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Comment by dustice | Hacker News Reader

I've seen many articles recently that suggest Microsoft's bundling of Browser to OS is analagous to Google's bundling of OS to Browser. They miss the key distiction that Google's offerings are /free/ and open-source. You don't like the OS? No problem, you can run Chrome (or Chromium) on whichever OS you want. No lock-ins, no harm to the user.

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Assuming you were buying Windows because you wanted Windows for some unrelated reason, or buying a computer with Windows, then you also got IE, but you were free to run other browsers.

How is it being closed source a meaningful distinction?

Free is not, and never has been, a defense to antitrust. Indeed, free offerings are generally considered very good evidence of antitrust: the company at issue is abusing its market power in one market to increase its market power in another market in non-competitive ways (i.e., by using money earned from a separate market to undermine the target market through under-priced goods). The obvious worry is that the products will stop being free (or so cheap) once the company has achieved sufficient market control.

It does not matter what the end user can do, antitrust focuses on what the alleged monopolist is doing.

Also, choice is not a defense to antitrust under the Sherman Act. That's a common misconception among non-lawyers. Choice is only weak evidence, at best, that the an alleged monopolist's activities are not anti-competitive.

Chrome != Chromium. Anyone who has tried Chromium in Linux will instantly notice they are using a much less polished product.

Chromium may be open source, but Chrome is not.

If I may ask, how is it less polished? I'm posting with Chrome for Linux right now (and I used Chromium before, which is identical) and it looks beautiful.

Excepting of course external plugin type issues (printing and Flash don't work yet), the browser runs super-fast, never crashes, and looks great. Some of the configuration options aren't complete, but those are minor issues (oh and I see they have added many of them).

It has gotten better recently, but it is lagging quite a lot compared to plain Chrome.

Text rendering used to be horrible but it has gotten better. But if I can't even configure proxy settings without hacky gconf editing, that tells you that you are definitely using a browser in catch-up mode.

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