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Comment by tester756 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

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