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Comment by seszett | Hacker News Reader

I know this is a bad faith comment, but early on the article says:

> EU users will swap out default browsers like Chrome or Safari for more privacy-focused options

So... apparently it is not just bad faith, but also plainly wrong.

The article doesn't mention to what browser in what percentage users have switched. The commenter above thinks that is Google Chrome and there are reasons to think so. Additionally most of the `independent` browsers are Blink based, thus assuming Google gets more market tech wise is correct as well.

You comment however lacks any substance.

My quote says users switch away from both Safari and Chrome given the option. Although switching from Safari to Chrome must be common, the stats (if you believe the article, since no precise numbers are given) seem to show that both browsers suffer, obviously because Chrome is also getting replaced by other browsers on Google phones. It seems difficult to interpret that as "helping Google control the market".

I'm not sure if most browsers under iOS already use blink by the way, as far as I know they are still almost all running WebKit.

> I'm not sure if most browsers under iOS already use blink by the way, as far as I know they are still almost all running WebKit.

Google last year stated they are working on bringing blink to iOS. They called it an experiment but obviously knew iOS was being forced to open up. So it’s happening (not yet but they are working on it). IE6 all over again.

Considering that on desktop EU users have been able to freely choose their browser for years and Chrome is dominant, I would not be so confident that it is not the article that is plainly wrong.

How many of the alternatives DON’T use chromium ?

I understand absolutism re: Chromium, but "The DMA is built to allow Google to control the web (via competitors using the open source foundation of Chrome)" is a very bold and very weak claim.

So you’re saying Google does not control the rendering engine and these competitor browsers have contributed functionality to the core rendering engine or added additional rendering functionality that isn’t in chromium?

When I got prompted to choose an option recently, there were many options I didn't recognize, so I have no idea.

Most of the options at the top of my list were Yandex, Edge, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, all of which use Chromium except Safari (whose rendering engine still shares common ancestry with Chromium) and Firefox.

I don't remember the exact order of these options, but Yandex was first in my prompt. It does use Chromium. I assume they put the popular options first in a randomized order, then other options below them in a randomized order, similar to what Microsoft did when they had a similar requirement in Europe. But I don't actually know how they decide the order.

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