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I'm primarily a Firefox user and I move between a Windows PC and a Mac both of which of course have their own web browser
But in the last couple of weeks
I actually have to download Chrome on three separate occasions because the three browsers that I have installed on
My machines are apparently just not enough to run Google websites well anymore and sadly it is not just me
The tech news is full of mysterious bugs and errors that pop up all the time and Google has purpose-built some sites like hangouts and
Google Earth for example to only work in Chrome at least for a couple of years
So in the 52nd episode of The Story Behind series
Let's talk about POW and why Google is trying to turn Chrome into a monopoly
Real quick before we start if you want to see more in-depth analysis of tech companies
Especially from a business perspective consider subscribing to tackle time
Alright, I'll start with my personal experiences. One of the random Google tools
I use as a youtuber is the end screen editor, the tool to put these
interactive little buttons at the end of my videos and about 2 months ago
It stopped working out of nowhere in all three of my browsers. A month later when it still didn't get fixed
I tweeted at YouTube to ask what was going on and they had a simple solution for me
I should just use a different browser. Well lucky for them
I guess the one that worked was Chrome
So I downloaded it, put up my end screen cards, and a few weeks later one day, she got fixed
I just deleted Chrome again. No biggie. A week or two after that
I had to hop on a call with my partner manager from YouTube and since she is a
Google employee we of course used Google Hangouts in the browser for the call. Except not in MY browser
of course, as Hangouts straight up doesn't work in Firefox. Since it was on my macbook
I decided to use Safari. Turns out you need to install a plug-in which I did and I got a random error
I could have probably fixed this somehow but the call was in like two minutes
So I just got Chrome and hopped on the call. At this point
I was a little bit annoyed but whatever
I deleted Chrome after the call and then got on with my life
But then recently I tried to add subtitles to my latest video
Like I always do and suddenly the subtitle editor doesn't work in Firefox. Neither on my PC nor on my Mac
I tweeted at YouTube again, but this time they didn't reply to me and instead
I only saw reports of other users confirming that they had the same issue as well
So just like a well trained monkey
I download Chrome and who would have thought it just works
now if I were a normal human being this is probably the point where I was just switched to Chrome because obviously
Chrome is the browser where everything just seems to work, right, but of course
I'm not a normal human being so I got angry at Google instead and decided to make this video because my issues, as it turns
out, they're not some isolated little errors. Just a few weeks ago, Google temporarily blocked Google Meet,
which is their enterprise video calling app, from working in the new Microsoft Edge and a few days later,
they blocked the same browser from accessing the modern version of YouTube, instead reverting users to a really old version
That's extra weird because the new edge even uses Google's own rendering edge in chromium
So it should handle websites the exact same way as chrome itself and indeed when users
Manually changed their user agent to pretend that they're Chrome
Both of these websites worked just fine
And then there are tons of reports like this thread from a Firefox engineer that claims that Google suddenly used some outdated
non-standard API on YouTube
which is only supported by Chrome that all of a sudden made YouTube load 5 times slower on Firefox and edge than in Chrome or
Like this thread from a previous VP at Mozilla claiming Google introduced
Hundreds of Firefox-specific bugs and errors to Google Sites each time convincing many users to switch over to Chrome
Instead and I could go on and list a bunch of other similar issues, but I think you get my point
Google websites are just constantly riddled with strange bugs and just aren't very well
optimised on anything that isn't Chrome and that's not even talking about websites like hangouts or Google Earth that
for years only worked in in chromium
Like when was the last time Mozilla, Apple, or Microsoft
Built a major service that only worked in their own browser and then kept it that way for years? On the Google Earth website
they even used the Chrome logo as the logo for the web as if the web for
consumers should just equal to Chrome and to anyone who's been around in the nineties or in the early
2000s, this sort of behavior should seem strangely familiar because we've seen it before
Microsoft back in the days used their dominance with Internet Explorer to strangle other competing web browsers like Netscape
for example. Sure, Microsoft might have been way more
Straightforward in their anti-competitive behavior, I actually explained all of that in my previous video that you can watch right here,
But Google is achieving the same results
Even if they use much more subtle tools. Instead of actually trying to break
Compatibility standards across the web like Microsoft did all Google needs to do is a bit of malicious neglect
Given how reliant many people including myself are on Google services
It's enough for those to work noticeably worse and competing browsers every now
And then. That alone will slowly end up killing competing browsers just fine. It's death by a thousand cuts and not even obvious to people
Looking at it from the outside
There is a rational, non-malicious explanation to any one of these issues on their own and tech websites
Love to point them out. The new edge for example is still in preview
So maybe Google just didn't test for it. Hangouts is being phased out in exchange for Meet
So maybe they didn't want to bother making it work on other browsers anymore. The YouTube tools are only used by a few people
So maybe they're not all that important and so on. All of these can technically be explained in isolation
But together they create a malicious
anti-competitive pattern, a pattern where Google has
Clearly decided that if something works in chrome, that's good enough and if it breaks in another browser
Who cares they can just fix it
Once they get enough complaints. Until then users can just get Chrome. In my last video
I explained why Microsoft suddenly stopped being anti-competitive because their new business model incentivized them to become a good citizen
I believe that companies are ultimately driven by their business incentives
And so that's probably also what's driving Google in this case
we all know that over 80% of Google's revenue comes from
advertisements and chrome is
Essential for letting them track you across the web and to make sure that you actually see the ads that they want to show you
Nearly all competing browsers like Firefox Safari
brave
and even the new Microsoft edge have added built-in blocking for web trackers and ads, most of them turned on by default, and they're
Increasingly getting more and more aggressive about them seeing it as a point of differentiation
Versus the dominant chrome in other words these browsers directly threaten Google's ability to track users and to show them ads
Google on the other hand has recently introduced their own default ad blocker on Chrome
Except they only block
Competing ads, not their own, and they've made changes to chrome that make it harder for third-party ad blockers to block trackers across the web
By limiting things like how many
blacklisted services
they can have in their database and I think the
Incentives are pretty clear to see. Now, if you care about the web enough to watch this video, I think you'll really enjoy this fantastic
documentary about the internet called 2-digits where fellow youtuber Derek from veritasium
Talks to everyone from the early inventors of the Internet to Edward Snowden
Explaining everything from how network switches work to how white hat hackers save you from the bad guys
You can watch it for free on Curiosity Stream if you sign up with my link in the description and you'll also get access
to over
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Curiosity' stream was founded by the founder of the Discovery Channel and works on essentially every device you own, including smartphones computers and smart TVs
And sign up if that sounds like fun to you and I'll see you in the next video