Nothing in the DMA does anything about Chrome taking over completely. Actually the DMA is more or less a dream come true for Google, Amazon and Meta, it drastically strengthens their market hold at the cost of making the Apple ecosystem more diluted.
It will be a sad day in the near future when the web becomes “Chrome”, even on mobile, much as it was “IE” not that long ago, alas, we seem to never learn.
I am aware but that does nothing to prevent total dominance of Chrome as the primary browser on all platforms moving forward. The EU is not calling for a random subset of the population to forcibly run Firefox.
With the power of Google they will corner the market incredibly fast, and it will all be “user choice”.
Google has already given Chrome an unfair advantage by leveraging their other services. I suspect the browser market is an unstable system where absent outside intervention Chrome’s 65% market share naturally becomes 100%.
Chrome is such a complicated piece of software that the “forks” are highly dependent on Google and when Google unilaterally makes decisions they have to follow suit. Brendan Eich explains that Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 as long as Google doesn’t remove the underlying code paths: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152
I think a lot of people don’t appreciate how delicate the balance of web standards is right now. We have it so good (three high-quality implementations of an open spec) and I’m not willing to throw that away just to run Chrome on my iPhone.
Maybe, but I doubt it, and who will prosecute them? I doubt EU will keep good track of their entire portfolio and their push for dominance, I could be wrong of course.
Isn’t chromium still bloated with tracking? Last time I read about it, it was far from a “clean Chrome” at least, now if it was truly open sourced and not mainly controlled by Google I would be much more hopeful.
As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all, different sports altogether, but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.
I don't think Chromium based browsers such as Brave, Vivaldi or Edge have to send data to Google.
Chromium development is highly dependent on Google of course. Google could theoretically do to Chromium what they have done to AOSP, i.e make sure it's not longer a viable platform for competitors. But I think that's exactly what the DMA could prevent.
>As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all
I think it's an empirical fact that they do compete. Almost all the installed apps I use could be web apps if it wasn't for arbitrary restrictions.
>but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.
How about not randomly deleting or arbitrarily restricting local data?
The biggest threat to the open web is Chrome’s dominance. Firefox is dwindling away and even Mozilla doesn’t seem to care about it, leaving Safari the only thing stopping Chrome from completely taking over. Google are already executing the Embrace & Extend playbook with non-standard functionality.
Everybody who says “Safari is the new IE” seems to be too young to know what IE and front-end web development were really like during the 00s. I’d take WebKit on iOS over a Blink monoculture any day, and so should any web developer.
No argument from me, I disregard anyone who says “Safari is the new IE” as someone who doesn’t know better but claim to do, or someone who is just trolling. I had to work with both IE on Mac and IE6 on Windows, Safari is not even remotely close to the isolated non-conforming nightmare it was back then.
It’s also a bit terrifying how many seem to think Chrome gets it right all the time, even when they blatantly ignore standards or leave implementations with bugs for what feels like forever. But they get away with it since they’re so big, just like Microsoft did with IE.
I don’t know what the solution would be, not like you can mandate the existence of a web browser engine into existence and making one gets harder for every new thing added.
Boot camps take the “seems to be passionate about coding in their free time” signals and help their students try to fit those signals by encouraging them to build personal projects on GitHub etc. This somewhat dilutes the ability of recruiters to check off “has some GitHub projects” as a heuristic, however useful that was to begin with.
The most plausible theory to me: this is all FCC licensing related, where the owner is operating an FM station that is licensed as an AM station + repeater, but _nobody_ listens to the AM station or cares. Other comments say they haven’t been broadcasting on AM in ~5 years, so it seems likely that it was stolen much earlier and nobody noticed. The Jeff Geerling video kind of supports this, but doesn’t call anyone out since it is speculative. Because if it is true, the station either didn’t notice, or ignored it until the landscapers filed a report, forcing them to address it and pretend like it just happened.
If you were doing it today it’d probably be much easier from the enterprise procurement side. They often give out single-use virtual card numbers per service now.
In the mid naughts ruby/rails was catching on and rubyconf was getting bigger, but the events were on the _weekends_ because most of these were people doing it for fun and not able to expense it to their employer or get time off. There was pushback from prominent people about how ruby was no longer an insurgency and needed to grow up and have employer-paid conferences, which got a nice response from _why the lucky stiff which I can no longer find.
This sounds in line with Google creating go: restrict the language features so you can hire mass quantities of programmers and be reasonably sure they won’t go off the rails. It’s fine for what it’s for but doesn’t seem like that should be the goal of most programming projects?
Especially with AI copilots getting better, it feels like we’re headed for a point where you’re either capable of architecting complex systems, or there isn’t much software for you to write: other industries tend to have rote work for beginners while they gain skills, but in software rote work tends to get automated away. AI can help people learn faster, but given what AI has proven good at, I expect more of the gains will go to expert productivity. (or non-programmer domain experts)
I think AI copilots will allow more people to be productive in software and, by so doing, allow vastly more software to be created.
Related to that idea is that, with the right definition (unconventional but not tortured), I think that more software is created in Excel than in python today and a large swath of the people making spreadsheets today for their business will be using AI copilots to make better software 20 years from now.
Totally agree. AI empowers people with existing software expertise, and empowers people with domain knowledge. Both of which have historically been bottlenecked by things AI is now getting good at.
Has anyone verified this (the Mail.app) part themselves, or is the blog post just going off of Apple's press release? The press release:
> Link Tracking Protection in Messages, Mail, and Safari Private Browsing
> "Some websites add extra information to their URLs in order to track users across other websites. Now this information will be removed from the links users share in Messages and Mail, and the links will still work as expected. This information will also be removed from links in Safari Private Browsing."
Note that it says "links _users_ share". That part seems unnecessary if it's _all_ links in emails. I think it points to this feature being more about protecting a user from inadvertently forwarding their email to someone else, while not realizing it has personal identifiers in the links? Preventing others from unsubscribing them, or even auto-logging-in etc.
Though, I personally haven't seen iOS17 remove any query params from emails at all, maybe will have to wait for the next beta to find out.
It seems like the $200/mo plan and below are subsidized by their marketing budget, and the various ToS terms are there to give them discretion over whether those users are worth it or not: either low-cost users who are using too many resources, or users who they think they can charge more.
I investigated Cloudflare and the $200/mo plan seemed to good to be true so I contacted sales who verified that yes, it was too good to be true and my usage of the $200/mo plan would violate their ToS. They initially quoted $5k/mo over the phone, and then came back with a formal quote with a number much higher than that.
My take is that Cloudflare's product is so good that they can get away with any kind of sales practices they want. It's like shooting fish in a barrel: just analyze customers on the $200/mo tier and find the ones that look like they could spend way more. It's not even wrong in concept: sales upselling is SOP, and the low-cost tiers provide a lot of value to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they're offering. But the combination of the two sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
AWS doesn't have transparent pricing either, but in a different way. Yes, you can use more and more bandwidth and know exactly what you'll get charged, but once you get to Cloudflare Enterprise levels of bandwidth the AWS sticker prices would be astronomical and everyone negotiates non-transparent lower rates.
What she's alleging seems to be: the MSG conglomerate is using their large footprint to punish law firm employees unrelated to their dispute using venues also unrelated to their dispute. Doing it out of spite sounds possibly legal, if petty. But the other possible intention would be to try to dissuade law firms from taking a case against any MSG property, to try to deny legal representation to the plaintiff. Not a lawyer, but surely there's a law against that?
"Unrelated to their dispute" is a fuzzy category. How would the venue actually know that she's unrelated to the dispute? They're not going to have access to the internal management chart of the law firm in order to be able to precisely delineate in every case exactly who gets admitted and who doesn't. And it's unreasonable to force them to create some sort of bouncer appeals board to let people present evidence to show that their position at the law firm is unrelated to the dispute.
Remember everyone arguing that Twitter pre-Musk is a private company, so they could ban anyone they wanted? This is the same thing, only in a physical location.
> How would the venue actually know that she's unrelated to the dispute? They're not going to have access to the internal management chart of the law firm in order to be able to precisely delineate in every case exactly who gets admitted and who doesn't.
The venue knows not, but that venue is a tiny cog in an empire owned by the parent group.
The parent group compiled the ban list by trawling the large law firms website for images .. and the parent group knows which offices and groups of personnel are involved in a specific case.
With large and potential trans national groups doing this it has a parallel with, for example, one country banning an entire countries citizens from entry or doing business .. on the basis that a small group of citizens took action that was undesired.
Very large companies have very large numbers of employees and many different activities on the go.
Should, for example, several thousand people be banned from watching streaming television because 15 people in the company they are associated with are involved in a class action against a media group?
> The parent group compiled the ban list by trawling the large law firms website for images .. and the parent group knows which offices and groups of personnel are involved in a specific case.
Do they? I don't work in law but at every company I've worked we adjust who is working on what based on needs at the time. Why wouldn't a law office temporarily shift more people to a case if they needed some extra manpower?
Assuming that whether or not the lawyer is working on their case is the deciding factor, the venue (actually the conglomerate that owns them) are the ones who chose to come up with this retaliatory scheme so the onus is on them.
Calling not being able to be a consumer of the company their firm is suing punishment seems to be a bit of a stretch. And it's only during the duration of the lawsuit.
And again, why are the lawyers so surprised when they knew ahead of time? If they had asked, it could have even been pre-approved, and thus a non-story. If anything, I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm because they knew ahead of time and took their Girl Scout troop anyway, knowing it could look bad for MSG.
> Calling not being able to be a consumer of the company their firm is suing punishment seems to be a bit of a stretch. And it's only during the duration of the lawsuit.
What if the company was Google? What if it was a healthcare provider with a patented/proprietary treatment?
As a matter of fact, didn't we recently have articles in hn where people were commenting they are reluctant to charge back to Google because they don't want to risk losing their gmail and the rest of it?
> I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm
Good for them. The legal system is the only way corporations can be effectively held accountable. You can hate lawyers as much as you want but this is directed at us via proxy. Lawyers litigate for clients.
"Sorry we can't take your case. We use Google products extensively."
For whatever reason, I’m just not seeing it. Everyone keeps bringing up Google. Why? They are in a completely different industry and largely irrelevant from what I can see. And like I said, those companies will absolutely shut stuff down during IP litigations. When I was at a company being sued and vice versa for IP infringement, the entire company was told not to use the other company’s software products, and if you absolutely had to, then you needed to apply for specific one-off permission. That happens all the time, and it’s practically the same thing.
The law firm is a personal injury firm, which in my experience and understanding can be (not always) very shady. Why is it required that MSG let lawyers suing them come into their venues while being sued? One could argue that the policy should be targeted towards certain venues and lawyers, but that is a lot of overhead that is solved by a simple, blanket policy.
I honestly don’t see the outrage here. Sure, there are a lot of what ifs that make this seem worse, but those hypotheticals are not what seemed to happen here.
And it’s the law firm showcasing punitive action. They’re now suing MSG for the denial for something that basically seems like a stretch of a loophole. I almost would guarantee the law firm did this on purpose, and that’s why I can’t stand lawyers. They don’t play by the rules everyone else has to, and they get to make the rules.
This is not a black and white issue, and there are valid points that can be made pro or con of either side. Even the likely possibility (I agree with you on that) that this was all planned does not change this. This fuzziness of the line that would obviously delineate right vs wrong is the issue.
That is why I added that "proxy" bit in there. One could argue for the position of law firms or the position of corporations, and I am urging you to now consider it from the pov of lonesome you, the possibly innocent bystander, caught between these two powerful social forces. You may still reach the same conclusion but it is a distinct analysis and you should do it if you haven't already.
They might also be banking on this giving Microsoft cover to not take it down.
With the original takedown, Microsoft would be worried that the relative nobodies disappear with Microsoft left holding the bag. If Microsoft instead knows that it’s backed by the EFF who is itching for a Supreme Court fight, they might instead tell the USG “here’s their mailing address, you guys settle it in court”.
After that, Google leverages its other service monopolies, Chrome goes to 95%+ market share, standards fall by the wayside, and nobody has any choice.
I guess the answer to that is antitrust against Google, but I’d rather do that first than go through the Chrome domination phase.