How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? This goes back to the original point about Google search being superior to Bing, and not just because it’s free.
Differing priorities. Edge is based on blink now anyway , so as a core browser engine they’re roughly the same. It’s the higher level UX that is differentiated.
Safari has largely caught up now for web standards and mostly only lags behind in experimental features that are largely driven by Google anyway. But Safari has better battery use and privacy.
Chrome is good because Google see it as their play at a web OS. That’s why they shove everything and the kitchen sink into it.
So it’s just different priorities and the resulting differentiators. I don’t think any major browser is actually significantly better anymore today.
The irony there is for a while, I considered Blink based Edge better than Chrome. The issue is they added what are basically a bunch of pre-installed extensions to Edge that I really hated and kept making the UX worse to me.
Honestly if there was a set of plugins that would sync my bookmarks toolbar links I'd have less issue switching browsers and trying others more.
I would love to use safari but for years now it will randomly just start refreshing pages. I have no idea why or even where to begin to debug it so on chrome I stay.
Removing manifest v2 might be the kick to try Firefox again but I’d still like to fix safari
> How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome?
How do I explain groups that attempt to compete and don't overthrow an incumbent? How much explanation does that need? That's literally the default, most attempts to overthrow the king fail.
And when a king does fall, it's never a guarantee who gets to stay in that throne. Even in actual political overthrows, there is no profession more dangerous than being the guy who led the revolution, and we can count in less than half a hand how many humans in history actually got the spot, got struck down and then made a legitimate democratic comeback afterwards.
More often than not, when a product is replaced, the growth of the replacer is a steady way upwards from 0. Not a meandering stable placement that suddenly shuffles around. I dunno what's the reasoning for that phenomena, I just chalk it up to people refuse change without perceived innovation. But point is, experience states that none of the browsers should be doing too much more than what they already do - the only likely path to victory is waiting for others to fuck, and not even Twitter, a shithole, could do that to themselves.
> How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome?
Google justified a huge investment in Blink by making effectively making it the application platform of their netbooks. They also justified such an investment because they are afraid of other companies owning the method they get their ads in front of people - Such as dramatically changing and increasing their investment in Android when they saw the first versions of iPhoneOS.
The ChromeBook is why Google has so many non-standardized API in Chrome (that people often refer to under the umbrella of "PWA".) No other browsers saw an urgent need to be able to e.g. scan for and talk to bluetooth devices from a webpage, and in fact the other browsers were somewhat appalled by the security implications.
Edge: Gave up, and now repackages Chromium. They spent over a decade as an incumbent with supposedly only a half dozen developers on the IE team, and that was because they were doing their own monopoly game (protecting the Windows platform from cross-platform applications). They couldn't overcome their lack of momentum, and quite frankly had an inability to attract experienced talent.
Safari: Does fine, but Apple never directly cares about market share - they want profit share. There's no profit maximization for free browsers; WebKit and Safari investment is about owning the best default browser on Apple platforms, and it has better system performance. It is certainly arguable that Safari is better than Chrome on Mac. And let's not forget part of how Chrome got such a quick start is that they are a fork of WebKit.
