Some of the top browser makers around have issued a letter to the European Commission (EC) alleging that Microsoft gives the Edge browser an unfair advantage and should be subject to EU tech rules.

A letter seen by Reuters, sent by Vivaldi, Waterfox, and Wavebox, and supported by a group of web developers, also supports Opera’s move to take the EC to court over its decision to exclude Microsoft Edge from being subject to the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

As Edge comes pre-installed by default on Windows machines, users must navigate the Microsoft offering in order to download their browser of choice. The letter states that, “No platform independent browser can aspire to match Edge’s unparalleled distribution advantage on Windows. Edge is, moreover, the most important gateway for consumers to download an independent browser on Windows PCs.”

  • @ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.world
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    09 months ago

    running “winget install firefox” in an elevated powershell gets you a better browser without ever opening edge. but then you still cannot uninstall it and all the other shit about it still stays active.

    • @T156@lemmy.world
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      09 months ago

      Yes, but they’ve got the advantage of having done it for longer, and not stirred the pot.

      I honestly don’t think it would have been an issue for Microsoft if they just decided to sit on Internet Explorer instead of trying to push everyone into using Edge.

    • icedterminal
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      09 months ago

      An out of the box OS should include a browser. Microsoft takes a ham-fisted approach, however, Apple makes it entirely possible to uninstall Safari. You do have to jump through the hoop of disabling System Integrity Protection to remove it, but it’s simple as trashing the app and deleting the data. I speak from experience. Very easy to do.

      • @njordomir@lemmy.world
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        09 months ago

        Seriously, showing a pop up confirmation if the user tries to uninstall the last browser on the device is all that is needed.

    • @towerful@programming.dev
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      09 months ago

      The issue is with how aggressive Microsoft is about it.

      Trying to download chrome? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
      Changing default browser? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
      Windows update… “We’ve done you a solid, because we know you want to use Edge”.
      I’m sure at one point, it was a warning in the security center that you aren’t using Edge.
      Also Teams (in sure there are others) will open links in Edge, despite what default browser you have set.

        • Echo Dot
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          09 months ago

          Would not be Linux then? I’m pretty certain Mac OS isn’t even in the top three mostly because their os is tied to computers and their computers are stupidly expensive and only westerners can really afford them with any degree of regularity.

          • @rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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            09 months ago

            Not by market share on desktops in particular Western countries, no.

            In the world - yes, I’d expect there to be more Linux desktops really existing than MacOS desktops.

            Apple is the West in a nutshell, though. When a real need or a problem is mentioned, it’s mentioned only rarely as some selling point - like Jobs saying MacOSX is “very Linux-like” (sic). When a solution reaches reality, it’s done in a neutered way - like Apple still regularly releasing sources. When a real need is fulfilled, you can expect twice the effort to have been covertly spent on negating its effect - like with Apple’s “just works” and sterility and even privacy selling points, which come with walled gardens, closed APIs, short and bad support, and them actually still spying on you. A declaration of effort to tackle any problem existing in the wild is always aimed at portrayal of said effort to be persuasive enough to sell the product and the more efficient, the better, where efficiency means that actually doing anything other than persuasion is against the goal.

            See, the difference between market mechanisms and geopolitics is not in people deciding that there’ll be this set of rules here and that set of rules there. It’s due to structure. The bigger that structure makes companies, the more similar market dynamic and scientific&technical progress will be to geopolitics.

            Which is why I genuinely don’t understand people who frown at “techno-luddites” like me dreaming of going back to decentralized, even if with worse compatibility, hardware production and simpler software and formats. I would even say that some degree of protectionism from less developed countries would help, where hardware can be imported only if there’s domestic alternative production to match.

            I’m more on the libertarian side, but if in XIX century weapons ownership was widespread, and in XX century it stopped being such, because of one’s ability to kill much more people quickly, then the same with electronics would make sense by the same principle. Only the qualitative difference in power comes not with the device, but with the centralized production line it comes from.

            Of course, that’s not my proposition. It wouldn’t work.

            My proposition would be to try to design some “civilization minimized”, where sufficiently usable computers can be produced in an area of 100k people, with society, industry, communications and warfare approaches optimized for that limitation. That kind of limitation for a self-contained unit of civilization, so to say.

            So - one can buy a reasonably good laptop for 500$ today.

            What kind of laptop can one produce for that sum in a 100k people settlement? Is that even possible to make it close to 500$ in relative value?

            I’d expect we’d need to solve all heavy problems with specialized boards. I think lithography is actually applicable here - we don’t need it very precise, it’s far above our possibilities in such a hypothetical unit, and it would improve resource usage efficiency. And I think a more compact machine of PDP-11 level is possible, with specialized boards in Amiga ideology. I also think we can even have some kind of machine learning, but with analog storage of coefficients to reach anything close to sufficient efficiency. It would be a Fallout-kind computer, nothing fancy, but - possibly usable. For dedicated boards (some of which can, again, solve problems with analog approaches) there is a possibility of optronic elements being more accessible and energy-efficient.

            There’s a question of portability - one can expect lithium to just not be realistically available in any random area of the world populated by 100k people. I mean, trying to imagine some autarky …

            So maybe not a laptop, LOL.

            Nah. That’s bullshit. That won’t work. At least not every 100k people. Maybe every 10mln.

      • Echo Dot
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        09 months ago

        Haven’t they been told they’ve got to stop doing that now?

        I thought the European commission had forced them to allow other browsers to actually use their own render engines

  • @dgmib@lemmy.world
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    09 months ago

    I’m not defending Microsoft… but if we’re going to go after a tech company for leveraging their other assets to give themselves an unfair advantage can we also go after Google?

    In the first releases of Edge, Microsoft tried to build a new web browser from scratch to compete with Google Chrome. By google kept changing YouTube’s code so that videos would playback janky on Edge. Microsoft eventually gave up trying to fix for YouTubes ongoing changes and now Edge is based on Chromium (the same open source web browser maintained by Google, that chrome os built on). Google leveraged YouTube to prevent completion from Edge.

    And now Google is blocking ad blocking extensions so that users are forced to see more google ads in their browser.

    Microsoft’s has leveraged their unfair advantage to get a little over 5% market share.

    Google’s leveraged their unfair advantage to get 66% of the market.

    Both companies need a hard smack down, but I want to see Google taken down too.

    • Echo Dot
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      09 months ago

      The early versions of edge were absolutely terrible and didn’t support modern standards. I fully believe that YouTube didn’t work on Edge but I don’t believe it was anything to do with Google and everything to do with Microsoft not being able to build a web browser.

        • Echo Dot
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          9 months ago

          What do you mean history disagrees with me? If you look at reviews of Microsoft edge when it released pretty much all of them talk about how it lacked compatibility with modern standards and was nowhere close to feature complete. Large parts of the HTML5 spec were missing, including any support for webm or ogg encoding.

          • @sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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            09 months ago

            I mean that there is several indicators that Google did indeed try to sabotage other browsers on YouTube.

            • Echo Dot
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              9 months ago

              That was a claim that was made yes, but never proven.

              Meanwhile what I said is demonstrably verifiable. Early versions of Microsoft edge that they put out were an absolute travesty, and all of the criticism leveled at it was 100% earned, it had nothing to do with any machinations from Google. Microsoft made a terrible browser put it out to the general public and were rightfully criticized for it. They couldn’t fix it so they switched to chromium.

      • @Katana314@lemmy.world
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        09 months ago

        I’m a web dev, fully disagree with you. I don’t even think this comment is based in any reality, just MS hatred (which, to be fair, I currently hate them for other reasons, but it’s a big company with many parts)

        I warned my colleagues against doing all development and testing in Chrome, because they would inevitably code towards “Webkit features” unknowingly, and leave both Edge and Firefox in the dust. I set up Edge as my default because, in an effort to catch up in popularity, they were being very strict and communicative with standards. If I wrote a page to work in Edge, it would work in other browsers. Meanwhile, there were horrific features like linear gradients that needed a full 15 lines of CSS specifically because Webkit would implement it, realize their implementation had gaps, reimplement it, and end up with 14 used-in-release syntaxes that you needed to account for, instead of the Edge/Firefox “Build it right” philosophy.

        I sincerely doubt the current YouTube situation is actually because YouTube is a complex site. 90% of the motivation for whatever feature they’re putting in is to push Chrome and fuck over other browsers.

        • Echo Dot
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          9 months ago

          I’m not saying that I like the fact that they’ve gone over to a new render engine, I don’t.

          But frankly the alternative wasn’t working and either they couldn’t or were unwilling to put in the effort to develop their own system.

          I fully believe Google might have been doing some messing around with YouTube. but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they did and no one was ever able to provide any evidence for the accusation.

          With regards to things like linear gradients, kind of get your point but also at the same time who the hell still codes raw CSS? I’ve been out of the industry for probably about 8 years and even back then people were using SASS, so needing a bunch of vendor prefixes is kind of irrelevant really.

          • @Katana314@lemmy.world
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            09 months ago

            Citing SASS feels like “Who codes HTML when we have Dreamweaver” type of comment.

            SASS just translates your styles to CSS, so even if you write one simple line, it’s polyfilling 13 - and for various technical reasons it’s better if one line polyfills one line for consistency. Just to give one example, an app might bloat its page load by inadvertently having 1MB-large CSS files post SASS translation.

            I’ve heard the comment about “not keeping up, wasn’t working” in regards to Edge several times, but I haven’t heard any concrete examples of that that didn’t relate to Chrome flexing its position or jumping the gun on standards. It’s even realistic a large percent of that was people, web devs included, having trailing feelings of “Ugh, IE - I mean Edge” long after that stopped making sense.

            • Echo Dot
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              09 months ago

              Dreamweaver is an IDE (a bad and crappy one). SASS is a pre-processing language.

              They don’t even remotely do the same thing

    • @Demdaru@lemmy.world
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      09 months ago

      Please, please do act on google too. Didn’t knew about YT thing, but god I loved Spartan Edge. It was soo…resource unintensive. It…simply did it job, was quick, low resource, looked good… :( I switched to it from chrome and then it became chrome.

      • Yi K
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        09 months ago

        YT does a lot of sneaky sneaky stuff. My Firefox constantly lagged on YT pages until one day I installed UserAgent-Switcher and pretended I was a Chrome. The lag went away.

        And no it doesn’t work now.

        • Kallioapina
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          09 months ago

          Its working for me now, I tested it this morning. Even tried swithching the user agent back to Firefox and yep - Youtube gets magically some buffering problems with it.

          Close youtube tab, switch user agent back to chrome, clear cache and restart the browser: no buffering problems. What a bunch of assholes.

          I’ve reported this earlier to EU competition ombudsman, like a about a year ago, and they confirmed then that they were getting reports about the issue, Google of course denying the practice. Hopefully they are working on some punishment for Google in the background.

          • Yi K
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            09 months ago

            Maybe I misconfiguted it. I’ll check it out another day

        • @Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          09 months ago

          Don’t have any of the switcher things ony my firefox deskrop and mobile.
          The only modifications I use are uBlock origin.

    • chingadera
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      09 months ago

      Long last effect from us nerds telling everyone to stop using IE, because Google wasn’t a hotplate covered in wet shit at the time.

  • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    09 months ago

    Theres like 2 or 3 commonly supported browser engines and the people who run them are complaining about unfair monopoly by a browser whose main purpose is to find another browser?

  • @vithigar@lemmy.ca
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    09 months ago

    As Edge comes pre-installed by default on Windows machines, users must navigate the Microsoft offering in order to download their browser of choice.

    What’s the actual alternative they want here? That users look up download URLs on other devices and download their browser of choice via command line using cURL Invoke-WebRequest? That ISPs provide browser installers on USB sticks?

    Also, it’s not like MS is cornering the market on browser share here. Even with this “unfair advantage” they’ve only scraped together a 5% slice of browser usage.

    • @WhoIsRich@lemmy.world
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      09 months ago

      For a while when you installed Windows, the first time user setup gave you a choice of popular browsers and it handled the download and install.

      Now Microsoft is actively trying to sabotage other browsers with popups and office apps bypassing the default browser setting.

    • @Katana314@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      You can get Firefox and Opera on the Windows Store. Ostensibly, this is how every other OS works now, although on Linux it’s usually less of a storefront with Candy Crush pushed up front, and more like a commandline entry to get apps by known name.

      I think people are just used to the Windows colloquialism of not having a central store, thus getting every app on the web through an installer file - and then, through meaningful distrust and horrific memories of Windows 8, choosing not to use that store when it was added.

    • @WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
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      09 months ago

      IMO edge coming pre-installed isn’t a big deal. But I’d like to be able to uninstall edge and not have Windows periodically try to trick me into setting edge as my default browser again.

    • @Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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      09 months ago

      I’d settle for them being force to offer links to alternatives when you first install Windows.

      AND being forced to stop the bullshit every few updates where they force you through choosing options. One of which is “update to recommended browser settings for security?”… Which just defaults the system to use edge.

    • Captain Aggravated
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      09 months ago

      Require Microsoft to distribute competing browsers in the Microsoft store.

      I can install Firefox, Chromium etc. from my distro’s package manager. I don’t open a web browser to install software. You still do that on Windows because Microsoft has a financial incentive to keep competitors out of their store, so their store sucks.

      • Frodo
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        9 months ago

        You can install Firefox from Windows’s package manager Winget with the command:

        winget install -e --id Mozilla.Firefox
        

        You don’t have to use the Store or Edge.

          • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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            09 months ago

            Exactly this. The point is not that there is no way to do it, the point is that the alternatives are obscure to limit adoption. It’s a dark pattern.

            This winget thing is worse than just using edge to download an alternative. The problem is not that people are forced to interact with a browser they dont like, it’s all the people who don’t know enough to understand that there are alternatives, and those people will never use winget.

    • @CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      09 months ago

      Basically either offer users a dialog box asking which browser they’d like to use or offer the browsers in the Microsoft Store.

      And stop telling me that “The Internet is better using Edge”, Microsoft.

    • Rentlar
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      09 months ago

      Invoke-WebRequest

      To comply with the court decision, Microsoft have added a super easy to use PowerShell command to install your favourite browser!

      ps> Get-Browser-That-Isnt-Microsoft-Edge -Q -Browser Firefox -NumberOfNags 0 -RevertAfterUpdate False -When Now -Why BecauseTheCourtsToldUsWeNeededTo

      • @rmuk@feddit.uk
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        09 months ago

        winget install -e --id Mozilla.Firefox --accept-package-agreements already works prefectly.

        • Rentlar
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          09 months ago

          Yes, i’m just making fun of the verbose nature of PowerShell commands.

      • @A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yes, and its a nasty story thats all unofficial cause no one is ever gonna go on the record, at least not for another 10-20 years when it comes out in someones book…

        but the short of it is, Edge had its own browser engine, but google kept making changes to youtube and other google sites that broke Edges performance and made it run like dogshit, while leaving chromium based browsers alone.

        after many instances of sabotage > microsoft workaround > google sabotage> microsoft workaround. Microsoft finally gave up and remade Edge as a chromium based browser.

        • @Wrench@lemmy.world
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          09 months ago

          So Google establishing a now industry standard of evergreen versioning so that they could iterate relatively quickly on features, rather than have to maintain compatibility with years old versions, and iterating quickly on their own major websites - is a bad thing?

          Right.

          Yeah, let’s go back to having to maintain terrible legacy browsers that behaved completely differently for the rest of time.

          • @h4lf8yte@lemmy.ml
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            09 months ago

            On “features” they would like to see. Most of the time features that make it difficult to block tracking and keep their advertising business going. The web is all about communication standards between different programs and this includes the joint adoption of new standards and respect for the existing standards.

            • @Wrench@lemmy.world
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              09 months ago

              And Google established a lot of the standards that were both open and long living.

              Yeah, Google has strayed far from the “Do no evil” philosophy in the last decade. But this rewriting of history to praise IE and demonfy Chrome from that era is ridiculous.

                • @Wrench@lemmy.world
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                  09 months ago

                  Because we should wipe away 2 decades of history and pretend the next thing is flawless on release?

                  Edge came in with a freight train of baggage, and didn’t make it. It’s absurd to frame this otherwise.

          • @A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            ah yes, the google white knights. here to completely misconstrue the argument to make everyone but google the bad guy.

            because thats what a trillion dollar company that threatens to seize control of the internet needs.

            • @Wrench@lemmy.world
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              09 months ago

              Rofl. So let’s white wash the browser history before chrome, then. Back when IE reigned supreme. You must either be too young or not in the industry to champion that.

              • @A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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                09 months ago

                Dude. Seriously. Genuinely.

                Are you on drugs?

                Or are you the victim of a mental derangement?

                Because we need an explanation for this complete divorce from reality you seem to be suffering from.

    • @seaQueue@lemmy.world
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      09 months ago

      It’s possible to go after both. M$ has some fucked up practices that trick the user into using edge that shouldn’t be okay

      • @Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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        09 months ago

        It’s possible to. Are they? Correct me if I’m wrong, but they’re not. They’re going after Microsoft and not Google.

        Not that it makes any difference since Edge is just reskinned Chrome now anyway. If it was still it’s own thing I’d be rooting for Microsoft, at least up until they start to become bigger, then I’d turn on them.

      • @biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works
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        09 months ago

        I went to the widgets pane on my w11 laptop once, clicked an article and to my horror, all of my data had been synced from chrome to edge, including passwords, history, open tabs, extensions, pretty much everything.

        I even went as far as to report it to the ACCC (the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) since I’ve never seen it from other browsers, and that I found it pervy the fact they did it without consent, although I doubt the ACCC would be enough to change this shitty practice, and others like it.

        They’re not even trying to trick the user anymore, they’re forcing them.

        • JWBananas
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          09 months ago

          You have to opt into that behavior. It prompts you on first launch

  • @2pt_perversion@lemmy.world
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    09 months ago

    I agree with going after the Edge Lords and making things more fair…but I’m guessing Chrome is the most used we browser by a long shot even on windows so the “No platform independent browser can aspire to match Edge’s unparalleled distribution advantage on Windows." part feels like users are comfortable stepping over Edge’s corpse to download chrome anyway.

    • tb_
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      09 months ago

      If users had a pop-up which allowed them to select more than just Edge or Chrome, other browsers may see an increase in users. Chrome is as much a default as Edge is in that way.

      • @2pt_perversion@lemmy.world
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        09 months ago

        Again I’m in favor of choosing browsers on install, but lots of Chrome installs on Windows is not the same as being the default.

        So much so that you even get this annoying popup from Edge when you try to download Chrome with Edge - which should be against the rules imo.

        • tb_
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          09 months ago

          Sorry, I phrased that poorly. It is the default alternative, most users don’t bother to look for anything else.

          And Chrome also does pop-ups not unlike it when you visit Google websites on a non-Google browser.

    • @myliltoehurts@lemm.ee
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      09 months ago

      It’s true, although chrome has gotten a significant boost from Google promoting it in search and every Google app (which I don’t know if they still do).

      So chrome beats edge on users, but it’s also likely largely because of the unfair advantage it receives/received from that promotion. Those options are not really available to other browser developers (unless Amazon or meta also decided they want a browser for some reason).

      • qevlarr
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        09 months ago

        Chrome got popular at introduction because it was much faster at loading and displaying websites. Sure, there was a marketing push by Google, but it succeeded on the products merits and not some unfair business advantage. It still is a great browser.

        We do need antitrust protections but not always because consumers are getting a bad product. It’s more about the balance of power. Maybe their products are good now, or their business practices are fair now to other market actors, but you never know when that will change and then it’s too late. It’s like you need safeguards against autocracy also when they’re genuinely doing good job of running the country, because it’s never worth it in the long run when they inevitably start doing nasty shit

  • @Matriks404@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    You could say the same about Android and iOS. They are preloaded with a web browser not many people change. In fact I’ve noticed that many users (mostly older) using Android don’t even know what browser they are using, since they just type shit into Google widget on their home screen.

    • @Goun@lemmy.ml
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      09 months ago

      Fuck, this. My gf doesn’t even know what a “web page” is, she just knows this Google widget.

    • @f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz
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      09 months ago

      IIRC Samsung devices default to a Samsung web browser labelled “Internet”. You wouldn’t want to disable the “Internet”, right?

      iOS seems even more egregious, where it’s internally using Safari no matter what browser you install, giving the illusion of choice.

    • Read Bio
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      9 months ago

      And some linux distros bcs somtimes it’s preloaded with firefox and chromium and also macos with safari

    • @VintageGenious@sh.itjust.works
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      09 months ago

      The google widget search bar is the thing I hate the most on default Android ui, alongside stupid bixby. Like the windows search bar, it doesn’t look good, always stays there and isn’t actually useful since you can still search with sometimes one click sometimes two. And the results are horribles with filled MSN-like news

  • Thomas
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    09 months ago

    Please submit a second copy of that letter, but replace Windows with Android, PC with Mobile, Microsoft with Google, and Edge with Chrome.

    • PhobosAnomaly
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      09 months ago

      That’s not the problematic metric though. It’s the 70-80% (link) install base of the Windows OS on desktop computers that Edge is installed with that’s the basis of the anti-competitive allegation.

      The fact that it still only takes 5% of the browser usage is more of a happy accident.

      • @StrongHorseWeakNeigh@lemmy.world
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        09 months ago

        That makes sense but also they clearly need any edge they can get. Maybe they should even make it more difficult to install other browsers. Like artificially lowering the search results of other browsers. Maybe they could get 6% market share that way.