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Comment by veave | Hacker News Reader

"massive ad campaigns" is hardly an antitrust matter.

Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.

> Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.

The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox. The explosive growth from Chrome can't be explained just by it being better than competition, or Firefox would have replaced IE in 6 months earlier.

The real explanation is that Chrome benefited from immeasurable (can't really calculate the cost of chrome being advertised prominently on every Google property) amounts of advertising.

Chrome had an ad on the Google homepage! (which is not for sale).

And at the top of basically every search in FF, they recommended Chrome.

> The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox

I don't think so. When Chrome came out it was much better than competition too[1]. I don't know if Firefox was that much better than Internet Explorer.

It is also possible that Chrome rode the wave of Firefox i.e, Firefox got people thinking about improved browsing experience by switching from Internet Explorer. Then Chrome came along and picked up many new users who may have otherwise gotten picked up by Firefox.

[1] https://youtu.be/LRmrMiOWdfc

I think you're forgetting some of the key benefits:

* auto-updates when firefox was still: HELLO WEDNESDAY'S VERSION HAS DROPPED WOULD U LIKE TO DOWNLOAD IT?

* tabs were isolated per process where an entire Firefox session could still get taken down by one tab not responding

* That super sexy tab handling code where the resizing happened when you clicked away meaning you could close multiple tabs by simply clicking a lot (which you couldn't in Firefox because it was resizing them all the time).

You seem to be missing the point.

My point is that being incredibly more advanced than the incumbent browser was simply not enough to have a great adoption, as evidenced by FF or Opera's market progression before Chrome's introduction.

People who make that claim in 2023 simply ignore how important Google's advertising was in securing Chrome's position.

Forgive me, as I also feel compelled to start with a mandatory posturing statement that adds nothing to the conversation.

Now that's done with; I would also suggest that given how much better Chrome was at the time than any other browser that much of its adoption was organic. At the time of its release Google still had a considerable amount of good will from the tech public. I was certainly telling anyone willing to listen at that time to install Chrome because of genuinely good it was.

> I would also suggest that given how much better Chrome was at the time than any other browser that much of its adoption was organic.

I tried it a number of times.

The tab close thing was the only thing that was significantly better on my machines,

... and if I really want to close a number of tabs quickly and without thinking I just right-click and chose "close tabs to the right/to the left/other tabs".

Chrome was much much better than Firefox at the time, mainly because of V8. Firefox only got it's first JIT 9 months after Chrome.

On my 2003 PC the difference was very noticeable. I switched instantly.

Did you try Opera back then?

I tried a number of times.

I am one of those who can sense and get annoyed by a few tens of milliseconds lag and for me Linux is a massive UX improvement despite its font issues and alignment issues (actually I can't see them even when I try) because all the random lags from Windows are gone.

I never experienced any improvement on Chrome on any of my setups so I discarded it immediately because the extension API was so crippled right from the start it was mostly just glorified web sites, not actual extensions like on Firefox.

(At that time Firefox had full blown FTP clients implemented as Firefox extensions, and even Firebug [1] was just and extension, so going for a browser that only allowed canned websites as "extensions" for trivial performance gains wasn't an option.)

[1]: not the first such tool but I will argue it was so impressive that it became the inspiration for all later web developer tools in all browsers.

I would argue it was better but has since degraded. The pivotal point, IMO, was ~6 years after Google's IPO.

Who else has been allowed to advertise on the front page of Google?

None as far as I am aware of. Not even - again AFAIK - disaster relief after the biggest disasters we have seen after Google was founded.

I'd argue that is quite clearly the same league as Microsoft pre-installing Media Player and Internet Explorer: taking advantage of a niche that they completely dominates and abusing it to wedge their way into another ecosystem and then completely dominating that too.

When you try to change the default browser on Windows (a setting ignored by some Microsoft apps, which will always use Edge btw.), you can't just change it, you get a pop-up going like:

You SURE you wanna do that? Edge is better you know. And more secure. And shit.

[ BIG BLUE CONTINUE WITH EDGE BUTTON ]

Arial, 6pt grey on white, "Use my choice" link

Edit: You also can't move or remove the Edge symbol from your desktop without admin privileges. So for a normal, unprivileged user there's just two things you can't remove from your desktop, recycle bin and Edge.

What does that have to do with Chrome?

Nothing, but it has to do with Microsoft, which the comment they were replying to talks about in its latter half.

Are you complaining about Google advertising its own products on their own websites?

If Microsoft could get in trouble for bundling its own product (IE) on its own OS (Windows) then IMHO this can in fact be seen as abusing monopolistic market power in the search market to benefit in the browser market.

How is that even in the same category?

Google does not force you to install Chrome in order to use Search.

Both cases they're abusing market power in one category to compete unfairly in another market. Apparently this is called "monopolistic leveraging" and is a somewhat unsettled area of law in the US. [0][1]

Here's another example. Amazon using its market power as an online marketplace to benefit in both the logistics market and its own-label goods market. [2]

By not allowing anyone else to advertise on its front page, it could also be said that Google is practising "Refusal to deal", which is also forbidden, although I admit that case is somewhat weaker. [3]

> Google does not force you to install Chrome in order to use Search.

I believe that just means they aren't practising tying, which is yet another abuse of monopoly power.

[0] https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

[1] https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1304...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54887650

[3] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

> Here's another example. Amazon using its market power as an online marketplace to benefit in both the logistics market and its own-label goods market. [2]

This is vastly different from advertising a product in the company website. Amazon got caught peeking into their own partners data, then leveraging that knowledge to unfairly compete with them.

> By not allowing anyone else to advertise on its front page, it could also be said that Google is practising "Refusal to deal", which is also forbidden, although I admit that case is somewhat weaker. [3]

Again, not the same. "Refusal to deal" means that Google would prohibit Microsoft from advertising Edge, their Chrome competitor, in their ad network, which is not happening.

But it's worth noting that Microsoft does the same with Bing and Edge, displaying a modal if you are using any other browser. They also got caught displaying large banners in the Chrome download page, which I personally think is even worse [0]

[0] https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-now-injecting-full-...

I admit, the cases are different, and I may be more stating how I think it should be than what a court would decide. But yes, Microsoft is doing even worse now, because the government failed to act previously.

Google does force me to use Android to use certain tools of theirs (eg manage their Google wifi pucks), as opposed to just using a local admin page like every other system.

Google owns Android.

You could also use iOS.

Here's the thkng you are missing:

Google, like Microsoft before them, pushes their own products in ways that no others are allowed to:

- Microsoft pre-bundled IE and Windows Media Player when no one else could bundle anything.

- Google pushed ads against Firefox and for Chrome on the front page of Google search (i.e. before a search was typed) something I am not aware if anyone neither humanitarian or commercial entities with the worlds largest marketing budgets being allowed to do.

For me, this example alone is enough to demonstrate behind reasonable doubt that Google, like Microsoft before them (and after them with Teams and Edge) have abused their position in one market to crush all competition in another market.

Everything else like the very convenient issues showing up in Firefox on major Google properties like Search, Calendar and YouTube is just icing on the cake.

Again, not the same.

Google did not cripple their products to work only on Chrome. It did not force customers to install Chrome on their computers, nor had partnerships with OEMs to preinstall its browser.

> Google pushed ads against Firefox and for Chrome on the front page of Google search

I highly doubt that Google, one of Mozilla main sponsors, had ads against Firefox in their Search homepage. They do promote Chrome in Search and Gmail, but not in YouTube as far as I know.

But that is beyond the point. Google uses its own real estate to promote their products, exactly like Mozilla does with Firefox and their VPN and Relay services. Mozilla also bundles Pocket within Firefox, by the way.

It's not great, but I think that a company should be allowed to promote a product in their own spaces, always respecting the autonomy of the user, and without aggressively pushing it.

Which is exactly why Microsoft is and should be in trouble. They not only bundled Teams in Office 365, but also defaulted to or pointed at Teams for every single operation coming from any other Office application.

> Google did not cripple their products to work only on Chrome.

Without defending Microsoft, they deserve a visit from relevant authorities, at least Calendar, the search results page and YouTube have had "funny" issues with other browsers and sometimes they have went away if one changed how the browser identified itself.

> I highly doubt that Google, one of Mozilla main sponsors, had ads against Firefox in their Search homepage.

I saw it.

"Download a better browser" it said when I was already using Firefox.

Yes, that's how anti-competitive practices look like.

Do you think one should be able to advertise Macbook on microsoft.com page or a Pixel phone on apple.com ?

how about a giant banner when you enter a Walmart store that reads "Just buy it on Amazon" ?

If you had to pass through Wall Mart drive through multiple times a day, would it be ok if they hassled you if you used anything but Walmart cars?

Is it OK when Microsoft force install Teams across every installed machine?

You have to realize google.com isn't just the corporate website of Google, it is their main product.

Google+

Seriously? Before any search was entered?

I'll take your word for it. Also it would just be another example that Google tried to enter social media as well using this tactic.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-is-running-a-massive-...

Chrome when it released was faster than Firefox, but it wasn't "better".

It ate far more RAM than either Firefox or IE did (and still does), back when RAM capacities were still practically limited, and Chrome was (and is) rendering the internet in Chrome ways much like IE did in Trident ways and Firefox has in Gecko ways. Chrome also had and still has its own UI paradigms, including no title bar, menu bar, nor status bar, and an omnibar instead of an address bar.

What really made Chrome the victor was they kept improving things common people care about, particularly in JavaScript and therefore JavaShit execution, while Mozilla got lazy on "winning" the war and Google dollars and IE was too late in getting back into the game.

Back then I remember switching to Chrome for these reasons:

1. Feeling faster than firefox (still does)

2. Process separation for tabs. Firefox used to crash the whole browser, whereas chrome would crash just a single tab.

3. Shipped with support for Flash and PDFs

Speed is why I use Safari now. It feels like Chrome did compared to FF back in the day.

It’s painful using Chrome by comparison. If it wasn’t for Chromes better dev tools I doubt I’d use it much

Only reason Safari feels fast is that it has avoided implementing features. There's still stuff that's been present in Chrome/Firefox for 10 years, but still doesn't work in Safari.

Does Google still show the old search results page design to Safari users? It did that for a long time.

Frankly, Safari works.

If those features slow down the web then that’s a knock on those features. Plus I’ve yet to see a single one of these supposedly “missing” features actually matter in the real world.

May I recommend Orion? It's based on Safaris engine, but imo improves massively on its ui (for example it comes with a fantastic (opt-in) tree-style tab browser). But most importantly it supports chrome and firefox extensions. Most of them do just work out of the box.

Orion is fantastic.

I still use Firefox since it is cross browser but if I change to MacBook as my dev machine I might go all in on Orion as well.

Not gonna lie, a tree-style tab browser sounds like awful UI to me, but… I’m glad you like it.

Supporting the insecure bloatware that is Chrome & FF extensions tho? Massive convenience factor, I get it, but… ewwww

It's funny how massive the impact of "bundle a bunch of proprietary stuff into our open browser" was on the browser wars. Between H264, MP3, Flash and PDF, Firefox never had a chance.

The problem is that there simply wasn't a better option at the time.

Ogg Vorbis was a novelty at best, and it was the only decently widely adopted open source competitor for any of the items listed that was available at the time.

HTML5 was only just published when Chrome launched. So Flash was at that point the only option available to show a video in the browser (sure, downloading a RealPlayer file was always an option, but it was clunky, creators didn't like people being able to save stuff locally, and was also not open source). Chrome in fact arguably accelerated the process of getting web video open sourced: Google bought On2 in 2010 to get the rights to VP8 (the only decent H.264 competitor available at that point) so they could immediately open source it. The plan was in fact to remove H.264 from Chrome entirely once VP8/VP9 adoption ramped up[1], but that didn’t end up happening.

Flash was integrated into Chrome because people were going to use it anyway, and having Google distribute it at least let them both sandbox it and roll out automatic updates (a massive vector for malware at the time was ads pretending to be Flash updates, which worked because people were just that used to constant Flash security patches, most of which required a full reboot to apply; Chrome fixed both of those issues). Apple are the ones who ultimately dealt the death blow to Flash, and it was really just because Adobe could not optimize it for phone CPUs no matter what they tried (even the few Android releases of Flash that we got were practically unusable). That also further accelerated the adoption of open source HTML5 technologies.

PDF is an open source format, and has been since 2008. While I don't know if pressure from Google is what did it, that wouldn’t surprise me. Regardless, the Chrome PDF reader, PDFium, is open source[2] and Mozilla's equivalent project from 2011, PDF.js, is also open source.[3] Both of these projects replaced the distinctly closed source Adobe Reader plugin that was formerly mandatory for viewing PDFs in the browser.

Chrome is directly responsible for eliminating a lot of proprietary software from mainstream use and replacing it with high-quality open source tools. While they've caused problems in other areas of browser development that are worthy of criticism, Chrome's track record when it comes to open sourcing their tech has been very good.

[1]: https://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-i...

[2]: https://github.com/chromium/pdfium

[3]: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

I can't remember firefox ever being included in installers for flash updates, antivirus, etc with install by default checked either.

Perhaps Chrome did succeed mostly on its own merits, but it wasn't above techniques used by things like Bonzai Buddy and Ask Toolbar to get the job done.

To top it, it could be argued that Chrome is a worse piece of spyware than Bonzi Buddy ever was.

You don't put a single character into the address bar of Chrome without notifying Google.

Yes, even if you are typing a domain instead of planning to search for something you have told Google about it, which means they know everything you visit, both internal websites at work and everything else.

Chrome's crushing advantage is/was perfect Google service support. For a long time Safari has struggled with Google Suite, Youtube support is/was janky on almost every other browser etc.

The Edge incident was kind of a perfect illustration of how Google either didn't care or actively threw spikes in rivals' wheels.

> Chrome was just like [IE6], rendered whatever it wanted.

> JavaShit

I don't think the increasingly small # of people who still talk this way about the web appreciate how easily this reads as incorrect extremism.

Chrome's throne is reinforced by the combined factors of websites increasingly becoming only compatible with Chrome, and JavaShit increasingly assuming Chrome-levels of execution speed.

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