Microsoft Proves the Critics Right: We're Heading toward a Chrome-Only Web

Megalith

Megalith

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Chrome’s total dominance of the web is becoming more of a reality by each passing day, and Microsoft, whose Edge browser will soon be powered by Chromium, has become a clear contributor to that dark future: the company has released a new version of Skype for Web, but despite legitimate improvements such as HD video calling and recording, the service will not work on non-Chromium browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Users have managed to sidestep this by changing their user agent, which suggests laziness on Microsoft’s part, or something worse.

There's perhaps also some irony in that the Skype app is built with a framework designed to foster cross-platform development, between devices, desktop, and the Web. For those who can use the Web app, it looks extremely similar to the desktop apps, which also look very similar to the mobile apps. That's because it's built using ReactXP, Microsoft's layer on top of Facebook's React and React Native frameworks. These let you use Web technology to build applications not just for the Web but also the desktop and smartphone platforms.
 
The part I don't get about all of the hate about the Internet going all Chrome is that Chrome is based upon Chromium which is OPEN SOURCE!!! Now I'd understand all of hate if it were like it was back in the dark old days of Internet Explorer, the big (even HUGE) difference between then and now is that Internet Explorer was closed source and Chromium is OPEN SOURCE. Open source is good! If you don't like something, contribute to the Chromium project, get your change committed, and then everyone wins. YAY! :D
 
trparky said:
The part I don't get about all of the hate about the Internet going all Chrome is that Chrome is based upon Chromium which is OPEN SOURCE!!! Now I'd understand all of hate if it were like it was back in the dark old days of Internet Explorer, the big (even HUGE) difference between then and now is that Internet Explorer was closed source and Chromium is OPEN SOURCE. Open source is good! If you don't like something, contribute to the Chromium project, get your change committed, and then everyone wins. YAY! :D
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your a naïve fool.
 
trparky said:
The part I don't get about all of the hate about the Internet going all Chrome is that Chrome is based upon Chromium which is OPEN SOURCE!!! Now I'd understand all of hate if it were like it was back in the dark old days of Internet Explorer, the big (even HUGE) difference between then and now is that Internet Explorer was closed source and Chromium is OPEN SOURCE. Open source is good! If you don't like something, contribute to the Chromium project, get your change committed, and then everyone wins. YAY! :D
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Firefox is open source too. It is not clear what point you are making with regards to the headline.
 
The point I'm making is that because Chromium is open source we don't have to worry about things like back in the old Internet Explorer days. Again, if you don't like the way things are going then fork Chromium and go your own way and change it to fit your project's needs. Look at Vivaldi as an example of taking Chromium and running with it, it's everything that is Google Chrome and a hell of a lot more; I'd even go so far as to say that Vivaldi is what Google Chrome should be.

So what if we have one browser engine? I say big deal! The beauty of open source is that you don't necessarily have to follow the pack, fork the project and go your own way.
 
trparky said:
The point I'm making is that because Chromium is open source we don't have to worry about things like back in the old Internet Explorer days. Again, if you don't like the way things are going then fork Chromium and go your own way and change it to fit your project's needs. Look at Vivaldi as an example of taking Chromium and running with it, it's everything that is Google Chrome and a hell of a lot more; I'd even go so far as to say that Vivaldi is what Google Chrome should be.

So what if we have one browser engine? I say big deal! The beauty of open source is that you don't necessarily have to follow the pack, fork the project and go your own way.
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The point of the news article is that your proclamation of "fork it!" won't work out. Instead of coding against standards and letting browsers sort it out, MS is targeting a specific browser. Vivaldi may not be able to run Skype without the same hoop jumping the other browsers are having to do.
It'd be one thing if MS were to find some edge case where a browser doesn't do what it's supposed to then commit a patch or report a bug, but they're moving to work only against Chrome and treating it as a platform.
 
trparky said:
The point I'm making is that because Chromium is open source we don't have to worry about things like back in the old Internet Explorer days. Again, if you don't like the way things are going then fork Chromium and go your own way and change it to fit your project's needs. Look at Vivaldi as an example of taking Chromium and running with it, it's everything that is Google Chrome and a hell of a lot more; I'd even go so far as to say that Vivaldi is what Google Chrome should be.

So what if we have one browser engine? I say big deal! The beauty of open source is that you don't necessarily have to follow the pack, fork the project and go your own way.
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Fork all you want, the compliant libraries will all be the same with the same limitations with added telemetry and other push junk.
 
commissioneranthony said:
100% this.
I had an interview with a company. They asked me to skype. I was like, wait, really? Shit, I havn't used that in over a decade...
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Skype for Business is still extremely prominent, and many still use the classic version of Skype for interviews since it is quick and free.
Fax machines are still used as well. :p
 
Derangel said:
Business telecommunications. That's been the big earner for Skype for years and why it is still around.
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That makes sense, it takes them a decade to start using new tech like that so it makes sense that it would take a decade longer to stop using it. Not to mention it's mostly facetime and the facebook one that I hear about people using these days and those are likely a privacy disaster for corporate environments.
 
trparky said:
The point I'm making is that because Chromium is open source we don't have to worry about things like back in the old Internet Explorer days. Again, if you don't like the way things are going then fork Chromium and go your own way and change it to fit your project's needs. Look at Vivaldi as an example of taking Chromium and running with it, it's everything that is Google Chrome and a hell of a lot more; I'd even go so far as to say that Vivaldi is what Google Chrome should be.

So what if we have one browser engine? I say big deal! The beauty of open source is that you don't necessarily have to follow the pack, fork the project and go your own way.
Click to expand...

That's all fine and dandy until you discover your fork doesn't work well with most websites, due to aforementioned engine (as implemented by microsoft and google) exclusivity.
 
Chromes dominance will magically vanish the moment they fuck with shit like adblockers and other useful extensions.
 
Microsoft will never make internet pundits happy. When they made the original EdgeHTML Edge everyone made fun of it and said it sucked (even though it was decent). Now they basically said "ok fine we get it" and made it chromium based, and everyone hates that too. Tell me, internet, what could Microsoft do with their browser that people would actually like? They already provided a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome (old Edge) and nobody used it.
 
the wafflator said:
Tell me, internet, what could Microsoft do with their browser that people would actually like?
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Nothing. A lot of the Internet likes to hate Microsoft just because it's cool to hate Microsoft. Even if the Son of God Himself came down from on high and blessed Edge people would still hate it because it's Microsoft.
 
trparky said:
Nothing. A lot of the Internet likes to hate Microsoft just because it's cool to hate Microsoft. Even if the Son of God Himself came down from on high and blessed Edge people would still hate it because it's Microsoft.
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Microsoft was every bit as evil of an empire as they are portrayed to be. I wouldn't be too charitable to them now.
 
Joust said:
Microsoft was every bit as evil of an empire as they are portrayed to be. I wouldn't be too charitable to them now.
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MS fluffing up a few small open source projects are good PR to the uninitiated, until you realize they're not supporting open source where it matters.
 
the wafflator said:
Microsoft will never make internet pundits happy. When they made the original EdgeHTML Edge everyone made fun of it and said it sucked (even though it was decent). Now they basically said "ok fine we get it" and made it chromium based, and everyone hates that too. Tell me, internet, what could Microsoft do with their browser that people would actually like? They already provided a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome (old Edge) and nobody used it.
Click to expand...

Microsoft could get out of the browser business. In 1999. And google could get out of the browser business. In 2019. But it's hard to leave the data-mines and get a real job.
 
trparky said:
The point I'm making is that because Chromium is open source we don't have to worry about things like back in the old Internet Explorer days.
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The problem is, there's no guarantee they won't stop doing that. Don't believe me? Get out your Android phone and fire up Browser or any of the other open source apps Google replaced with closed-source apps and stopped developing.

You can say "Oh, they'd never do that", but they literally already have.
 
I won't ever use a chromium browser again because it's all from Google... I'm actually trying to move my desktop/laptop to Linux also.
 
Okay so the code is based on something from Google. Can someone explain to me what is the issue with that? Does Google maintain some backdoor to tracking you or sniffing your data through the browser that way?

AFAIK it's the fact that we use Google search and the tracking cookies that come with that, that actually harvests our data. It doesn't matter if you use IE or Chrome or Firefox or Safari if you keep using Google as your search engine and let it drop cookies in all of your business.

My present setup is as follows: For my Google ecosystem things, I use chrome and google search, otherwise I use firefox and duckduckgo ... and wipe all cookies on shutdown. No issues.
 
the wafflator said:
Microsoft will never make internet pundits happy. When they made the original EdgeHTML Edge everyone made fun of it and said it sucked (even though it was decent). Now they basically said "ok fine we get it" and made it chromium based, and everyone hates that too. Tell me, internet, what could Microsoft do with their browser that people would actually like? They already provided a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome (old Edge) and nobody used it.
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It's all about the timing. If they had gone chromium when EdgeHTML was new, they would have been lauded. The problem is at this point with google and chromium, people realize the elephant's foot is in the door, the rest of it is pushing in, and the elephant is here to fuck your house up. And microsoft is now helping push the elephant all the way into your livingroom. MS doesn't care about your struggle with the elephant, they just want to move to the most deployed engine for testing against to streamline the testing of their various web-centric cloud products.
 
dvsman said:
Okay so the code is based on something from Google. Can someone explain to me what is the issue with that? Does Google maintain some backdoor to tracking you or sniffing your data through the browser that way?

AFAIK it's the fact that we use Google search and the tracking cookies that come with that, that actually harvests our data. It doesn't matter if you use IE or Chrome or Firefox or Safari if you keep using Google as your search engine and let it drop cookies in all of your business.

My present setup is as follows: For my Google ecosystem things, I use chrome and google search, otherwise I use firefox and duckduckgo ... and wipe all cookies on shutdown. No issues.
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Because Google is trying to dictate web design. They're like the Monsanto of the internet.
 
dvsman said:
It doesn't matter if you use IE or Chrome or Firefox or Safari if you keep using Google as your search engine and let it drop cookies in all of your business.
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If you want to not-support Google by not using their search engine, why would you support them by using their browser? Consider your answer in the light of sketchy moves like the secret binary blob that was downloaded even if you used Chromium instead of Chrome (never mind, for the moment, that it didn't actually spy on you--it could have), or the time not so long ago they tried to force you to sign into Chrome if you signed into Gmail, thus potentially doing things like merging your home and work history if you checked your home email at the office), or even the time they broke behavior going right back to the very first browsers by removing the functionality that Esc stops background sounds and animated images just because stupid young web developers didn't know about that functionality and complained that they wanted Esc to do something else.
 
raz-0 said:
If they had gone chromium when EdgeHTML was new, they would have been lauded.
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And that would've been the wrong response from the audience. If enabling a monopoly now is bad, so would have been doing it three years ago.
 
I still use Firefox. But the masses have spoken.

I have had to download Chrome to use a website or two this year since they won't work with MS browsers or Firefox. This is yet another.

Sad.
 
1_rick I don't think people know about the technical flaws of Chrome / Chromium / Chrome based browser tech. I certainly didn't until you brought it up. Of course if it is a "they could do something / what if" scenario, I'm not too worried about it since I'm sure any and every browser can be hacked if someone really wanted to.

- As for the Gmail forcing a Chrome sign in - sure - that's why I use IE or Edge or something else for work (or alternatively bring in your own computer or laptop and use that for personal things). I do a combination of those things as needed (which isn't often). Is it a hassle? Sure, but if you are a paranoid security nut, that's what it takes. You can't have easy and security all at once.

- Google dictating web standards? I don't think the majority of people / sheeple give a crap. Personally, I'm not a web developer attached to a certain way of doing something. Whether it's a standard defined by a central standards defining body or by Google / Microsoft or whoever ... makes no never mind to me / most people.

Bottom line, as [H] always says "If something is free (Chrome / Firefox / whatever) you are the commodity." By now everyone knows what they're getting since they know what they're paying (FREE!).
 
dvsman said:
any and every browser can be hacked if someone really wanted to.
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Yes, but this was Google putting it in the browser themselves.

My larger point here is when Microsoft approached a monopoly on the browser people rightly had a screaming fit about it; whereas when Google does the exact same thing--including, like I forgot to mention earlier, following Microsoft's old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish policy by proposing new HTML or whatever features and then just starting to use them in Chrome--it's met with utter silence by probably the very same people.

Edge has a lot of warts. No doubt. But other than the fact it's slower than Chrome, it was shaping up into a decent browser, and we'll probably be sorry when we're down to Chrome and Firefox.
 
Staples said:
I still use Firefox. But the masses have spoken.

I have had to download Chrome to use a website or two this year since they won't work with MS browsers or Firefox. This is yet another.

Sad.
Click to expand...
My experience has been the opposite. I've never run into a website that doesn't work in Waterfox, yet I've had several issues with websites in Chrome, especially in the past 6 months.
 
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