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Except that's not true. IIRC, before Chrome was ubiquitous and dominant, they used their search monopoly to incessantly nag people to install it. If Chrome had just popped up as a download on some Google website, and was never promoted by is other properties, I really doubt it would be so dominant today.
At the time Firefox had something like a ~25% market share and was growing fast, and IE had the rest). If Google hadn't used its monopoly, I bet we'd now have a 3-way browser split between Firefox, and Chrome, and a cleaned up IE.
This is something I never understood. If I were already using Firefox or IE before installing Chrome, what would have prevented me from continuing to use Firefox or IE after installing Chrome? Did the Chrome installer disable or otherwise interfere with other applications?
This is even more relevant when a large portion of the first page of search results are essentially paid spots. Back when they were more algorithm focused and that was not directly influenced by revenue into the company, this was more defensible. Now, though, it is easy to say that they pay $X to keep the default search position to bring in $Y revenue.
Would Chrome have gained that much popularity if Google hadn't been the most used search engine, nay, website in the world?
> As far as I understand, developing a non-monopoly business to try to protect your monopoly business is not illegal.
IANAL either, but whatever Google is doing with Chrome should be illegal, i.e. making so many (open) web standards that it is basically impossible for a new browser engine entrant unless they invest billions.
In fact, I reckon that no major corporation should be sitting on the W3C board if they have vested interest in controlling the future of the internet. It's the equivalent of lobbying legislators, but worse, because the people writing the standards are openly on your payroll.
Right now the only thing that stands between Google and total domination of the world wide web is Apple and their stubborn dedication to Webkit. Another example that only a company with the revenue in the hundreds of billions can complete in this field that affects the entire world. I am sincerely thankful to them.
Normally I would think that a bad thing, but as the "progress" nowadays is becoming more and more user-hostile and developer-friendly (as both a user and a developer, I can see both side here), I would prefer stagnation to progress.
I don't want Web Integrity or manifest v3 or any of that crap. That's a blatant transfer of power from the user to the developer, and the latter is already substantially more powerful than the user. We need to go the other way.
Yes, Chrome was absolutely superior to Firefox in every way at the beginning.
> impossible for new entrants unless they invest billions
All industries require that you invest billions, and it’s to compensate the civilization-long effort of R&D that the other company did. Reasoning-by-absurd: Should Boeing display all the plans of the band new Dreamliner so that it doesn’t take billions for new competitors to emerge? Should all companies make their blueprint public so they can have immediate competition? No, Google invested in browsers and set up new norms in WWW in exchange for their position on the market. The benefit to the general population has been excellent WWW norms, to be honest.
I’m thinking outside the law framework but to me, no corporation should be have 51% market share. But that’s wishful thinking, not the law (also, market share is something economists struggle to define).
At the time of Chrome's introduction, Firefox still had XUL extensions and a somewhat different UI from Chrome, so Chrome wasn't strictly superior (though it is fair to say it had better performance than Firefox). Over time, Mozilla replaced XUL extensions with Chrome's extensions API (without providing meaningful additions, like reintroducing the ability to modify the UI) and reworked the UI to be a clone of Chrome, so thanks to Mozilla's efforts it might be fair to say that today Chrome is strictly superior (excluding privacy and MV3 etc.).
(I still begrudgingly use Firefox BTW :))
I can't speak to the technical capabilities early on, but I will say that I distinctly remember many of the computing people I knew explicitly not preferring Chrome early on. I distinctly remember a discussion in one of my college CS courses, shortly after the release of Chrome, where everyone was in agreement that Chrome was just "that awful browser that Google made".
This is exactly what was Google doing when they started with Chrome. If you visited google search they had a very visible text in the center asking you to try out Chrome.
It was also on other google pages, but search is the most prominent one. They don't do it now, because they already have monopoly in web browsers also.
> what Google is doing is making sure that nobody else gets a monopoly
Depending on what “making sure” is, that could very well be illegal.
just because you provide a way to do so, it's a lot of effort to swap. defaults matter. remember msft getting sued over IE?
Google, YouTube, Gmail and other sites have nagged me to install Chrome, though.
Same for Lisbon. I switched from Chrome to Firefox and bahm! 3D was available!
But the enforcement of that has varied substantially over time: strongest at the end of the Gilded Age, lessened over time, and likely to be strengthened in our neo-Gilded Age.
The problem is how does this help me? Why do I care if Apple has a different search than Google? This benefits me in no way. Meanwhile pharma companies routinely do the same thing and pay off generic manufacturers to not produce generics after their patents expire. This makes medication massively more expensive for the public. But the FTC just sits back and lets it happen. I don't believe for a second that the FTC isn't just engaging in political warfare.