Since Apple implemented a browser choice screen for iPhones earlier this month to comply with Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Brave Software, Mozilla, and Vivaldi have seen a surge in the number of people installing their web browsers.
It’s an early sign that Europe’s competition rules may actually … get this … enhance competition – an outcome that skeptics deemed unlikely.
Yeah, it’s just because it’s Chromium. I don’t know anything about the company so I don’t have any opinion there.
I used to be of the opinion that it’d be nice if the web unified under one platform. Honestly, I still hold that opinion, but the caveat there would obviously be that no single company should control that platform. Google does control Chromium. All Chromium based browsers will see Manifest V3, and that’s just one thing. Google can do more or less what they wish, and the rest of the web will just kind of have to take it.
They’re in a similar position that Microsoft was in back when Internet Explorer was an actually good browser, but unlike Microsoft I don’t think Google will rest on their laurels. It’s really worrying to me that Google essentially owns the internet.
2021: “The rendering engine doesn’t matter that much because everyone ends up seeing the same internet”
2022: “How much can google really do with a monopoly on the back end?”
2023: “They still don’t control the underlying structure of the internet.”
2024: “well shit.”