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Ask HN: How YouTube is recommending Chrome in middle of monopoly trial?

29 points by sansah ↗ HN
Google Chrome is a fast and secure browser for YouTube. Try it? I got this when not logged into google on Edge. It's a popup not a video ad. Edge runs on chromium tech, so this claim is BS. They are in-between monopoly trial. Shouldn't they have limited some of their shady practices? I also can't think brave can run ads like that. Aren't they abusing their position?

26 comments

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smoldesu
Because Google isn't at trial for their browser monopoly?

If recommending a browser was monopolistic behavior, both Microsoft and Apple would be metaphorical rubble by now. The industry has done this for years, our glorious FAANG vanguards decided that browser solicitation was a normal user experience.

eli
Among other reasons, wouldn't it be more suspicious if they suddenly stopped?
madduci
Because adblocking doesn't work on Chrome.

Use Firefox.

hkt
I recently saw a "adblockers aren't allowed on youtube" gate from Firefox. I recommend using Minitube on Linux desktop now. Plus youtube-dl and NewPipe.
shrimp_emoji
youtube-dl is broken now and barely updated for some byzantine reasons, no?

yt-dlp is supposed to be the new hotness, though I've yet to try it. https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/

jedberg
> yt-dlp is supposed to be the new hotness

I've been using it as a drop-in replacement for YouTube-dl and it's been great.

LoganDark
I use yt-dlp to download all my music now - it works. Really well. Probably because it pretends to be an Android client, and those are perpetually out of date. (Think of the shitty smart TVs!)
hkt
True. yt-dlp is symlinked to youtube-dl on my system and I forget that sometimes!
legitster
Not only are they not on trial for this at all, changing your behavior because of a trial would be admission that the behaviors were suspect to begin with! If they are arguing that their methods are above board, then they should continue doing them through the court case.
robertlagrant
Having an open source Chromium that allows competing browsers to be built at a fraction of the cost might make it hard to claim monopolistic practices. If Google never existed, would we have more browser choice now?
hkt
The monopolistic practices are largely about (IMO) forcing standard adoption to make it impossible to develop new browsers. I suspect competition law is ill equipped to turn that into action, though.
lazide
Also, they were dumping a lot of energy into shutting down competition that way instead of making IE not suck.
josefx
There are so many angles. So many angles. Before chrome there where a lot more competing browser engines, so that is already a solid YES. Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market.

> at a fraction of the cost

Microsoft gave IE away for free and there where dozens of IE clones build on top of its engine, you just never had a reason to use any of them because in the end they where still IE clones.

smoldesu
> Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market.

"Then you have the UNIX market that was a lot more diverse before Red Hat Linux hit the market."

I think it will be trivial to prove that Google is actively harming the internet. Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission. If the market decides that a terrible, buggy and enormous runtime is the best way to freely distribute content, then that's what we'll settle on. It's hardly surprising that things got this way, too; locked-down platforms are becoming so normalized that browsers are the only window of freedom users and developers have. It's not like Google or Apple made it any easier to ship native, cross-platform apps in that time, either. So of course users will gravitate to a browser that has more features than their own OS.

So... implicating Google is easy. Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely.

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robertlagrant
> Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely.

What would winning this battle look like/achieve?

smoldesu
It's hard to say. My theory is that the demand for complicated browsers is largely reciprocal to the power of your OS. If you have a Chromebook, then your browser is probably less locked-down than your root system. Same thing would happen if Chrome's Blink engine got put on iOS.

Winning that battle would probably look like one of two things:

- Browsers go back to their original goal of being document renderers, and a new wave of local and online APIs fills in the gaps.

- Browsers stay the way they are, but with broken tooling that forces developers into native APIs whether they want it or not.

asadotzler
They aren't really competing if they're just another distribution for Google's web platform. Google doesn't care so much what Chromium browser you use as long as it helps them dictate how the web platform evolves to funnel more money into their coffers and every Chromium browser is doing just that, cementing Google's ultimate and long-term control.
robertlagrant
But what does that mean? What is "Google's web platform" in this context, and how does it harm competition? What do you actually want? If Chromium didn't exist, would we have more competition in browsers?
asadotzler
It means that everything about the web, but especially the critical parts like privacy vs surveillance is increasingly and sadly dictated by Google. If you distribute their vision for the web, their literal web platform, Blink, you are harming the web by increasing Google's stranglehold.

And yes, the web would be better served by people building their own, hard forking an existing, or using any of the two or three remaining not-Google solutions. The web would be far better if Google was the only Chromium distribution because we wouldn't have the illusion of a dozen choices that are all just Google's and we'd likely have more and more viable alternatives.

redder23
What supposed claim is BS?

"Chrome is a fast and secure browser for YouTube."

That claim is NOT BS. And I am not shilling for Google here, I use Brave and Firefox myself and NEVER used Chrome EVER and I am proud of it. However, they did not claim its MORE secure or faster, they just say "is a fast and secure".

I remember when Chrome came out how heavily Google pushed it back then I used their search. It was something similar I think, or was it Firefox ads somewhere else? Not sure but there was also no claim just a meaningless general statement.

God Google search is it shitty these days. Putting things in quotes does not even work anymore and the search results are garbage.