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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Apple tricked quite a few Windows users into installing Safari and setting it as the default. Then Apple discontinued Safari for Windows without making an announcement or notifying uses (same as they do with older OS X versions... they just stop updating them). So there are quite a few people out there using Safari on Windows with no clue about the fact that they're using a completely insecure browser.

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If someone went to the trouble of installing Safari they know

And by the way, I never managed to make it work in Windows...

One of the main points of this thread is that Apple specifically targeted people who _weren't_ trying to install it.

Ah I understand now.

True, if you installed iTunes or QT and it installed it as extra, yeah, you probably have an older browser installed (but I think there's not that many people that still use it)

I think you are still missing the complete context of the original comment. Once a browser is set as default, for a significant portion of people that won't change unless they are somehow prompted or forced to change it again at a later date. To many people, the browser is just another part of the OS that allows viewing webpages, and they just call it "The internet".

It seems if they were that clueless, they would have had many more opportunities to change default browsers without realizing it.

What other browsers auto-install from other software and automatically change your default?

Chrome?

From what? It automatically sets itself as default?

Yup. Chrome is offered as opt-out bundleware with quite a few Windows apps and Google pays the publishers for this. This is how quite a few regular users switched to Chrome. Even just updating Java in Windows it'll try and sneak a copy of Chrome in with the update.

lets be honest. flash or java plus the ask toolbar have been installed by now, and managed to install chrome.

chrome has a way of installing itself.

No, they really didn't. I've fixed quite a few friends' computers and asked 'why do you have Safari and Quicktime installed?' and the answer is always 'I have no idea, maybe iTunes did it'.

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