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Comment by kweingar | Hacker News Reader

Here's something I don't understand.

If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage.

If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer, run the installer, open Chrome, and set it as the default browser. So many users do this that people conclude Chrome has an unfair advantage.

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It's a common misconception that tons of users manually install Chrome, but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser.

Chrome is the only browser with a business model that makes sense to do this. Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default. Firefox makes no money at all, and makes 95% of its revenue from Google's payments to be the default search engine. Safari isn't even available on Windows, and even then, 99% of Safari's revenue is from Google.

(Safari was available on Windows from 2007-2012, but it never captured much market share, because Apple was never willing to pay PC makers to make Safari the default.)

Here's StatCounter's estimates of desktop browser market share. The overwhelming majority of users are using their computer's default browser.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

    Chrome: 65.55%
    Edge: 13.9%
    Safari: 8.69%
    Firefox: 6.36%
    Opera: 2.9%

FWIW, I don't think it makes any sense at all to sell off Chrome. Google could probably sell off YouTube, AdSense, and Google Cloud, but not Chrome.

The only viable business model for a web browser, the one that literally all major browsers use, is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default. Even Kagi makes its own Orion web browser, for exactly this reason.

How could Chrome make its owner any money at all if Chrome couldn't accept money from Google to be the default search engine? How could Chrome possibly do what Firefox and Safari can't?

I agree with you. Of all the remedies to address Google's "monopoly" this seems to the most bizarre.

My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser? In the article it said that they'd need approval for any new joint venture, collaboration, or partnership with any company that competes with Google in search or in search text ads.

It makes no mention of web browsers.

> My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser?

I'm not a lawyer, and didn't read the verdict, but your query is very Hacker News. Justice is not code. If Google is forced to divest from Chrome, it of course means it can't turn around and make the Google Dhrome browser. If Google did, they'd be sued for ignoring the verdict.

There court hasn't set a remedy to its verdict yet. From the article

The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must “promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve.” It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine.

Think of it like MySQL and then MariaDB. So if Google sells Chromium to say Saleforce (they seem to buy everything) then Chrome is no longer Google's. Google would have complied with the verdict.

What does it mean to sell Chromium? Chromium code is Copyright The Chromium Authors. It contains a substantial amount of code not written by Google, which isn't Google's to sell.

I suppose Google could sell the rights to their parts of the codebase, possibly the rights to future Googler contributions, admin rights to the repo, domains, trademarks, CI, hardware labs, and maybe some other things I'm forgetting... but in terms of the tech being developed and shipped, there isn't really anything substantive to sell.

You're right in the short term but look how quickly the required outcomes from United States v. Microsoft Corp were relaxed and eventually ignored.

The difference between that case and the Google one now is that Microsoft was forced to sell nothing. It was a pyrrhic victory for the DOJ that comforted Microsoft.

Microsoft was forced to change their behavior. If it wasn't for that DOJ case IE would still be the dominant web browser.

The only reason Google is trying to take away cookies is because they make you log into Chrome which gives you all their browsing data anyway and probably anything you type. So maybe not having a browser controlled by Google would be good.

Selling might not make business sense for Google or for Chrome, but it makes a ton of sense for the American public. Google is using Chrome to benefit advertisers, data brokers, and surveillance over users. Exhibit: the manifest v2 / Ublock Origin saga. And this is huge because so many other browsers use Chromium or its engine under the hood. Google can also use Chrome to push user-unfriendly web standards or de-facto standards.

Of course, this doesn't appear that related to the DOJ's reasoning.

The problem is that it doesn't make business sense for anybody else to buy Chrome. Bare in mind that 99% of Chrome is the free Chromium open source project, so you're not buying any sort of technological asset. You're just buying a big pre-existing user base, which would be extremely difficult to monetize without making the product much worse, although I'm sure Microsoft or Facebook would be happy to give that a go. It certainly wouldn't make any sense to buy it without a sprawling advertisement business or some major conflicts of interest. But what's the point of selling it to someone else like that?

It's easy to say "just sell it" without thinking about the actual implications, but you're basically talking about destroying it. Maybe that's the point, but we should at least be honest about it.

Yeah, Chrome is "Google-flavored Chromium", just as Edge is "Microsoft-flavored Chromium."

If (say) Meta bought Edge, then they'd get the userbase and the trademark, but the product seems pointless. Why would Meta want a browser whose killer features are integrations with Bing and Office 365? If Meta wanted a browser, they'd make a "Meta-flavored Chromium."

I'm assuming this is the point - say "just sell it" to satisfy anti-monopolists, while knowing no one will buy it for any reasonable price to satisfy monopolists. Political points across the board with no consequence, why not?

I suppose then we could treat as some kind of public good and fund its development directly from our tax dollars?

I fear the US government more than I fear Google. At least Google will lose power at one point. The government may fall into wrong hands. Which is exactly why the Reps are trying to defund and dismantle half of its functions.

> The problem is that it doesn't make business sense for anybody else to buy Chrome

I don't see why divesting it necessarily means selling it to another company. Google could create a non-profit like Mozilla, or a for profit and float it as its own business.

If Google controls the spin-off, then the problem is not resolved. The whole point is that the government doesn't want Google to control it. And if Google does not control it, then who does? The judge?

There are a lot of seemingly simple "solutions" to this problem that just don't hold up under a modicum of scrutiny.

Any company purchasing Chrome would do it for power – since Chrome can’t become a paid product.

Any NGO receiving Chrome would be extremely vulnerable to spying, because of the immense power of having software installed on a billion computers.

Mozilla already exists, and it behaves as a non-profit arm of Google. If you created another non-profit it would do the same unless it was banned from receiving money from search engines (but then it would have no money.)

Yeah, I agree with all this.

The right answer is to nationalize it. Set up some sort of independent non-profit steering committee, and maybe redirect some of the massive savings Elon has pulled out of his ass to fund the actual core development. That solves the "who spends $1b per year on development if not an adtech" problem. If the US was a functioning state right now, I might suggest making it an international organization to encourage buy in from developers and backers outside our borders.

Browsers are one of the most critical pieces of modern software infrastructure, both from a security-footprint perspective and as a vehicle for (mis-)information delivery, so maybe they're too important for ANY commercial entity to use them as a bludgeon to for their agenda.

If they no longer control the core project, then Google (or Microsoft) have a much harder job doing self-serving stuff. They could nuke Manifest v2 in THEIR Chromium derivative, but core Chromium isn't going to give it up-- the Operas and Vivaldis of the world don't have to spend their limited resources trying to unwind the change to keep a desired feature.

> It's a common misconception that tons of users manually install Chrome, but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser

Maybe 10 years ago, but which ones do it now? thinkpads and HP machines, at least, ship with Edge as the default. Dell or something?

Windows is also _hyper_ aggressive about pushing Edge now too. Like it's nuts how hard it pushes it, to the point that it embarrasses people who do actually prefer Edge. "Recommending" at every turn that you not switch, having the edge browser itself warn against downloading Chrome, pushing edge into various OS-level browser launches even if it's not your default, and, of course, randomly resetting the browser default on various updates.

edit: at least from this page, it's edge by default on at least some dell machines too, but I haven't owned one in so long I won't say that for sure: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000128257/how-to-ch...

It doesn't seem to be a default on PCs.

I don’t remember chrome being default anywhere. You always needed to open edge to download chrome and I have installed windows numerous times in past.

Chromebooks are a thing, and are extremely popular

> extremely popular

for really small amounts of "extremely"

(outside US K-12 they are hardly a thing)

And Australian K-12 too :)

crucial though, that's were audiences get introduced with their software

I wouldn't be surprised if Chromebooks alone gave Chrome more market share than Firefox.

They don't do so badly in the UK with non-technical types (eg the elderly) especially where a full computer isn't safe or supportable.

I have a very nice Chromebook tablet (a Lenovo Duet). I use it to run a Debian Linux VM; it has its quirks, but I use it to run Emacs, TeX, and various Scheme implementations. It is relatively cheap, and even though it's a relatively low-powered device, it has adequate performance for my needs. (And yes, it is not “really” Linux: you can't install your own window manager, for example. But it's usable.)

I have lots of criticisms of Chrome OS, but the fact is that the year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived. You buy one of these machines, and out of the box you can have Linux apps (and a terminal) running within 15 minutes of switching the machine on.

Yea, I don't disagree it is a decent product. I was just refuting the "extremely popular" comment. Statistically their market share is minimal. People still by-and-large buy Microsoft Windows laptops.

German here. I know 0 people who own a Chromebook. In fact I think I have never seen one in my entire life (outside of a store).

Schools I know are using Windows laptops or iPads.

I believe the claim was that it's coming default on prebuilt PCs. If you're installing Windows, that's not the situation where Chrome would be the default.

Right but what OS is installed on a pre-built PC if not Windows?

not sure what exactly that has to do with prebuilt versions of Windows that come with bloatware/adware or other nonstandard customisations?

I think the GP has only encountered business laptops (which don't have as much bloatware). I can confirm that current "normie" laptops (from HP at least) do already have Chrome installed, although it is unclear if this is as part of paid marketing or just to reduce support headaches.

Also, there was the time where Google pays antivirus companies like then-Avast to shove Chrome. Unsure if it is still happens, but this points out to how Chrome can pay through the marketshare.

I do a lot of IT support. Edge is the default on every single prebuilt / laptop I have setup for people.

This is ancedotal sure but it's several hundred datapoints from the cheapest student focused budget laptops(running windows not chrome os) to business grade laptops from the big 3 (HP/Dell/Lenovo). Apple ships Safari by default and every linux distro I have used ships firefox or a spinoff of firefox by default.

So in my experience Chrome is actively installed by the local it help (me, things are just plain broken for some use cases on non-chrome). I personally do not use Chrome, that doesn't mean I won't make it the default for every PC I touch for an enduser purely because I get less calls for support when users are using chrome.

It's no secret that I feel like other search engines are worse that Google even though Google's results are nearly unusable.

Google built a mote by having a better product, nobody else tried to compete and now it's become nearly impossible to compete. I actively avoid Chromium based browsers personally but even then I need to have one installed because even in Firefox and Safari derived browsers things are broken or website just plain don't work (https//f1.tv actively does not work on firefox as an example, unless they have since backtracked)

>> I feel like other search engines are worse that Google even though Google's results are nearly unusable.

Give Kagi a go - the usability thing is superb, as you can down rank common awful sites so they never appear in the results and they aren't stuffing ads into the results either

I find the results excellent 99% of the time and for those odd cases I'm not convinced it found the best results I pop back to Google. I tend to find that I do that most with subtle image searches (which are kind of rare but you are usually after something very specific where Kagi occasionally struggles with on the image side)

For me almost all conventional search is dead now. Sure, perhaps useful for “what going on tomorrow where I live” but for everything else I now rely on LLMs.

I wasn't sure where to say it but your comment seems appropriate. It must impact install numbers when companies(ones I've been at) only want you to use chrome. Wasn't really an option for our regular staff. I was able to get away with using ff.

Agree as well - I still end up mostly using Google search, tho half the time when I don't get any decent results I realize it wasn't that important anyways. Interesting side effect of poor search results.

Edge moved from their own engine to Chromium’s Blink engine, so from an IT support perspective, it should work equally well.

Mostly correct yes and for certian users I actually do encourage them to try out edge.

Many users are so used to Chrome though it is jarring to switch to edge. Open them in two workspaces and flip between them, although the UI are both browsers, edge feel like the Temu version if a browser, at least to me.

But then I use Zen/Vivaldi so I personally find most other browsers these says a little weird.

I bought 2 machines in the past year and neither of them had Chrome installed. Maybe it happens, but not on the two brands I got.

>I believe the claim was that it's coming default on prebuilt PCs.

That's the claim, but I've never seen a pre-built with chrome installed (other than a chromebook obviously), let alone configured as the default. Which OEMs are pre-installing it as the default?

I can confirm Dell's default for Windows devices is Edge. I believe Dell's Ubuntu laptops come with both Firefox and Chrome installed.

If you buy a cheap computer with Windows S it is very hard to get out of the S configuration and in S configuration you can't install Chrome at all or Firefox.

You can switch out of S mode (for free) https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...

Doing it that way is a pain if don't want to create a microsoft account, which when tries to convert your computer account to a microsoft account. Pretending that it's easy to switch by requiring you to use the microsoft store to do so is a really shitty antipattern.

99% of Windows users use a microsoft account these days, so this method is trivial for most.

Not very hard in my experience. Not even hard.

But very much nonobvious. I recently had to help one of my parents when they couldn't figure out how to install some software, and it turned out to be S - but I had to do a bunch of digging to figure it out and I'm good with computers.

Before Edge, everyone had to install Chrome because the web wouldn't work with IE. It is still the case that some major sites don't work with Firefox either. Edge is as close to a de-Googled Chrome as you can get to work properly. Unfortunately de-Googling meant re-Microsofting

The web wouldn’t work with IE just because Microsoft had this unique strategy of deviating from standards, having non-working APIs and providing an awful experience to developers. It’s unique.

Firefox compliance is another story, but very mild compared to IE. Chrome also had to deal with compatibility issues when Firefox was the leader, but Mozilla relinquished their leadership position because it was very important to them to fire their CEO / original writer of Javascript for ideological reasons - he had given $1000 to an anti-abortion NGO, which is an unacceptable thoughtcrime. Then they spent their time politicking and not enough coding.

Sounds like the history of browsers is just made of strategic mistakes.

Yeah, I really feel like Brenden pretty much screwed over the entire browser scene by going all political and not doing his heavy lifting of reading the mid 00s political zeitgeist better. Feels like he doomed us all to live under Google's boot for his poorly timed performative activism.

> he had given $1000 to an anti-abortion NGO

That's not what he did. He donated for California's Prop 8, which opposed same-sex marriage, in 2008. I'm personally not judging, as many US progressives have forgotten that during those days, even Obama opposed same-sex marriage. But it's important to get the facts straight, even when being sarcastic.

---

> Then they spent their time politicking and not enough coding.

Mozilla's management certainly is guilty of blunders, but I'm pretty sure the developers who have worked on Mozilla don't feel like they've spent time “politicking”.

The failure of Firefox in the marketplace starts from the fact that it's pretty hard to compete with a browser that's funded with more than 1 billion $ per year. And people may not remember much about the launch of Chrome, but it was literally years ahead of its competition. Have a look at its famous comic book, with which it was announced, describing its design and philosophy, and count the years it took for the competition to catch up (across the board, including Safari): https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

I mean, sure, you can blame that on politics, but I don't think anyone was able to stop the decline and when Brendan Eich resigned, people were already talking about Chrome's hegemony and Firefox dying.

> And people may not remember much about the launch of Chrome

And remember -- the original browser engine that Chrome (+ Safari) came from was KHTML + KJS from the KDE folks, which was doing pretty good at the time considering the development resources available to it

Using your money to help pass a law that binds every person in your state is not a “thoughtcrime”.

> Unfortunately de-Googling meant re-Microsofting

That's an understatement. Microsoft Edge is, in fact, a more privacy invasive browser than Chrome. And that was a pretty high bar.

In the EU, straight from the get-go, Edge presents users with the IAB interstitial, informing them that Edge is going to share their data with the entire advertising industry. Note that Chrome doesn't do this, as Google only wants you to share data with them, and it's not the browser that asks for consent. Edge's IAB interstitial is filled with dark patterns as well, such as legitimate interests being unlawfully declared.

Edge is also filled with Microsoft's telemetry, which you can't turn off. Every browser instance, of course, comes with a unique ID that's reported to Bing Ads. Using Edge without Bing is fairly difficult. And end-to-end encryption for its synchronization feature isn't supported.

I entirely understand why people want to degoogleify, but picking Bing in that process is fairly stupid.

> It is still the case that some major sites don't work with Firefox either.

This comment keeps popping up. Every time I ask the commenter to show me some sites that dont work with Firefox. Nobody has ever shown me one. I think people are stuck in the past here, Firefox has been absolutely fine for about 10 years now.

I have yet to find an actual web site that breaks with Firefox and works with Chrome.

Closest would be Google's Android Flash Tool that uses WebUSB to image an Android phone. But that is more like a browser extensions versus a HTML5 application.

I have had numerous experiences with ZScaler, corporate man-in-the service, breaking web sites with Firefox. I need to use Chromium to upload to Virus Total. ZScaler even likes to brake web sites on Chromium and requires multiple reloads with minutes or hours between refresh.

Microsoft services with ZScaler break easily with Firefox and Chromium but work fine with Edge or MS Teams. Don't know if this intent to push users to Edge or just a correlation with ZScaler.

ZScaler developers, thanks for making my work life living hell with 30s or more latency and lack of ability to properly connect to web services and handle cross-VM HTTP testing.

Ok, I tried to sign up for a Reddit account and it failed over and over on Firefox. Same computer, Chrome worked first time. I guess Reddit wanted to fingerprint my browser in a way that Firefox wouldn't allow.

This is not the only case btw, just a nice clearcut one

Wouldn’t it be funny if the aggressive “are you sure you want to leave Edge?!” kind of messages actually made people ton the whole think it was a lower quality product…

> Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default.

Have you used a Windows PC lately? It seems like once a week I have to ignore/decline prompts to change my default browser to Edge.

I’m not sure PC makers have any say/control over this behavior.

I think you might be holding it wrong? I've only been asked once, I said no. Quite sternly. It apologised, we laughed about it. Now Edge has no internet access.

I just opened Edge, first thing it did was ask me to become default browser:

https://i.imgur.com/u2Nby1b.png

I think every non-default browser asks that the first time you open them. It's not a huge deal, but it is a huge deal when you start getting prompted from the OS to change it.

Where on the statcounter page does it show that people are using their default browser? You're making a lot of claims about Chrome commonly being the default browser without linking to any evidence of your correction of this "common misconception" that people install chrome manually.

At this point Microsoft has embedded bing so deeply into windows they don’t care

> The only viable business model for a web browser, the one that literally all major browsers use, is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default. Even Kagi makes its own Orion web browser, for exactly this reason.

The only viable business model ... while the incumbent (IE, now Chrome) is allowed to give the product away for free in service of some other predatory agenda.

Since Chrome's engine is used by Edge, Opera, Brave, etc.. Probably the best move is to become a non-profit and have all those organizations chip in.

The main reason even Microsoft gave up and rebased their browser on top of Chrome is because of the breakneck speed at which Google introduces new standards and features to the ecosystem. Having them be forced to slow down might be a good thing for browser diversity and the future of the Internet.

Or maybe because Chromium is pretty good, open-source and there's nearly no upside to reinventing the wheel?

If Mozilla would fork Chromium now and base Firefox on their fork I would switch from Brave. The engine simply technically superior.

According to this maybe somewhat broken website (idk there's a warning that it's broken but it still seems to work) https://www.netmarketshare.com/, Chrome has 65% market share on OS X.

Cite? I’ve literally never had a PC come with Chrome on it.

Hell, MS makes it super hard to even install Chrome now, including numerous irritating nag messages and ‘are you sure?!?’

If spun off, why wouldn’t Chrome then be free to sell its default search provisioning back to Google?

Because the DOJ demands two things. First, Google must sell Chrome to a DOJ approved buyer. And second, Google must not pay anyone for the default search engine spot.

About one in five Windows updates shows a notification along the lines of "Update your browser preferences to secure defaults?", which is code for "Can we bing you mate?"

Every time I visit my parents, I need to de-bing them again

Why bother to "de-bing" their computer?

I like your analysis, but wonder about this line:

>> The only viable business model for a web browser is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default.

Mostly, it's just that giving away browsers for free as a source of garnering search traffic distorts the market.

"Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default."

Why would they pay the manufactures when they can just add annoying reminders and make it hard to switch in the OS they ship it with?

This is just flat out wrong. Edge is the default browser on ~all new Windows machines, and Safari is the default (obviously) on macOS. If you have data showing the opposite, please provide it.

People go out of their way to install Chrome because it's better than the competition. Just like they used to do for Firefox, back when Firefox was a better browser than the competition.

>> Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default.

Not only is this not true for lots of manufacturers, but the minute you click on a web link anywhere in windows (help, start menu, etc) it opens in Edge, and Edge cannot be uninstalled on a windows machine.

> but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser.

Unless you have a source for that, that's flat-out wrong. I've never heard of that, I've never seen that, and I can't find any supporting evidence of that.

> Here's StatCounter's estimates of desktop browser market share. The overwhelming majority of users are using their computer's default browser.

That's not what that graph shows. It doesn't show anything about defaults.

> (Safari was available on Windows from 2007-2012, but it never captured much market share, because Apple was never willing to pay PC makers to make Safari the default.)

I think it must have been bundled with iTunes as I remember family members having Safari installed on Windows computers at the time.

But I think it being available for Windows right when Firefox and then later Chrome started to become popular didn't help - it was just some other browser that no one was recommending.

Your source shows the "Market Share Worldwide". I don't see it shows the "Default Browser Worldwide".

AFAIK, in the US, the default for:

- Windows: Edge

- Mac: Safari

- Ubuntu: Firefox

I think the claim that "Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser" needs a clear source.

The main problem with Google anti competition is how chrome is being leveraged to mine user behavior signals for search engine algos. That is the unfair advantage that needs to be killed off

That’s not the issue.

The problem is that Google owns both sides of the internet - the browser on your computer and the search engine to find everything.

As a result, they control your perception of the internet.

If a site doesn’t work, you as the user thinks the site doesn’t work. You don’t think oh, my browser is broken. Also, if you don’t find a site on Google the. To you, it doesn’t exist.

As a result, you have to bend your website to satisfy both Google search and Google chrome.

That’s why this is an issue. Because of those two things, Google effectively controls the internet, and you as a user or you as a website owner have essentially zero recourse when Google does something that harms you.

Zero recourse other than using another browser or and/or another search engine.

Why bother having a discussion when you use “zero recourse” here. It comes off as totally absurd.

> if you don’t find a site on Google, to you, it doesn’t exist

What do you mean "find a site"? Are you saying the user has a website in mind they've visited before? Or are you saying the user doesn't have a website in mind, and is looking for "any website about XYZ?"

I don't think your claim is valid. At what point does the user conclude something "doesn't exist"? Users never reach such a conclusion, in part because Google results tell us "bro, your search returned 480 million results."

How many people get past the first page? I'd wager a guess its under 3%. It could be 20 results or an infinite amount, it wouldn't make a single bit of difference. It is a fact that google gets to control who and what shows up in a search, and they put paying entries at the top. There are many problems with this. They have also de-listed websites from google search, and are at a high risk of complying with any government request to censor topics. Which, again, is not good for humanity.

That's an answer to a different question. Italian restaurants might use the first page of their menu for pizza. Do customers who want pasta conclude pasta "doesn't exist" because it's not listed on first page?

This analogy disregards everything we know and understand about the internet and how corporations operate

> everything we know

Please demonstrate what you know before making representations about what we know.

The restaurant sells more pizza than pasta, so they put pizza on the first page of menu. The strategy works, people come back for more pizza.

Google facilitates conversions by presenting paid results relevant to search intent. If nobody ever clicked paid results and converted, businesses wouldn't buy those paid spots. Admittedly, Google makes tracking success of paid ad spending a confusing nightmare, but not impossible to work out with some effort.

If there's only 10 organic spots on the highly sought after page 1, paid search is a way to fight it out in the market. Fair enough?

It's a balance of:

  * Running a search engine business.
  * Providing quality paid results that match search intent
  * Surfacing quality organic results that match search intent
  * Allowing various ways to filter and access results according to refined search intent, for example advanced search tools or other channels such as image, shopping search, maps etc.

These result counts are known to be fake.

It might exist, but if you can’t find it on Google via keywords, it might as well not exist.

Does that make sense?

> can’t find it on Google via keywords

Can't find what? Are you saying people are using Google to search for things they've misplaced? At what point is the user thinking "I can't find what I'm looking for?"

No, I'm saying they use Google to navigate.

If they want a lasagna recipe, they use Google. If (for whatever reason), a particular lasagna recipe is not findable via this method, it for all intents and purposes doesn't exist.

I hope I'm making myself clear.

So the user has something in mind. Your example is a recipe.

Just to clarify my point. Google isn't meddling with your Lasagna recipes.

The parent poster claimed website owners need to "bend your website to satisfy both Google search and Google chrome". This isn't accurate, and the claim should have been called out by more than me.

You might never use Chrome other than 30 seconds of quick testing your website build. I build sites that obtain high search ranking and I barely open Chrome. I conform to HTML standards and other good practices regarding content and structure. There's nothing "Google" about a good website other than the alarmist misinformation such as expressed by the person's comment in this thread about needing to "bend to Chrome".

The irony is I'm not friends with Google. So many things they do I object to. Even their "super-thanks" how they take 30% cut, it's criminal. People were using super-thanks to donate to fire victims on youtube, and Google was grabbing 30% of every donation for itself. I can't forgive that. BUT... I don't think they should be made to stop doing deals to be default search engine, that is overreach. Forced to sell Chrome?... don't care. I don't use Chrome.

I hope I'm making myself clear.

That framing of the issue makes a lot of sense. It might still be a reasonable middle ground if Google doesn't own Chrome itself, or control the proprietary bits or any related backend services, but still maintains leadership of Chromium development.

As a Firefox user, I also don't love the implications of forcing Google to end its default search engine deal with Firefox. If they changed course on that, then a similar deal with the hypothetical non-Google Chrome could be a viable way to maintain something like Chrome's current financial model without giving Google too much control over the web.

On the other hand, one might argue that Google's search business and that sector as a whole are already at a high enough risk right now without the courts throwing another wildcard into the mix. I'm not staking out a position on this one way or another, but I hope whatever decisions they land on are very carefully considered.

The actual issue is that Google pushes Chrome on its properties “this site renders better with Chrome download here” so it’s almost impossible for users to avoid it. Same issue with Edge. Once you switch off of Safari on macOS that’s the last you hear of it. If anything should be illegal it’s using your dominant position in one market to force users into a specific position in an adjacent one. MS got busted for it previously. Google under threat now. Apple has its own issues but it isn’t currently entirely owning a market. If Ape owned the phone market and the only App Store was Apple’s, I think the court would start ruling against Apple.

There’s also a clear conflict of interest having the advertising company own the user-agent.

This is definitely a huge part of it. My grandmother is not tech savy, and ended up with the google app installed on her phone. Because if she types anything into any of the search bars, google puts a big banner for the google app in the results page. She doesn't use safari for searching - she now goes to the google app.

Notably - it doesn't advertise chrome there? or maybe she just didn't see those. Most of her internet experience is through either the facebook app or the google app now

Wasn't she just searching google via safari anyway? I do find that popup really annoying though.

They not only officially own the user-agent which they made sure is the most installed.

They are gray cardinals of web standards which they bloated to the point of zero viable competition. And their only opponent lives on their couch.

Case in point: Google's attempt at casually turning every user into a renter of their own devices via Web Environment Integrity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity under the false pretense of protecting sites against bots. Google is continuously implementing more and more draconic control of users and their hardware, and they keep using security as the argument. It is now de facto impossible to run an open source build of Android, like LineageOS, without also losing access to a wide range of apps which refuse to run without a hardware attestation from Play Integrity API.

Chrome is not enough at all; Google also needs to sell off Android.

> Chrome is not enough at all; Google also needs to sell off Android.

Then Apple should need to sell ios.

I firmly believe that there should be no vertical integration between hardware and OS manufacturers for general purpose computing, so yes, I hold that position as well. Having private control over your general purpose computing device should be considered a human right. Apple has a similar control over their hardware and software stacks, but they have been like this from the beginning and have never pretended that the users actually owned their devices.

General purpose computing devices are so ubiquitous in society that accepting that private companies have total control over how they are used should be considered a democratic issue.

In the thread of the argument, Apple does not hold a monopoly on web advertising, though.

Apple’s entire business is building compute devices.

> If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS...

I can set Kagi as the default search engine on iOS?

Because last I checked, Apple hardcoded their list of options.

You’re right, but there is a Safari extension to set Kagi as default search.

Which is still a workound and sometimes buggy - it overwrites an existing search engine. In my case its google. But when I want to use google, I can’t - I have to switch to another browser or deactivate the kagi addon/plugin.

Sounds like a plus.

I actually don't want my Kagi plugin to overwrite Google for a different reason: Sometimes the plugin fails to hijack my search, and I really don't want my searches going to Google. So I overwrite DuckDuckGo, so even the fallback is okay.

And what's more. Where do the requests for autocomplete/suggestions get sent? Because the Kagi plugin works by redirecting the result page. So whilst typing the search question in the address bar of the browser requests are made to autocomplete/suggest the search question. These are still sent to Google (or whichever search engine selected).

That's a very good point. Mobile OS vendors should allow for user-defined search engines the way that desktop browsers do.

In principle I agree, but there needs to be an “old person mode.” The number of times I’ve uninstalled malware on my relatives’ computers is astounding.

Wouldn’t that be the current system that presents a static list of search engine? I think we are just asking for a way to go to settings and add a custom url and parameter for a non-predefined search option.

Somehow, my father in law managed to set some sketchy search engine as his default. I forget exactly what it was, but it was definitely serving malware ads.

I’d prefer a static list for those people.

I could write a book on the crazy stuff he has done to his iOS devices. I’ve contemplated putting “child mode” or whatever on his account to prevent him from changing settings or installing apps.

My favorite so far was a malware VPN that was harvesting ALL of his traffic.

I haven’t opened Safari recently but I’m pretty sure Safari in general just doesn’t have user defined search engine lists at all on any platform and never has. There’s ways to hack it with extensions, but otherwise if you want to switch SEs, you can use one on Apple’s list or you switch to a browser with more flexibility on iPhone, Mac or iPad.

Of course since one of the options in Safari is DuckDuckGo, you can also use its extensive list of !bang operators.

Sounds like an issue between Apple and Kagi?

> I can set Kagi as the default search engine on iOS? Because last I checked, Apple hardcoded their list of options.

Check again: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-for-safari/id1622835804

Works perfectly.

This doesn't change the search engine, it attempts to redirect from whatever one is configured in the settings. It's very much an unreliable hack.

Unreliable indeed. It stops working half the time for no apparent reason and you have to go in and toggle settings to make it work again.

That was the old extension. New one is stable.

You are wrong. Your searches are still sent to the original search provider before the redirect extension takes over. It defeats any privacy Kagi could possibly provide.

As a user of this application, this is not even close to the same thing as having the ability to change the search engine in the browser settings itself. If I need to actually search something on one of the other search engines for reasons then I have to go disable the plugin, or set it to a specific search engine which I am unlikely to use. I am also curious if my typing into the search bar still sends my quick search pre-submit to my search engine selected in the browser unless I remove the pre-fetching. So no, not perfect. And this is not Kagi’s fault that’s just the unfortunate situation Safari leaves them in.

> > > If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS...

> > I can set Kagi as the default search engine on iOS? > > Because last I checked, Apple hardcoded their list of options.

> not even close to the same thing as having the ability to change the search engine in the browser settings itself

Two replies up, they expressed surprise at being able to make Kagi DEFAULT.

You can. To your point, you can flip it off by toggling the extension.

You can also have it not intercept others, only one.

To the question, "I can set Kagi as default on iOS?" the answer is yes, for the normal definitions of set and default, meaning, make it so when I search I get Kagi.

Otherwise the comment would not have been about "Kagi as default on iOS", but something like, there's a setting for alternative search engines on iOS? The answer to that is of course, no, but there are workarounds.

You can’t set Kagi as the default though.

As others have said, you can only set something else as default and run an extension that tries to hijack it.

In addition to bundling, Google has also been massively pushing it via ads.

As far as I know Chrome is the only thing that has been advertised on Googles famously clean "front page" before making a search.

That tells me something about how important it has been for them to push it.

There's also the way they've used deceptive ads ("download a better browser") to me and many other Firefox users over the years. (No, a browser that leaks my browsing habits to the worlds biggest advertising company while not supporting vertical tabs a decade after it entered the market certainly isn't best for me.)

Chrome had been on the biggest and most VIP billboard on the planet:

https://open.substack.com/pub/bitecode/p/web-browsers-and-ou...

Nobody can get it except chrome.

Yup, I don't understand why Google would sponsor McLaren F1 team. They've already done a better promoting Chrome.

If you visit google.com, there will be a question bubble on the side asking you to download Chrome.

And after you do, there will be another one to make it the default browser. Number of clicks might be the same in both user stories, but the second one has a lot more hand-holding.

On Android Chrome is preinstalled and cannot be uninstalled

On Windows 11, Edge is preinstalled and can't simply be removed either. Furthermore, it constantly bugs you about if you're sure you don't want to enable their recommended settings, which ends up re-enabling all the analytics/rewards/etc.

What it would take to get them punished again...

The edge situation is a mess for sure, and Microsoft seems to have such a perfect understanding of the current judiciary climate that they can't dance around the lines without any consequences.

Significant market share, which is something they don't currently possess.

> have such a perfect understanding of the current judiciary climate that they can't dance around the lines without any consequences

More like they have their hands in creating the current judiciary climate. Kind of hard to file suit against someone who is intertwined with the agencies that would investigate them.

In Europe, you can now fully remove Edge from Windows 11, and it doesn't come back (or at least hasn't so far). And it's not even hard, you just uninstall it like any other app. They do give some scary prompts, and it does disable all internet-based integrations in the start menu, but that's not even necessarily a bad thing.

Someone hasn't told that to my Windows machine. I can't uninstall Edge, at least not via Settings > Apps > Installed Apps.

You have to have Windows with region set to a European country during the initial installation. If you chose US during the original installation, even if you live in the EU and now have your region set to one, that won't work. But you can install Windows from scratch (it has to be on a formatted partition, if you restore from a previous installation it doesn't work) with the right region choice, and the option is simply there.

Nobody cares about the desktop anymore.

Which ones? Samsung internet is the default for Samsung devices (which constitute the majority of Android devices in the west) and most (all?) of the Chinese OEMs have their own browser... The only Android devices I've ever had where the default is Chrome are Pixel devices...

> Samsung internet is the default for Samsung devices (which constitute the majority of Android devices in the west)

I have a Samsung Galaxy S23 and it came with both Chrome and "Internet" which I guess is the Samsung one. I don't remember which was default or if it asked the first time something tried to open a webpage, but I didn't even notice the Samsung one was on here and I'd guess the Chrome brand name wins out for most people if it asks...

I have a samsung phone and although it comes wih the samsung browser, chrome is still the default and cannot be disabled

It makes sense why it can't be _removed_... it's required for core OS interaction features such as a known-working login portal framework and probably tons of other 'reuse the rendering engine from the browser to display stuff' portions of the shell and settings pages.

If you wanted to de-google your phone _that_ much it probably requires a custom firmware blob that's shipped with a different browser... if that's even possible / reasonable.

It's not really required. Android comes with a separate webview (that cannot be overridden). Sure it's based on Chromium but that means there should zero reliance on Chrome the product, and those known working login portals can continue working without Chrome.

It's well known that Google requires manufacturers to install their apps and requires it to be uninstallable. This includes Gmail, Google, and others.

> that cannot be overridden

I thought I knew better, because the webview implementation can be changed in the system preferences, but (of course) the list of package names that can appear there is hardcoded:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/androi...

I live with firefox mobile engine for webview without any issue

GeckoView cannot replace built-in WebView [0].

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView

The real question is whether Chrome's dominance comes from unfair practices (bundling, aggressive prompts, discouraging competition, etc.) or simply being a product people want to use.

I don't think those are either/or scenarios.

You get nagged to do it by the most popular website in the world (google.com) if you're using something else, which might be part of the problem.

And I get nagged by the operating system in multiple different ways (system dialogs, notifications, opening a new file type, ...) to switch back from Chrome.

It'd be ironic if Google had to sell Chrome to Microsoft due to monopoly reasons.

The mere existence of a competitor is not the spirit of antitrust.

Look at what Google does with Chrome and how it harms the internet, they literally just disabled an ad blocker and then offered a new tier of ad free Youtube for $8 a month.

Then think about the power it gives them for tracking, remember they tried to replace tracking cookies with their own standard?

The counterpoint would be anyone can fork Chrome and put an adblocker back in (ie Brave).

I worry as part of Google, chrome is just an open source project with profit as a secondary motive, while as it’s own company they’ll probably try to make it more profitable and it’ll become worse and closed down.

If it's so unprofitable why have they spent, what, nearly a year now in court trying desperately to keep it? Have you genuinely never heard of a loss-leader?

Across their entire buffet of products, many of which are free at point of use like Chrome is, they advertise Chrome. That the internet is better with Chrome. That their products are better with Chrome. Do you really believe this is genuinely just because they also make Chrome, and are jazzed about that fact?

The fact that they're working so hard to keep it tells me it's an even better idea to make them sell it.

> The fact that they're working so hard to keep it tells me it's an even better idea to make them sell it.

If your goal is nothing deeper than to hurt Google, sure. Otherwise, this logic is far from complete.

That's the same argument as with Android - its open source, anyone can fork it and change whatever they don't like!

And its flawed in the same way - first its not fully open source (IIRC Crhome has some proprietary bits that are not in Chromium, same with Android+Google Play services vs AOSP) but good luck maintaining your fork for any length of time!

Google is in full control of both Android and Chromium with all decisions happening behind closed doors with zero leverage for anyone from the outside to influence those decisions. So as with Manifest v3 now and many similarly bad decisions for Android, once Google selects a course, it will be harder and harder over time to keep your changes if you still want the end result to look like what the users will see as Chrome/Android.

And I would say with a browser the pressure to update would be even greater & thus its even harder to keep any signifficant custom changes.

On the one hand you're positing that Chrome can just live on independently from Google. That 's what "anyone can fork" means to me. Forking is not just copying the code, but maintaining the project and keeping it relevant

On the other hand you worry that Chrome can't go on without Google, as it currently doesn't bring enough money and needs to be a market abuse tool to justify the costs.

In a very real way, I think if the situation is unsolvable letting Chrome die and be born again could be the only long term solution. It would be painful, but we're already bleeding.

Sure, but there’s a difference between Brave existing as its own company and the government forcibly coming in and breaking up a company.

I think it’s good for the market that some players are fully independent, and others are part of massive conglomerates.

You seem to be disagreeing that what Google does is problematic, let alone illegal in the first place ?

I can see it as an opinion, but that changes the whole discussion IMHO.

So many problems would be solved if the selling of data about people was regulated to a degree that it ceased to be profitable. Many "free" things would go away, but none of those are actually free, the price is just hidden.

The issue is that you don’t need to search for chrome. Google tried to force it down your throat when you visit their sites using any other browser

That's not how it works. As Google is the default search engine for most browsers (Safari, Firefox), as soon as you hit Google it begs you to use Chrome instead of whatever you're using right now. You don't have to search for Chrome, Google nags you until you switch to it, or switch to another search engine.

> If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage.

As long as you don’t want a search engine that is not on the Apple’s authored list.

Google uses their dominant market position in search, email, video hosting (youtube) etc. to promote their browser. Such sites have had a banner telling you they are best viewed with chrome if you use a different browser, and are optimized to work best on chrome.

They don’t allow any search engine in safari now that apple has become an ad network. This is why there’s a weird workaround for Kagi. The search for pay deals are the priority. For those on Mac devices, Orion is excellent now imo.

But how will Google divesting Chrome solve this ?

It sounds like they’re also trying to ban Google from paying someone (like Apple) to be default so if they did, Apple might no longer be disincentivized to build their own search engine (or at least do a DuckDuckGo and stick their branding and ads on top of licensed Bing results or something). That would represent more competition. (Although it would probably kill Mozilla too)

I wish I could upvote this a million times.

It's a massive cognitive dissonance that you're right -- it makes absolutely no sense. A lot of people just want to argue that Google is bad/too big/anticompetitive, and will use whatever argument is easiest to do so, even if they flat-out contradict each other.

The actual reality is that most people do change defaults quite easily when they perceive a benefit, so it's incredibly difficult to make the argument that defaults are anticompetitive. Chrome proves this. At the same time, some people aren't aware and will stick to a default, and the search market is so big that it's still worth $$$ for Google to pay Apple for the search default. The search deal proves this. On these points, there's zero anticompetitive behavior.

But if there's an anticompetitive angle regarding search, it's that in effect, Google is essentially paying Apple not to develop its own search engine. But that's basically an impossible legal argument to make. Nobody can force Apple to compete in search, and if it doesn't want to and would prefer to take Google's money, that's its free choice.

> If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer, run the installer, open Chrome, and set it as the default browser. So many users do this that people conclude Chrome has an unfair advantage.

Most of that advantage comes from an unfair practice, of Google making consumers think that their choice of browser was in someway inferior (which could be true) and thus they should prefer Chrome (which is not true). If Chrome won market dominance using this method, then it becomes an unfair practice. Same thing with Microsoft Edge, Apple's App Store, etc. You can't use your market power in one market to influence another.

That's just simple advertising though. Nearly every company is selling their product as being superior to some set of competing products, at whatever their price point is.

it would be, if chrome would pay for this ad (and other browsers can compete for the spot). But it doesn't (can't?) and that is exactly what is wrong here.

Did Chrome pay for the ad placement on Google’s sites? Could Mozilla or Microsoft buy the same spots? Could they pay YouTube to keep the site faster for them than standards-compliant browsers?

If the answer to any of those is no, it’s more than simple advertising.

Yes. My biggest gripe with Google is that they prop up unprofitable products with their wildly popular product. It makes competition impossible. YouTube is the perfect example.

I feel like it should be illegal to use your profits in one industry to run a loss leader in a totally separate industry.

> I feel like it should be illegal to use your profits in one industry to run a loss leader in a totally separate industry.

There’s nothing wrong with running a loss leader, only with squeezing everybody else out.

I think the key part is “separate industry” – Google should have had to restrict Chrome promotion to what was available to other browser vendors (e.g. not the Gmail login page because they don’t sell ad space there).

>Most of that advantage comes from an unfair practice, of Google making consumers think that their choice of browser was in someway inferior (which could be true) and thus they should prefer Chrome (which is not true).

Are you sure that the advantage came from marketing? In my mind the advantage was that Chrome really was faster for example due to V8. Also can you explain why the "thus they should prefer Chrome" reasoning is flawed?

Personally, I haven't seen Google act in a way that prevents competition in the browser space (ie. being anticompetitive). If anything, Windows is more anticompetitive because it is closed source, making it much more difficult to create a competing product. All the web specifications are completely free. And Apple is the only vendor that prevents browser competition on their platform, although Windows does give you a popup telling you not install Chrome.[0]

The Google search agreements between Apple and Google seem more likely to be anticompetitive.

[0] Searching for Google Chrome with the default Bing search engine with the default Edge browser gives you this result:

>Promoted by Microsoft

>There's no need to download a new web browser. Microsoft recommends using Microsoft Edge for a fast, secure, and modern web experience that can help save you time and money.

See also Every trick Microsoft pulled to make you browse Edge instead of Chrome - https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...

It's mostly marketing. Google spent lots of money both for external marketing and for Google-property banners that advertise Chrome. There were years you basically couldn't visit a popular website without being told to install Chrome. Then there were billboards and paper ads on top of that.

There were feature differences for sure, but the marketing did a massive amount of work in this case. If people switched for features, all that spending for years wouldn't be necessary.

> So many users do this that people conclude Chrome has an unfair advantage

Because Chrome is the default on android phones and the easiest way to sync saved passwords between your android and your desktop/laptop is to use chrome in both places

Chrome having such a huge market share on mobile does add pressure for users to adopt it on Desktops and Laptops too

Antitrust goal is protect competition and prevent monopolies, Safari search and Bing market shares aren't in a position of a monopoly, unlike Google's (~79% of desktop search market share)

Which is ironic because this judgement will destroy Firefox (if Firefox doesn't destroy itself, anyway), and probably Chrome, and leave Edge as basically the only mainstream web browser with a "monopoly". The more things change...

I think Firefox will live. Maybe Mozilla dies, but somebody will raise funds and pick up the work.

Selling off Chrome ≠ Destroying Chrome

Do you think it would survive a sale? Could the project be able to survive a huge nose dive in contributors? I only use chrome because I trust Google, who knows if the new owner would be similarly trustworthy in my eyes.

Chrome is the default on every non-Apple system in common use. Windows (Edge), Chrome OS, Android…

Edge is chromium based not chrome based. Google is not the default search engine on edge nor does it have any real control over the edge experience which Microsoft couldn't change itself.

ChromeOS is not popular by any means outside of the US education market. Chrome being the default on just Android is hardly a strong case when Android usage in the US is only 56%.

It depends on what the concern is. when IE6 was the default browser for the vast majority of consumers, it held back web technologies and generated considerable pressure towards MSFT hosting services.

And on some Android devices it isn't even the default (e.g. Samsung Internet).

Samsung Internet is also chromium based.

But it's not chrome. This is important because things like default search engine are set by the product built on top of chromium. Control over web standards isn't really relevant.

Control over web standards was very relevant to the previous antitrust fight with Microsoft’s over IE6.

Every non-apple system in common use? So linux? I don't think so...

Unless you are counting Android as a Linux system, Linux isn't in common use. Ask the top 5 PC makers how many Linux setups they sell and it's going to be a pretty small number.

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