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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

Google needs Firefox to exist for anti-trust reasons. If they don’t buy fire fox’s traffic, bing will.

I always wondered if firefox would actually change default engine if google stops the cash. It would remove some chunk of users at least imo, can firefox really afford it?

They’d change the default for fresh profiles but they wouldn’t dare overwrite existing installs. The former is a minor nuisance that would only cause minor grumbling but not affect market share. The latter would be actively hostile and cause significant loss of trust.

I think last time if you were still on default you moved to the new default.

But it's hard to find a definitive record.

They switched to Yahoo for a while.

Safari and edge are enough, I doubt google needs Firefox as a competitor like gates needed Apple (and injected funds)

I thought Edge was now a paint job over Chrome?

I'm going off the top of my head here, but you can watch Netflix in 1080p (and 4K I believe, I only have a 1440p monitor) on Edge, to see up to 1080 in chrome or FF you need an extension with 4K not being possible.

I don't know if it is a tech-issue or legal, but since it can be fixed with an extension, I guess it's tech?

So is Safari, there's only really two engines now, Chrome (Edge, Safari, Opera, Brave, et al) and Firefox (Tor).

Safari isn't Chromium-based, it's WebKit; Chromium forked Blink out of it.

Oh, my mistake.

Isn't that the very definition of a "trust"?

Not according to some very well-paid lawyers, so I guess no.

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