Why do the major tech companies, Google, Microsoft and Apple spend so much time and money on providing browsers? They don’t charge for them and Chrome and Safari are multi platform so it’s not as if they are forcing you to a certain operating system. I started wondering this after seeing television advertisements for Microsoft and Google browsers in the UK recently.
What if Chrome became the browser used by 95% of the world, what could they do with that power?
Microsoft’s incentive is that 95% of the time spent on a computer right now is spent staring at a browser. If you use Windows but don’t use IE, then you can, in theory, get 95% of the same experience by using your browser of choice on Linux or OSX.
Google’s motivation is a bit more subtle. Part of it is that they want their users to have a better browsing experience. To that end, Chrome has a bunch of tie-ins with Google’s web apps. GMail in Chrome is a different experience from GMail in IE. It’s better, and a certain percentage of their users will appreciate that. Another part of it is that Google is a master of scale. I have a friend who worked on search engine improvements for Google, and he said that if someone figures out how to save 2 bytes from being sent on every search page, at the volumes Google is dealing with that directly results in some x million dollars of savings per year. If Google controls the browser, they can make their pages load faster and with less overhead, which directly saves them money. The more people they get to switch, the more they save.
Apple, I dunno. I guess they just didn’t have a choice, since they’re sworn enemies of both Google and Microsoft. If they didn’t write their own, what would they license? Firefox is largely funded by Google, so they’re also the enemy.
It’s always felt to me that the big contenders among OS developers in the mid-nineties didn’t know if making their own browsers would be in the company’s best interests. The future of the web was radically shifting and changing at a break-neck pace, NetScape was dominant, and until Microsoft saw that the internet was going to be a pretty big deal, they wrote I.E., included it natively with Windows, practically destroyed NetScape, and thus the anti-trust suit against Microsoft rose out of this.
Once things started to become more stable—Google a monolithic search engine; Microsoft always one step forward two steps back; Apple a Phoenix reinventing itself—Apple wrote WebKit.
WebKit, despite some bitter history between Apple and the open source community, has become the defacto layout engine to render web pages for anyone wanting to write their own browser, going forward.
Chrome, Android, Safari (OSX and iOS), RIM’s mobile OS, among others use it as the core engine to drive their browsers.
So, now that standards have been forged, with an open sourced core layout engine to build browers on, I think it’s one of those things that are provided as part of the OS to provide a default system browser (Apple / Microsoft), or as in Google’s case, its huge stake in the internet itself and now Android, it only made sense—and to that end, likewise with Apple’s Safari on iOS.
And I find it ironic that Google seems to build a better browser on WebKit than Apple. (though I do use and like Safari quite a bit).
It’s very complicated. Just some of the simpler stuff.
Google makes money on ads and collecting info about you and selling that info. They want you to use Google products for everything. Note that Google even scans your Gmail messages for stuff to use in ads.
If you use their browser, then can collect more info, target ads better, etc.
Note that Google also does things like contract to provide email to a lot of places via Gmail. (You keep your old email addresses, Gmail hosts the them.) So that, for example, a lot of colleges now farm out their email to Gmail. (Which of course most people hate.)
MS’s philosophy is to not let anyone else win in the computer business. They see Google as a major competitor. So they want to crush Google. IE was a tool to crush Netscape. So they keep trying to do the same with everyone else. MS has tried search competitors like Bing, but have been less than successful in this in terms of market share. People using browsers other than IE hurts this quite a bit.
MS had a vested interest in keeping Apple barely alive for a while. Hence Word for Macs and for a while IE. The could point to Apple and say “We’re not a monopoly. Apple is still alive.” (Redefining “monopoly” in the process.)
Then Apple came back from the near dead. Game on for real.
Apple wants to become the new MS. So having their own browser is part of that game as well. Then they discovered apps! Oh boy, stuff that used to be free web pages are now pay stand-alones. Ka-ching. So they gotta block other browsers and browser add-ons that act like app replacements.
Opera, my browser, is also a free to some, pay to others browser. It’s used on Wiis and many smartphones. It provides those makers with a browser that has better lockdown controls so that users don’t horribly mess things up like with IE.
Thank yuh! I did not know that.
Even you link shows that Apple did NOT write WebKit. Web kit was a fork of the existing HTML and java script engines from KDE (ie Linux).
See www.webkit.org
Meflin
I didn’t bother to lay out the entire history as that’s a whole 'nuther story. However:
[Quote=Wikipedia]
The code that would become WebKit began in 1998 as the KDE’s HTML layout engine KHTML and KDE’s JavaScript engine (KJS). The WebKit project was started within Apple by Don Melton on 25 June 2001 as a fork of KHTML and KJS.
[/quote]
Why do most people hate this?
There are many kinds of people in the world and everyone has a different choice and opinion. There are one kind of people who only likes to criticism. So do not think about this kind of people’s opinion.
After seeing at least three 30-second TV-commercials just last night for Microsoft’s IE, I am also wondering why the expenditure of dollars for promoting a free browser. The ads were only for IE and not on any other aspect of Microsoft. Seems these ads want you to think its a fancy/shiny browser that will open up the world for you (or similar thinking).
Maybe the thinking is that Bing will be used as search-engine and ad dollars will flow to MS from that aspect? Is this kind of the gist (not just Bing but other MS-branded bits that IE could use)? Are there other things that are IE-dependent that earn dollars for MS when utilized? I’m Firefox, so no real idea what IE has going for it currently, to be honest.
I heard IE10 will only be available on Windows 8 (correct me if I’m wrong), so if Microsoft can get lots of people to believe IE (in general) is the best, then lots of people will have a good reason to upgrade to Windows 8.
Wikipedia confirms the “only on Win 8”, fwiw. For subsequent versions/releases/previews anyways, it appears.
From the link "…On 12 April 2011, Microsoft released the first “IE10 Platform Preview”, which runs only on Windows 7 and later[3][2]. While the second platform preview was also available for Windows 7 and later, subsequent platform previews run only on Windows 8 "
Don’t worry IE10 is available on Win7. So no need to upgrade to Win8. You can use with Win7 operating system.
Thanks all, some good responses. I also understand why MS forced Bing on us, sort of.
Because it means that information in their emails that they consider private is sent to Google. These are the same people who don’t use Gmail, for the same reason. Or that do use it, but only for non-essential purposes.
Plus there are a lot of people who don’t like Google as a company and don’t really want to use their stuff. Reddit users I understand are pretty down on Google for removing their app from the Android store for censorship reasons. Come to think of it, censorship usually features in people’s dislike of Google.
As far as I can see, no one has pointed out that the web browser is becoming an extremely important client for services delivered by software giants via internet and other networks as well.
If Microsoft, for instance, would drop IE for the benefit of Chrome et al, then functionality of their services in the cloud (Office 365 etc), services for the enterprise, like SharePoint Server, the internet experience via Windows Phone, advanced web browser applications like Outlook Web Access, and so on, would (slightly exaggerated) pretty much be in the hands of their worst competitors. Also, it would be very unpractical to deliver the server side product, but not the client.
Some of my opinions:
Microsoft has a history of adding non-standard functionality to IE that its server-side software can use. This can lock customers into using MS software. ActiveX is an example.
Google released its own browser for two reasons: to counter MS’s proprietary additions and to make a fast Javascript interpreter that lets users more effectively use Google services.
Yes, this! I’m surprised it hasn’t been mentioned earlier.
And an extension of this: the core browser in an OS is often used in applications where you don’t realize. For example, QuickBooks needs Internet Explorer for many Internet-related functions. If you aren’t running the right version of IE, or you set Internet Options too restrictively in IE, you can screw up QuickBooks. The average user doesn’t realize this because they never see the IE interface, but these kinds of things are very important both for the OS developer and for third-party developers on those platforms.
ActiveX? I assumed the question referred to the current year, not a decade ago. Microsoft’s been trying to get people to STOP using ActiveX since IE7, they’d love to be able to kill it off for good.