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Comment by mvid | Hacker News Reader

If quality of competition truly mattered, then IE wouldn't have had to be stopped with legislation

IE wasn’t stopped with legislation. It continued to be bundled with Windows. It was eventually dethroned by Chrome.

> IE wasn’t stopped with legislation

Yes it was. You're ignoring all the other things proprietary about IE and only considering the OS bundle one. JScript, VBScript, and ActiveX were the real problem. There we so many proprietary extensions to IE that were not even remotely supported elsewhere. Hell, C# even came out of the hell that was Microsoft's JVM, J++, and J# thanks to those trials

One could argue the successful legal action against IE bundling stopped Microsoft from further entrenching it in Windows. With Edge in Windows 10/11 you can see the kind of nudges that Microsoft probably wanted to add all along.

And now this topic is full of people defending this exact entrenchment by dictat from Apple.

It's not the same, because Safari is already a minority in the market compared to the Chrome behemoth.

Seriously, I kind of wonder whether or not grass roots anti-Safari sentiment is dominated by web developers who resent having to test their sites in more than one web browser.

I don't like Safari because I can't get uBO or Tree Tabs for it, and because it's often the odd-one-out between the Chrome/Firefox/Safari triopoly in terms of feature support. The battery efficiency is nice though.

Fair, though I would suggest that Safari's feature support really is excellent (especially in recent months) and I would further say that I don't think the web needs to — or should — advance at the pace being set by Google. I actually like the fact that Safari is a bit slower. I think it's healthy for the web.

On desktop I personally use Firefox because I find it to be a good blend of performance and resource efficiency, plus it has excellent support of content blocking add-ons.

[To clarify, I had intended to refer to Safari on iOS specifically, vis a vis complaints about the lack of engine choice on iOS. But I recognise that my post didn't say what I had intended.]

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