you see the amp symbol, avoid visiting that site.

The main AMP concerns seem philosophical, which I don't think OP was asking about.

By choosing to use AMP, you are ultimately choosing to destroy the internet. You're granting the power of one company to run and control what you visit, do, use. Your surrendering your data for them to make money off to use and abuse.

Your supporting the downfall of innovation. Your eliminating development of opportunities and innovation. Denying fairness. Nothing there is philosophical, that's all real all because you choose to use Google Amp.

---

The internet is made up from many devices connected somehow Without a search engine how would you locate information? You can't unless you knew Computer X has the information on what you need. Just as an encyclopedia has an index telling you to look which volume and page to open.

A search engine crawls from computers to computers in hunt for information and then records it in a catalog. So when you search "dogs" this is then retrieved within the catalog for any computers that hold information on dogs.

This costs money, so what's a way of making money? Sell search results. My information on dogs is not that useful but I do like users visiting my webpage because I may sell pet related items. So I pay google £100 to list my website at the top when someone searches "dog". Great, I am now top of the list. Others do the same and get their search results on the top too.

However, my friend who is a vet has a information piece on if a dog is sick, and the remedy on what to do. Unfortunately they don't have the money to boost their page to the top, so it gets buried. Some pseudo science website makes a page about dog cures and pays for it's rank. The information I need on how to cure a dogs cold is now buried further but that's okay, I now have a fake remedy on how to cure a dogs cold.

Next up is Google Amp.

Amp is disguised to load the pages faster, but all it's really doing is collecting information about the user who visits, and redirects them to a branded copy-paste version of the original website and sells the users information.

I'm really a company who sells placebo medicine for dogs, my medicine has killed a few dogs in the past but no worries, it's trusted because I'm with Google Amp.

At the same time google implements a new policy "You must use AMP to be part of google search engine pages 1 to 6" -- This in return costs money to implement. So now the vet piece on how to cure a dog's cold is now on page 7.

Who goes to page seven on google? The average user normally stops around page three.

Well, now you've got to pay money to get a listing and now that anybody can cram an illegitimate idea into a web page and in which so long as it's encoded as AMP content – it'll look like it's from a legit new organization endorsed by Google.

On top you are at Google’s mercy when it comes to how (and even if) your content is actually displayed. If google doesn't like your page, swipe, there goes your listing.

Your a vet, you don't have money to implement AMP, nor do you have the money to get your page to the top which you now can't because your not using AMP. So the vet isn't getting any visitors, your vet practice is unknown in the world apart from local town folk. So not only are you crippling businesses from thriving because of Amp, your supporting a dominated chosen google market.

Google wants you all within googles walled garden. Above is a jist of it. But AMP is bad, there is NO good coming from AMP. By supporting amp, your support death of freedom.

The search engine does serve your page from a CDN (for free, by the way) that they own, but don't forget it's their perogative to even rank you at all. They are a private company, not a public utility.

The rhetorical strategy used here was to make up a dystopian example of search being bad, and then say amp.

Amp isn't more expensive, WordPress templates handle it automatically today. And the whole tangent about misinformation is interesting, but it's not how things really work. While speed is a signal, reliability is also one, which means that it would be cheaper to advertise you're vet article and it would be more likely to appear near the top anyway.

And now your introducing a sack of rubbish called WordPress. What if the site is not using WordPress, may do.

You work for google, so explain it to me, how do things really work?

The larger threat with Amp is signed content, where Chrome address bar drops URL and has only the legal name of the site owner.