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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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