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Comment by Phemist | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft uses all dirty tricks in the book to keep their users on the default browser (which is of course MS Edge).

Legal..? I'm sure their lawyers think it is?

I posted about this before, but MS got fined before by the EU for this kind of OS/Browser bundling in the late 2000s. For a while, we had an option at installation on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 to choose our browser.

These were still the days of Internet Explorer, so I don't know how much MS not having a competent browser factored into this decision, but I was really surprised that with a recent fresh install I did, this browser choice prompt was gone. Not to mention all the roadblocks thrown up by MS while trying to install an alternative browser...

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> Microsoft uses all dirty tricks in the book to keep their users on the default browser (which is of course MS Edge).

At one point, I went to search for "Firefox" on Bing using Edge and this happened[1].

It's almost comical how desperate they are to keep you using Edge.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187

Google has been doing this in search as well. Not sure where the comedy is.

On top of that they peddled their browser in all their products (gmail, youtube, maps, docs, ...), claiming better and faster experience, more features. Sometimes they had to check user agent to deliver worse experience to make that claim truthful.

Just because another quasi-monopolist does it, doesn't make it equally good or acceptable.

It's equally bad. I never implied otgerwise. It's expected too, not comical.

Do you have a screenshot of "this"? Is it Google telling a user searching for Firefox (or another browser), specifically for that search, that they're using Chrome already?

I don't doubt that Google does the same thing, they are just as complicit in this duopoly as Microsoft.

One of the main reasons Chrome has become a monopoly is that Google pushed it aggressively with such tactics on its various properties.

That was ok, they were saving us from IE and ActiveX.

Maybe they think it's legal, OR they know its illegal but possible fines don't put them off and are accounted for as cost of doing business.

It's interesting, that second option seems too malicious, how would you even coordinate a common understanding of this?

Perhaps it's just enough in the grey-zone that it is a "cross that bridge when we come to it" issue and that they don't need to figure out the specifics of any laws/regulation, because if they are on the wrong side of it, in the past it has been proven that these types of regulations are quite toothless.

This specific issue on its face seems a security thing, where users are warned against installing software from untrusted (as defined by microsoft) sources. It very handily doubles as a way to scare users into not installing competitors for their own applications (like browsers and office packages), of course.

Just look at Uber, for example. The opportunity cost of obeying the law in the various markets they entered would have far exceeded the cost of penalties they received in practice. So what did they do? They just flat out ignored the law globally, and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them.

Unless part of the calculus involves executives behind bars, I don't know what else we should expect from corporate behaviour; they're just following their incentives.

I guess the Uber case is similar in ways but also quite different.

Uber was (relatively) vocal about their hope for regulation to catch up with this new world of taxi gigs ordered through an app.

And in the MS browser-choice case, the regulation was specifically designed for Microsoft and they had been found to be non-compliant once already.

How does that change the calculus? Clearly, not enough.

They were hopeful of regulations "catching up" because it hurts future competition. If new regs hit the books after uber has already enjoyed their growth, it's a lot harder for someone else to break in.

Consistent refusal to obey the law should result in fines of ownership of the company. Forced nationalisation. That's the only thing that will get their attention. They have too much money to care about fines.

> It's interesting, that second option seems too malicious, how would you even coordinate a common understanding of this?

You can coordinate this with a coded message, such as:

"Our goal for 2023 is to make Edge a market-leading product, the best browser on Windows, and the customer's browser of choice. All executives ranked Vice President or above will receive $100,000 in shares for every percentage point increase in US browser market share this financial year."

Later you will be shocked - SHOCKED - to learn anti-competitive behaviour happened, when you were "just trying to encourage the OS and browser teams to cooperate on things like power efficiency and security"

> Microsoft uses all dirty tricks in the book to keep their users on the default browser (which is of course MS Edge).

Why do they? How do they profit from this?

Why should they not? Their browser market share is munuscule, and I actaully feel good if somebody takes some of it from Chrome, slightly decreasing Google's hold on absolute power in defining the web.

Even if Edge had a bigger slice they're still just a glorified fork. They don't deviate from Blink or Chromium in any ways significant to user freedom or standards independence.

I don't even understand their value proposition. "Hey here's our knock-off of a product we couldn't make, with a little bit of gloss on it". How does that make me interested as a customer??

Simply a pure Chrome clone with vertical tab bar already is enough to interest me. From my point of view a horizontal tab bar is absurd, making a browser barely usable (I could hardly ever see the tabs captions in Chrome, only comprressed icons, until I've bought a reeeally big display). I feel this way since the days tabs have first been introduced - in Opera on Windows 95 (and it already had vertical tabs bar). Edge has a vertical tabs bar.

Nevertheless I actually use Firefox with a vertical tab extension (there are many) as I find it overall better, also make use of its awesome container tabs (a very nice convenience leap from using multiple browsers for different purposes) and feel nice about using a browser which is kind of (I know it's not really, at least from the financial point of view) independent from privacy&freedom-hostile corporations and actually different from their one technically. Another reason is Edge somehow feels the slowest browser ever to me.

That vertical tab bar I would put under "a little bit of gloss" :) But I also use firefox with Sidebery.

But besides this Microsoft also added a lot of user-hostile crap to Edge, like the "buy now pay later" schemes and the coupon notifications.

Why should they care to make a competing browser at all?

The answer is simple. The google anti-trust case clearly indicates this is _highly_ profitable. As the browser (chrome) is one of the leading ways of increasing Search Query Volume (SQV). SQV increases ad impressions thus increases ad revenue, thus maximizes shareholder value.

Bing has a similar ad platform and with Edge Microsoft will have many ways to send users to do queries in Bing.

Why leave a big piece of juicy pie like this on the table for google to sweep up?

Theres a separate Windows ISO for European audiences as a result iirc it lets you pick a browser to install.

> fined before by the EU for this kind of OS/Browser bundling

And now Apple gets away with only allowing one browser engine on iOS, even if you try to go out of your way to use something else you can’t (third party browsers have to use the Safari engine built into the OS by App Store policy)

Why is that an issue when it’s the engine? It’s hard to argue this is anti competitive in any way when it comes to browser product choice.

It limits what plugins/extension can do. For example Firefox on iOS doesn’t support plugins at all and thus you can’t use the same Adblock you would use on desktop (unlock origin)

I don’t see the point of being able to change the UI skin only? All that does is tricks people into thinking they’re using a different browser when they aren’t, and it gives Apple control over which features and APIs are supported etc. (maybe you can patch new ones in by injecting a polyfill but that’s a terrible solution)

The market share of OSX in the EU is too small for anti-competition laws to kick in (5-7% depending on source). They also used this in a shield against Epic in those cases (since iOS is less than 40% on average). If that is a good argument I leave up to the reader to consider.

When Microsoft had it's browser mess it had near saturation level op dominance (>97% if I recall correctly).

I do mean specifically iOS because Mac OS doesn’t have the same restriction

Safari has been called out under the "gatekeeper" part of the DMA in the EU, apple's app store as well. the version on the ipad may escape due to a technicality, but I doubt that will persist for long.

Are you in Europe? I think these days they just use a different behavior for EU users so they can screw over everyone else.

Yes, so I've never seen anything but the EU-sanctioned installation flows and the regression is in these flows.

Can't wait to see the fines in a few years then.

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