Meanwhile we clamor to the EU to force Apple to let Chrome replace Safari on their otherwise vertically integrated iPhone.
Taking away Chrome's marketshare and making a dent in Google's absolute power in the web should be their only goal, instead of whatever they diversified into.
The problem is that Mozilla doesn’t own a leading OS. So theyre always going to be an “also ran”.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that the only way to succeed in build a successful browser is to build a successful operating system.
And yet Google made Chrome the dominant browser on both Windows AND macOS. How do you explain that?
And Chome came at a time when people were fed up with Internet Explorer. There was a gap in the market when Chrome came along. Remember that Firefox was beating the competition for a period back then too. But Mozilla isn’t a household name like Google. You don’t say “I Mozilled something last night.” Google is such a common name that people literally use it as a verb.
But that all said, if Chome was released today with Edge being where it’s currently at (yes, I know Edge is based on Chromium, but let’s look past that for the sake of this hypothetical), Google would have a harder job gaining market share.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
Maybe Mozzilla should take another approach with such experiments.
Imagine if Microsoft would prohibit you from using Google search on Microsoft devices and force you to use Bing and anyone would justify this on the basis that Bing is unpopular.
It’s about locking competitors out via owning the leading market in other parts of the dependant ecosystem. If MS didn’t lead the market in desktop operating systems then it wouldn’t matter what search engine they defaulted too.
Mind you people on Apple systems can still use Safari, people on Windows will always be able to use Edge etc, but there is no coherent argument for not putting more equal choices in front of a user across systems. All these companies make general purpose computing devices, there is no downside for the consumer in having control over them.
To let a company be anti-competitive and lock down a platform, so people have to use their proprietary software rather than being able to run a real version of Firefox or Chrome is completely backwards.
If you have a 10% market share and you use that 10% market share to expand into other markets then you’re increasing competition.
But if you have a 90% market share, then you’re not simply just expanding into other markets, you’re eliminating competition from those markets.
Imaging you have a birthday cake but you said only your best friend could eat it. That would be unfair to the other guests. But if everyone turned up with their own cakes and offers up slices to other people, it then means everyone gets cake and it doesn’t matter as much who you give your cake too.
Microsoft is currently using Windows as a platform to try and push users into Edge instead of Chrome. Do any of us have a problem calling that anticompetitive?
Because it is anticompetitive, it doesn't matter that Edge has a trailing markeshare behind other browsers, it's still user-hostile anticompetitive behavior.