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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

Good.

Still wait for Google to be punished for abusing it market position to push its browser in a much worse manner than Microsoft pushed IE back in the days.

For those who are new to this game: Microsoft was basically punished for bundling a browser with their operating system.

If that was punishable (and thankfully it was), what should we say about the worlds largest advertising company pushing their browser in ad spots so valuable that no others were ever allowed to touch them (the otherwise clean front page of Google)?

And of course: with its current behavior, MS should of course be punished again for its abusive use of a dominant position when it tries to stop people from downloading other browsers and tries to prevent people from setting other browsers as default.

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I always find it boggling that apple can require all browsers use webkit on ios... it seems so similar to some of the MS stuff you mention.

Maybe because nothing ever happened with the “MS Stuff”.

Apple will keep their prices high enough to never be bound by anti-monopoly law. "Give something away" with advertising and you've got the problem that you want to collect whatever you can from each and every consumer.

For now it is actually a good thing.

But it should probably be looked into the moment the Chrome monopoly is dealt with.

I don't find effectively forcing Safari on users to be a good thing. Even if it takes some market share away from Chrome, it just makes a new platform specific monopoly, and arguably a worse one with less pressure to change.

As a web developer iOS is the most infuriating platform at the moment for me. There are some random nonstandard features. Just this last month I had an issue with ios "low power mode" causing webkit to throttle all browser animation frame requests by half, with no way to override or even check if it is on. There are open complaints and issues about this going back years but nobody can change it without Apple's blessing, which they don't give, so it affects every browser on iOS with no recourse.

I have had tons of iphone browser specific issues and I am pretty sure their platform monopoly is a big part of why they go ages without being addressed. If there was real competition on the ios browser market they might push each other to do better by comparison.

Why should you as a web developer be able to bypass settings that keep the client’s phone from running out of battery life?

It's a net positive in that it is the only thing stopping Google from having complete dominance of the web. Both are problems that need to be solved

You solve that problem by making a better browser, not by limiting user choice.

Firefox has, more or less, consistently been a better browser than Chrome, but because Google has a monopoly on the internet Chrome gets the majority of the market share. A better product cannot defeat a monopoly.

Firefox is not better than Chrome.

Tell me what plugin I use to get tree style tabs on Chrome?

Tell me when did Google stop sending my every single keystroke to Googleplex?

And when did it stop eating all my RAM?

Google is closer to Firefox than before, but mostly because of Mozilla :-/

> I don't find effectively forcing Safari on users to be a good thing. Even if it takes some market share away from Chrome, it just makes a new platform specific monopoly, and arguably a worse one with less pressure to change.

Safari has no pressure to change because it literally can't, Apple WebKit is the ONLY rendering engine on iOS.

But for Apple's love of avoiding standards, you won't usually find people who care or who are concerned about it until it actually gets in your way (your issue for example), for the most part nobody cares about USB-C not being universal for iPhones as I'm the 14-24 demographic in the US and everyone sees USB-C as the "Android" charger or even funnier the "vape" charger, and they see Lightning port as the only phone charger ever made (I genuinely had to remind my sister that 40-pin is a thing), and for example that's all I can talk on because none of the other things have genuinely got in my way (mainly because my only Apple products are over 10 years old).

Why is Apple's arrangement a good thing and Google's a bad thing?

This is the tricky bit about monopoly breaking... The lack of consistent legal philosophy on what constitutes "monopoly" can be a real problem for fair competition (which translates to more costs and worse product for everyone, as companies shadow-box law hypotheticals rather than just make good product).

Apple's arrangement is only a good thing in the context of Google's otherwise total domination of the browser market.

Nobody is saying that Apple's behavior is overall good, just pointing out that Apple's bad behavior just so happens to be keeping someone else's bad behavior in check.

Note that I write "for now".

Microsoft now is doing the same with Edge. If you want to change your default browser on Windows 11 you need to individually click and select it for every file extension/protocol.

I just tried this, there's a "make XYZ your default browser" button at the very top of the page, which changes the default for most of the relevant file extensions. Some, like MHT, it doesn't. Not sure why. But they have everything on one page, so for the extensions it missed, you can easily change.

That seems about as simple as one could make it. Is your concern that it didn't change every extension to whichever browser you made the default?

I tried to mention it above, so yes, I absolutely agree.

Microsoft was never “punished” in the US for bundling IE. They were given a slap on the wrist for forcing OEMs to pay for Windows licenses even when they shipped PCs without Windows.

Do you notice that at no time before or after the DOJ case there was never a time that MS stopped bundling IE with Windows?

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