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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is actually the one reacting here. They were effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust cases; Apple and Google took advantage of that to build two walled gardens, which ended up dwarfing MS's own empire. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, MS would have gone "If this behaviour is now allowed, why should we not do it too?"

This is just the result of normalizing monopolistic practices in the mobile world over 15 years. You can thank Apple and Google for that. If you want something different, call your representatives and ask them to let the hammer fall on all 3.

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Simply put, people don't love Edge as much as they love Chrome. The browser bundled with Windows 11 is naturally Edge, but users who use Chrome install Chrome of their own volition, so forcing them to open links in Edge is extremely annoying.

I don't use either chrome or edge but why would I use a clone instead of the real thing?

I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption. Edge is just chrome now but with some annoying bloat like the coupon pop-ups and pay later scams.

> why would I use a clone instead of the real thing

Has nothing to do with why people don't use Edge (they still didn't use Edge when it was using a custom engine; same for IE before it).

And it's only the techy minority that even knows Edge is built on top of Chromium.

> I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption.

It’s all about Electron. There may be a Microsoft contingent that thinks it’s the future or maybe they are just hedging, but for now it’s important for stuff like Teams.

Small correction: the new teams client (currently in preview) uses WebView2 (based on Edge/Chromium), not Electron

I'm disappointed that they're still going with a web-based thing, but maybe WebView2 will suck a little less than Electron. I'll take what I can get.

Writing a browser engine is a lot of unprofitable work just to get to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams. Especially when you already wrote one and couldn't keep even that in pace with standards and the evolving web technologies.

Taking an existing engine and building a malicious frontend to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams has way better returns in comparison.

Edge was, initially, Chrome but degoogled and it had (and still has) a lot of great UI innovations, like a vertical tab strip that's just right. Their wide use of hovering menus that can be pinned to become sidebars is honestly good stuff.

Of course, that's UI design, they are worse for privacy than Chrome, and the UI advantages begin to slip by the aggressive introduction of all the bloatware in the world. The browser's never quite been free of dark patterns either (new tab page's search field as one of the more glaring examples).

In a corporate context, it's very different from Chrome.

>It's more memory efficient in general

>It supports the Edge Webview2 framework that MSoffice apps use further cutting memory use

>It supports MDAG https://learn.mecrosoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...

To me Edge is so competitive that I was surprised to see Microsoft getting back up to their old playbook when much of what makes edge profitable for them will be disabled on a corporate network anyways.

Previous Edge was a complete refactor of IE with a brand new js engine. Extremely lightweight and low power compared to Chrome. Their goal was to be 100% compatible with the modern web.

Google started breaking pages as soon as it detected it was running on Edge and not Chrome. Simply changing the user-agent string magically repaired the pages. So MS gave up and forked Chrome.

If that was the reason, surely it would have been quicker and easier to change the default user agent string themselves?

Yes and no. It's part of the reasons.

Another one is a lot of websites would only test on Chrome. So if Chrome implemented a standard in a slightly different way than the spec, it would break on all other browsers.

But well-designed websites don't alter their behavior based on the user agent string. They test for capabilities before using them.

Indeed.

That's the correct thing to do and it's what real software engineers will do. But from the horrors I've seen in offshored websites, that's science-fiction to some coders. They will assume whatever version of Chrome they are running is the only one in existence and will use user-agent string once someone tells them their site is broken in Safari.

I doubt "love" for the software is involved here. I think many users believe Chrome is "the internet" just like they used to believe the Google search page was the internet, or Internet Explorer before that. This impression of Chrome was built on the fact that it's a solid browser but was enforced by Google with the same underhanded practices they applied for years.

My Android phone came with Chrome which I can't uninstall, just disable. Chrome is just there on millions of mobile devices, it was already on millions of PCs and has been for years, so people are used to that. The synergies between those devices and the Google services services makes it easy to stay and hard to leave.

People have to use "the internet" to install Chrome on a fresh Windows install. So I don't think anyone thinks that Chrome is the internet (that's actually something Chrome had to overcome when IE was dominant and installed by default).

Microsoft problem now is that for 15+ years people have been told and essentially trained to install a new browser if they want a good internet experience on Windows. And that is Microsoft's fault for shipping a shitty browser with their OS for multiple decades. That's why they had to drop the "Internet Explorer" branding. It became synonymous with "browser you can't use if you want to use any modern website" during the late 00s/early 2010s.

Obviously, Edge uses Chromium now but that is a relatively recent develop (and a technical detail that the average user isn't even going to know). So it's not enough to undo 20 years of "the browser that comes with Windows is crap" inertia right away.

> People have to use "the internet" to install Chrome

That's not been true for a while. IT preinstall Chrome in most companies nowadays, and obviously it's already on the phones and tablet you buy for the home.

Yes, MS dropped the ball after killing Netscape and being humbled by antitrust laws. But the current situation is as much a product of Google's "growth hacks" and mobile monopoly.

Maybe in a corporate environment. But not when it comes to personal devices.

Most tablets sold are iPads. They don't have Chrome pre-installed. In North America, most phones are iPhones that don't have Chrome pre-installed. Most personal laptops are either Windows machines or Macs which don't have Chrome installed. Its pretty disingenuous to pretend as if Chrome market share comes from devices with Chrome preinstalled. People go out of their way to install Chrome.

There's also the fact that as soon as you touch anything by Google you'll get nagged with adds and pop-up suggesting installing Chrome.

Some freeware also contained an (enabled by default!) option to install Chrome and make it the default browser. CCleaner was guilty of it if I recall correctly.

People seem to have forgotten how Chrome captured the desktop market to begin with. For many many years it was effectively almost impossible to download freeware without accidentally installing Chrome. Sites like download.com and even sourceforge wrapped everything in custom installers that would automatically include free trial of an antivirus, maybe some adware, and Google Chrome, unless you were aware and clicked the secret hidden opt-out link that was almost the same color as the background.

Every site doing chrome downloads without a clear opt out (or opt in, I don't remember) was demonetized, IIRC.

Attributing Chrome's popularity to it being included in download.com bundles doesn't sound accurate at all. If anything, the "Download Chrome!" link on Google.com yielded far far more installations.

Chrome didn't even really catch on until 1-2 years after release when they finally added extensions and themes around 2010.

People liked Chrome because it really was a quantum leap over Firefox, which itself was a quantum leap over IE at the time. When Chrome was released and Google explained their tech decisions, it was a sea change. Everything they said in their illustrated comic about Chrome[1] made perfect sense and accurately predicted where web apps were moving to.

Google saw where the ball was going and designed Chrome accordingly. Isolated tab processes, seamless auto-updates, and a prioritization on JS performance were great bets that were copied by everyone else.

1. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

As annoying as for Edge-loving people who then buy a mobile phone and are then forced to "open their links" in Safari or Chrome.

But to be honest, it's mostly the other way around: people live on phones, and when they have to interact with desktops, they pick the browser that integrates with their phones in the most seamless way. Which means, inevitably, the browser picked by their mobile-OS vendor, since there is little or no choice in that world.

The solution is not to turn into a little enforcer/fanboi for this or that corporation, but to crack open the mobile world (as well as Windows or any future platform) with the force of the State.

Granted I haven't used Chrome in years, but I find that firefox integrates remarkably well from phone to pc. The menu of open tabs on other devices is invaluable to me (although idk if Chrome has this too)

Sadly it integrated even better before they rewrote the mobile browser and threw out every useful little feature that had accumulated over the years – with the old mobile Firefox, you were able to forward links from other apps directly by sharing them to Firefox without actually having to open them on your phone.

New Firefox is too dumb for that – you actually have to open that link in a new tab before you can send it to some other Firefox instance (and then close that useless tab again).

Android actually lets you live without even having a default browser. It's great since you can use multiple browsers in place of multiple browser profiles. Apps will just ask what browser to open the link in. It's great.

You can set Edge as the default browser and links will open in Edge.

You can also buy an Android phone with Edge pre-installed by default like a Microsoft Surface Duo.

Microsoft has been trying to co-opt Android since Windows Phone failed. And they are able to do so because Android is relatively open (certainly more open than any mainstream consumer operating system has ever been). For instance, Microsoft added support for running Android Apps on Windows 11 and they added the Amazon App store to Windows rather than the Google Play store. Done completely without any involvement from Google. That is unprecedented openness for a mainstream OS. That's not to say that Android is perfect in regards to openness but the iOS/Android walled garden false equivalence that gets pushed around here is baseless.

> They were effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust cases

They won that case on appeal though, and Mozilla wasn't a factor until years after the fact.

The more accurate read of the early-00s browser wars was that MS "won" with IE (95% market share!) and then pretty much lost the stomach (or focus/budget/etc.) to advance the web in any way.

The specter of further anti-trust action still hung around. It's only been relatively recently that it has become apparent that the country's leadership is not interest in trust breaking anymore. But now Microsoft is playing catchup.

MS built a walled mobile garden too. Nobody bought into it.

Apple is certainly a worthy competitor to the Microsoft empire, Google remains a cut below.

>Monopolistic practices on mobile

Most of my phones have shipped with Samsung Internet.

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