I'm starting to see sites which work in Chrome but not Firefox - and not because of fancy web standards Firefox hasn't caught up with, but web page bugs showing the developers haven't bothered testing in other browsers.
> bugs showing the developers haven't bothered testing in other browsers.
I see this a lot and it's clear that most designers are building for Chrome and that they trust Firefox to render everything the same as Chrome will. The assumption that following the standards ensures a page will render the same in at least Chrome and Firefox has started to feel safe. That's a big improvement from the era that preceded, when you knew with certainty that cross-browser issues would exist. But it's not a completely safe assumption yet and may never be. Always test.
I'm less scared because at least Chrome (or rather Blink / webkit) is open source so can (and is) implemented in other browsers. However I do agree with you that it isn't healthy for any single rendering engine to monopolise the internet.
The fact that Chrome is open source doesn't helps me, a Firefox/Safari user, when I see the site that works correctly only on Chrome.
Open source or not, I don't want to use Chrome. There was a time when Chrome was lean, now Chrome is a pig. Not to mention blatant Chrome push from Google - the last one is Inbox, "it works only on Chrome". Set Safari user agent to Chrome? Everything works well. Shame on you, Google. That's exactly what Microsoft did in '90s.
My point is that you can still have Chrome (well, Chromium) compatibility without having to run Chrome, as demonstrated by the amount of webkit browsers in ArchLinux's repos:
$ pacman -Ss webkit browser
extra/epiphany 3.14.2-1 (gnome) [installed]
A GNOME web browser based on the WebKit rendering engine.
extra/kwebkitpart 1.3.4-3
A WebKit browser component for KDE
extra/qtwebkit 2.3.4-1 [installed]
An open source web browser engine (Qt port)
community/dwb 2014.03.07-2 [installed]
A webkit web browser with vi-like keyboard shortcuts, stable snapshot
community/luakit 2012.09.13.r1-7
Fast, small, Webkit based browser framework extensible by Lua
community/qupzilla 1.8.5-1
Cross-platform QtWebKit browser (Qt5)
community/qupzilla-qt4 1.8.5-1
Cross-platform QtWebKit browser (Qt4)
community/rekonq 2.4.2-3
A WebKit based web browser for KDE
community/surf 0.6-2 [installed]
A simple web browser based on WebKit/GTK+.
And that's only a subset of the available browsers based on a very basic search. There's quite a number of bigger names missing from that list, such as Opera.
So while I do agree that more variety of rendering engines is better (on the provision that they do follow HTML standards to minimize wasted developer time), things aren't quite so bad with -Chrome- webkit as the de facto standard as they were with Internet Explorer as webkit is open source so you're not tied to any specific browser.
What's more, Internet Explorer actively pushed technologies that were not only tied to IE, but to Windows as an OS (ActiveX controls, being the biggy. But that wasn't the only IE-exclusive technology). At least with Chrome, the technologies are platform agnostic so non-webkit browsers could still support them if they wanted to / had the developer resources.
I'm not trying to stick up for Google nor Chrome here. In fact aside Chromes developer tools, I don't like it much either. But pragmatically, a Chrome monopoly is less dangerous to the web than Microsoft / Internet Explorer ever was simply because all the parts of Chrome that matter are already open source and have already been forked and/or ported to other (new) browsers.
To be honest you're just arguing semantics as Blink is a fork of the same webkit components that Chrome was using previously. So little has changed from a rendering perspective.
Given the amount of redundant code in webkit due to Google and Apple pushing the library in slightly different directions, it does make some sense to fork it. And it's really no different to Apple forking webkit themselves (webkit2).
However when the forks diverge more in the future, your point will be more relevant (just as the difference between kHTML and webkit is now quite pronounced).
In any case, I did reference Blink in my first post. So your point isn't lost on me :)
This is a developer of the site problem, not a Chrome or Firefox problem. No self respecting web developer would ever make any site work only in one browser.
I should have said, no knowledgeable web developer would do such a thing. There are other browsers out there, including mobile, and no web developer worth his salt ever targets one browser alone.
I noticed that google street view has stopped to work reliably in Firefox in Ubuntu (not tested elsewhere) but still works fine with Chrome. This thing really looks intentional.
You're looking at things from the perspective of IE6 in 2014, not IE6 in 2001. Of course it seems shitty today, but that's because browsers from then are shitty compared to browsers today. It's only a victim of its success and the fact that rolling updates weren't a plausible model then.
If the contemporaneous Netscape 6 had been anywhere near as successful as IE6, you'd be cursing it now. Almost certainly more than you curse IE6, whose problems come not from the software itself but the fact that it was good enough for companies to lock it down as the standard and the fact it went for years without real competition. Netscape 6 didn't see this fate, because it was... outcompeted in the marketplace.
I said nothing about IE6 being shitty. Only you did. Netscape failed due to the illegal activities of Microsoft as outlined in the anti-trust complaint against them back then.
But IE6 held the web back by not keeping with the standards or making improvements and only letting it work on Windows. It took Mozilla and Firefox to get things moving and they took away 30% of their market share all by themselves. Then, when Chrome came along, that signaled the huge drop off. All by moving the web forward.
I remember seeing this on TV and not understanding why microsoft was threatened with a fine if they ship IE by default on their products.
Actually I still don't. Nobody ever stopped me from downloading another browser on windows, anyone who wants to do it will do it. So people did have a choice, they just didn't know they had it, and it's their problem, not microsoft's!
You needed to be around in the 1990s to understand this. :)
Its sort of like Google search now where when you search for "ann arbor map" you get a giant beautiful link to another Google property and a few riffraff links to other competitors that basically nobody ever clicks on because it would take effort.
This is exactly where Microsoft was in the 90s / early 2000s with browsers. They had a dominant desktop share and they directly embedded IE and although there were alternatives, clicking takes effort and nobody did that. They just used IE. The EU forced them to provide an explicit, easy option to reduce that advantage.
Given Google's dominant share in search, it would not be surprising to me to see the EU force them to change this for the same competition reasons.
Also, it was a great way for the EU to shake Microsoft down for billions of dollars and ensure there was no one company more powerful than the EU, but I'll leave that to the conspiracy theorists.
I was there in the 90s. Only having access to Windows when the Internet became common, guess how I went about learning there were other browsers out there and downloading Netscape?
How much more difficult would that have been if IE wasn't included by default with Windows?
Are you saying Microsoft should have intentionally excluded a means to browse http content and instead directed customers to be on the lookout for consumer magazines with a demo disk containing a browser? Where and how do they draw the line to being a useful distribution and alienating their users? For example, certain ICMP utilities were included by default with Windows.
> Are you saying Microsoft should have blah blah blah...
No, I'm not saying Microsoft should have done anything specific. My post quite clearly says that a lot of useful software was still easily available to those who's internet access was a premium; and nothing more.
However now I think about it, I'm pretty sure I got my copy of Internet Explorer 4 (the one that integrated IE's Triedent engine into Windows Explorer) from a .Net magazine* cover CD. So it's not like browsers weren't also distributed via the aforementioned method.
(*not to be confused with Microsoft .NET)
> Where and how do they draw the line to being a useful distribution and alienating their users? For example, certain ICMP utilities were included by default with Windows.
Now you're just arguing for the sake of having an argument.
Well... you know what a browser is (and you also know that there are alternatives). Most people don't. Most people don't open the browser, they "go to the Internet"; the browser is the "Internet".
If a dominant player bundles their browser (as a component) in their OS, people become less and less aware of the browser as a possible and separate "product", and will of course use the dominant one as default - this is (and effectively was!) bad for competition and evolution(any web developer can tell you the pain this caused and still causes today).
But the same is true for the calculator app, or the file manager. Granted, the web is used for a lot more than those... but I don't see why the browser is singled out as something needing special legal treatment.
> but I don't see why the browser is singled out as something needing special legal treatment
Does your calculator interact with anything else but your computer? Same with file manager (SMB excluded)?
Now lets look at the browser, it interacts with different servers, via the HTTP protocol, and the documents they serve via many different technologies such as HTML, Javascript, Java, XML, Flash, along with others. 'Back in the day' Microsoft did a very strong push to tie IE in with Windows, then push developers to use ActiveX on websites so they would only work with Microsoft products. There was no HTML5 multi-platform interoperability, if you wanted to visit a huge number of sites (many government ones too), you used Windows on X86, and you used IE. Even worse, after the early versions of IE, they dug its hooks deep in to the operating system so it became WindowsIE, you didn't have one without the other.
I don't quite see what interaction over the Internet has to do with the issue. Microsoft Office is regularly bundled with new Windows computers as a trial, or basic license. Could that not be seen as anti competitive?
I could argue that the TCP/IP stack is "bundled" with the operating system, and it's something that's very difficult to change (if not impossible without recompiling the kernel). Network engineers have probably had to put up with different TCP/IP stacks using different congestion control algorithms, impacting fairness of bandwidth usage on their networks. So by the same pretense, shouldn't TCP/IP stacks require the same choice that Microsoft were required to offer with browsers?
Well that's true, my straw man doesn't quite stand up in this case. However it still doesn't explain why Internet Explorer was the target when there is so much other software that was bundled with Windows, which too had for profit competitors? Those people who exclusively used Internet Explorer as "the Internet" would too have used the bundled mail client (I can't remember what it was called back in the day) exclusively too and seen that as "the email"?
I don't think there was anything else bundled with Windows that explicitly targeted other for-profit competitors at that time.
Dr-DOS and the Berkley screen saver stuff are two other situations that spring to mind, both of which resulted in legal cases, but the size/scope of MS by the time the Netscape thing came around was probably the tipping point (considering their previous behavior already demonstrated a pattern which showed no signs of stopping).
It is amusing however how it is a practice now that all major technology companies partake in. For example Google & Apple constantly take ideas from a 3rd party apps and integrate them for free into Android/iOS.
The legal issue wasn't "taking ideas from 3rd party apps and integrating them for free into" Windows.
It was taking anticompetitive steps to defend an existing monopoly, and to leverage an existing monopoly to monopolize another market.
Its like complaining that one person gets arrested for shooting a gun when another doesn't, not noting that what the first person was actually arrested for was murder by way of a gun, and what the second person was doing was shooting targets on a shooting range.
There are four bases for the complaint, two under Sec. 1 of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and two under Sec. 2 of the Act.
1. Unlawful Exclusive Dealing and Other
Exclusionary Agreements in Violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act (deals with ISPs, Internet Content Providers, and others that traded favorable promotional placement in the then-monopoly Windows OS for commitments not to license, promote, or distribute non-Microsoft products, particularly browsers.)
2. Unlawful Tying in Violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act (distributing the browser, a separate product based on market demand, etc., with its monopoly Windows OS system.)
3. Monopolization of the PC Operating
Systems Market in Violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act (willfully maintaining monopoly power over that market by "by anticompetitive and unreasonably exclusionary conduct.")
4. Attempted Monopolization of the Internet
Browser Market in Violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act (targetting "software products that have the potential to compete with or facilitate the development of products to compete with PC operating systems and thereby to erode Microsoft's Windows operating system monopoly" by way of "including tying and unreasonably exclusionary agreements, in order to obtain a monopoly in the Internet browser market".)
Note that a key issue in all of these is Microsoft's then-existing monopoly power in the PC OS market and how it was defending or leveraging that in different markets -- without that monopoly power, much of what they were doing would not have even arguably been an antitrust issue.
Browser+OS wasn't the issue, it was one of the mechanisms -- unreasonable and anticompetitive action to maintain an existing monopoly, and to leverage that monopoly into a monopoly in another market, was the issue.
> However it still doesn't explain why Internet Explorer was the target when there is so much other software that was bundled with Windows, which too had for profit competitors?
Because the browser was the area where the government felt they had the best case for two key features: (1) that the tying, etc., was intended to leverage the existing monopoly to monopolize another market, and, (2) that the tying, etc., was intended to neutralize a threat to Microsoft's existing monopoly.
Bundling two products together isn't generally illegal. Doing so as a means to leverage a monopoly in one market to monopolize another, or to defuse a threat to an existing monopoly (and, a fortiori, to serve both purposes simultaneously) is a different story.
> Those people who exclusively used Internet Explorer as "the Internet" would too have used the bundled mail client (I can't remember what it was called back in the day) exclusively too and seen that as "the email"?
The bundled email client wasn't an issue because it didn't exist yet -- Outlook Express wasn't bundled with Windows until Windows 98, which was still pending at the time the lawsuit was drafted (the complaint notes at para. 57: "Beginning in or around June 1998, Microsoft will introduce to the market the latest version of its operating system for Intel-based PCs, Windows 98.")
As I understand it, Microsoft spent a lot of effort integrating their desktop environment with the browser. Blurring the lines between files on the machine and hyperlinks, making the desktop a webpage, etc. The idea was that "using Windows" and "using IE" were designed to be synonymous -- so much so that the popularity of Windows could be used to monopolize the internet. Nobody would even be able to use another browser without crippling their ability to use Windows, and you couldn't use another OS without crippling your ability to use the internet.
Under anti-trust law, it is illegal for a company to use their monopoly power in one business as a competitive edge in another separate market. Therefore, the entire argument turns on two things: (1) was Windows a monopoly (2) was IE an integral part of Windows (hence not a product competing in another market).
Since Windows, for all intents and purposes, was a monopoly, a huge part of the discussion was about whether IE was an integral part of the operating system and therefore MS actions were not to be considered as competition in a different market but simply innovation in the existing OS market. Applications like Calculator had been part of operating systems for well over a decade by then and no-one was shipping any OS without one so there really was not a basis for comparison. Browsers, however, were completely new. Netscape, the first widely adopted consumer grade browser, seemed to be doing very well as a stand-alone application. From today's point of view, you could argue that no operating system would ever ship without a browser but that was not clear at the time. A similar idea would be, in say 20 years, BitCoin lockers becoming an integral part of operating systems. Not obvious today, at least not to anyone outside the niche community of enthusiasts.
Clearly, the courts got it wrong, in that browsers are part of the OS today (just as much as the Calculator). However, MS' ability to put Netscape out of business really did slow innovation down overall for a really long time. It took a long time for the market to correct itself and have the better products win. In fact, it took another monopolist (Google) trying to protect its business in another market to come in and accelerate the pace of innovation.
TL,DR: Courts shouldn't be in the position of deciding technology vision. Not because they do not have noble intentions but because they do not have the expertise.
Sure, that is the role of the courts. However, in this case, that distinction rested on the definition of what constituted a certain peice of technology and the ability to predict how that technology was going to evolve. The courts had no way of knowing the answer to this question. To their credit, I honestly doubt the companies themselves even knew the answer at that time.
This situation was very different than when an oil company uses their monopolistic position in refineries to choke competing exploration and retail companies. Or when a manufacturer of telephone equipment uses the profits from its monopoly in that business to drive out competitors in its telephone service business. Clearly, in these scenarios, it was clear (and remains clear) that the monopolists were using resources from one business where they were clearly dominant to out-compete other companies in separate (even if adjacent) businesses.
Technology is a very tricky area for the law largely because it is fast changing. Situations are cropping up far faster than the laws can be modified to address them and so the courts are pretty much forced to sand-off the edges of existing statutes that were designed for other situations and hope for the best.
You seem to be saying that the evolution of technology over the next 20 years had something to say about whether Microsoft was abusing a monopoly situation at the time of the trial. I don't think that's a valid way of applying the law.
Furthermore, a big part of Microsoft's motivation for making the browser "part of the OS" was exactly to try to blur that line for the court. I am therefore highly skeptical of using "it's now part of the OS" as a reason that the court got it wrong.
Well, I don't know about the basis for a different "legal treatment", but I know that today the browser is the effective plaftorm/container/"VM" for the most popular applications. The browser capabilities and features will actually affect users and web applications - besides the ability to use this as leverage for other products, a single player with browser monopoly will have an unhealthy preponderance in the shaping of the web. I don't believe we can make an intellectually honest comparison with the calculator or the file manager...
Adding to that, there's an argument to be made that the browser ballot helped make the Web a much richer place.
The reason I say that is that it allowed Chrome to make serious inroads and become a much more dominant browser. Chrome comes from Google, a company whose entire business model revolves around getting people to spend more time on the Web. So they have a vested interest in pushing the Web toward being as rich a content platform as possible so that people spend more time in their Web browser and not in other applications.
So they did that. They made Javascript more performant, they pushed new standards for producing more attractive and responsive pages, etc. And makers of other browsers, who might not have done the same because they're not driven by similar incentives, had to start hurrying to keep up.
The idea - and I'm just explaining it, not advocating nor criticizing - is that when you have a overwhelming control in one market (in this case, Windows), you can't use that to push your way to the top of another market, since it's stifling the competition and reducing consumer welfare.
> when you have a overwhelming control in one market, you can't use that to push your way to the top of another market, ... stifling the competition
Microsoft not only used its OS monopoly to stifle competition, in many cases, it used it to kill many competing products and services. Steve Balmer once boasted that he'll stop at nothing to kill Netscape.
If you were around during the Clinton years when the US filed an anti-trust case against MS, you'd have been surprised at the tactics that Bill Gates and Co used to kill competition.
I thought the original reason wasn't that Microsoft was shipping IE with Windows per say, but that they were telling OEMs that they weren't allowed to pre-install Netscape if they wanted to keep their sweet Windows OEM license deals. Am I thinking of the wrong case?
That was my recollection of the crux of it as well.
Oh, you want to bundle Netscape with your Windows PC? Each copy of Windows will run you $80. If you decide to not bundle Netscape, it'll only be $30.
I'm also reminded of Linux/desktop bundling. IIRC, MS tried (and I think succeeded) in their licensing terms require Windows licensing based on PCs shipped, not Windows PCs shipped, so even selling a Linux-only desktop still required an MS-tax, meaning it was more expensive to sell a Linux desktop than a Windows desktop (at least for some of the big players like Dell, HP, etc).
That would make more sense if this was the root of the problem. Otherwise Apple and Google would be in the same boat offering users a choice to install a browser other than the default for OSX, iOS, and Android
Netscape was the sizzle and you pay money to get a browser to surf internet.
Microsoft decided to package IE for free on Window.
Internet was wild west and mysterious. There's hardly any books on it and information wasn't traveling as fast for the masses to know much about internet.
But they do know there's this IE thingy that will give them internet.
IE destroyed netscape, very few people had a clue there was an alternative browser...
Hence this was deem as a monopoly.
Hell when I was a kid I didn't really know much other than netscape and all of a sudden IE. It didn't occur to me that there are choices but the fact that IE was a part of window and it just works out of the box. I moved to mozilla when IE was slowing down.
But the point was it was so integrated with window that it was apart of it, it felt natural as if the internet was apart of microsoft.
And in fact microsoft acted as a gate keeper of the internet for years that was their business goal. Their OS control stuff on the PC and that's how they made money. Which is why they lost to Google when they double down on their model. The way they acted and their many moves to monopolize it, one of which was IE.
The EU just followed what the US courts said during Clinton. Clinton turned MS into a whipping boy.
In retrospect, the courts were wrong. Netscape's profit model made no sense. People didn't want to pay for commodity software like a web browser. MS had every right to release a free one bundled with their platform. The web isn't some optional thing. A browser is part of every OS now.
On top of it, the deal MS signed didn't let it control OEMs so that laptop that's full of shitware that slows Windows down and gives it a huge attack surface is not something MS could fight until recently with Win8. The government empowered OEMs.
The Netscape/MS fight wasn't worth it. The government should never have stepped in. In the end the best product wins. I, and everyone I know, got Chrome via downloading it. Not via some fancy choice menu.
I think the truth here is that Netscape had a lot of friends in the government and Clinton's DOJ wanted to make some career defining kills. Bill Gates was an obvious target. It was wrong for Clinton to attack MS. It didn't stop IE6's dominance, it didn't revive Netscape, and it didn't fix anything. If anything, it made everything worse.
Tech is generally a meritocracy. People can just migrate to whatever software they life. MS wasn't stopping Firefox or Netscape from being installed. Lets give our companies room to compete. Lets not applaud heavy handed legislation from either the US or the EU. I mean, google fucking maps can't even be seen in Spain due to corruption. Governments are just as corrupt as business. Except government is an unstoppable monopoly with guns.
Agree that in hindsight web browsers was a dumb thing to take down MS over. It was difficult at the time to make the claim that a browser-less computer would someday be effectively useless, but that point came.
The lawsuit should have been over their Office suite. (And no, in the end, the best product did not win.)
Do you know that Microsoft was bribing websites to include features that Netscape would not render properly? How does that fit into your "tech is generally a meritocracy" view?
> Tech is generally a meritocracy. People can just migrate
to whatever software they life.
That and the test of the last paragraph of your comment is
proof that you're a paid shrill.
This is an unwarranted attack on the person.
I may agree with you on the content -- the ideal of the meritocratic technological society has not been achieved yet, and the field is not level. But personal attacks are not needed here, they are not useful for the discussion.
The simplest explanation: Implementation costs, as in what it takes to design internet based systems in order to connect with and make sales to consumers and businesses.
The grand dream has long been to have a set of standards which web browser designers and network infrastructure designers must design to. In reality, standards development and compliance has a lag time to it that brings frustration to those who need web sites for their business models. So, in all practicality, they will design and test for perhaps one, two, or three platforms - as popularity may guide - and make use of non-standard methods where standards-based methods are lacking.
Add to this what others have observed, that the typical user knows little to nothing about what a web browser is, or even cares to know.
Companies that manage to achieve popularity for their internet technologies - such as a web browser, among other things - tend to have stronger voices and more powerful influences on standards committees. That gives them a competitive edge in that they can push for a standard where their products are already or nearly compliant with, thereby forcing others to expend energy (cash + time) into whatever reverse engineering projects needed to comply. Alternatively, the stronger voices can also induce more heel-dragging.
In the meantime, companies that have the popular technologies - such as Microsoft, especially in the 1990's - can more easily make sales to the businesses requiring web sites, for either internet or intranet needs. And consumers find their internet surfing experience generally satisfying with the home computer as they got it (again, especially in the 1990's, that was MS Windows + Internet Explorer).
Microsoft was uniquely positioned for dominance. They made the most popular desktop OS, and equipped it with a ubiquitous web browser (for both Windows and Mac OS back then). They then also had the server technology, software development tools, and a "portal" to funnel consumers to advertisers and shopping sites. Basically, they were leveraging their software technology and market position to get into the same business that Netscape had just started. They succeeded tremendously, and basically squeezed out much of the competition, including Netscape.
It's because not everyone ... actually the vast majority of users ... is aware of other browsers and even if they would be, they may have then only known about Firefox even though there are many many more browsers.
Think of it this way, it's akin to a car manufacturer selling cars with labels that state that anything other than XYZ branded gasoline will cause damage and void the warranty. Sure, maybe it won't cause damage and sure it may not stand up in court that it voids the warranty, but most people aren't in the position to know that, nor should they need to be in the position to know.
We ... the community of technology savy ... are very frequently remiss to ignore that not everyone can be, nor should have to be well informed about technology. Think of if Martha Stewart claimed that her recipe will only turn out if you use Greenest Pastures Milk when you are trying to hobble together a cake to impress your family. Are you informed enough about the intricacies of milk that you would know that you can use other milk brands?
Sure, you may scoff and say that you know enough about milk to know that it's not true, but do you know that some brands don't have additives or certain types of fat that may collapse your batter?
Your car analogy is poor. Better would be to consider a scenario where Ford owned 95% of the car market, and offered for free, Ford branded stereos in each model whereas previously there was no stereo and you had to buy one separate.
Other stereo manufacturers, who sell stereos got mad, and basically convinced the government that Ford has a monopoly and should be forced to offer consumers a choice in stereo.
Microsoft never warned people that using another browser would "cause damage" or void warranty. They simply gave away something for free, that was previously a paid product. Their dominant market position gave them leverage to essentially wipe out the competition. This, depending on your market philosophy was either the right move to protect consumers, or an example of special interests influencing government to effect markets (IMHO it was probably both).
Because Opera, and before that the company behind Real Player, are anal like that and the EU went and agreed with them for some silly reason. They never did go after Apple, or Google / Android, or whatever for doing the exact same thing (pre-installing a media player / browser). I guess you could argue that Microsoft was singled out because their browser was an inherent component of their OS, but at the same time you could go after Apple and Android as well for their webview that is required to be used in all applications that need one.
They don't go after Apple, because bundling by itself is not prohibited, only if you have an overwhelming control of the market, which Windows had but iOS doesn't. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if the EU started pressuring Google on the Android front in the near future - they're already talking about splitting up the company.
No, I meant what I said. Specifically, I was referring to this[1], where the EP says regulators should consider splitting up search engines from other commercial services.
That doesn't mean I believe they well split them up - nor does the resolution say that, it's just a recommendation - but it does mean they're increasing the pressure on Google, and so potentially on Android as well.
Unbundling the search engine from all other commercial services essentially means splitting the company in two, even if they can still be called both "Google". Maybe I'm reading to much into it, but everyone else (Reuters. Telegraph, FT and a lot of others) seem to agree. In any case, all I'm saying I'd that it represents increased pressure, nothing more.
As for not mentioning Google directly, that's not really a great puzzle. Google is the only search engine with any relevance in a regulatory sense, and MEPs have mentioned it before. Of course, they must remain impartial, but it's not DDG they're worried about :)
Why isn't Apple forced to the same deal with iOS? Not only do browsers not have the same prominence but they actually have to use WebView for rendering. Not to mention the other apps Apple refuses to approve because of "duplication".
Apple has never had a dominant position in desktop (or any other platform). That is actually part of their genius, because if they did, they would never be allowed to do all of the tight integration scenarios that they do.
I would never think that Apple intentionally limits themselves as you imply. As far as tight integration goes, there is nothing to stop any company from doing that. You misunderstand why Microsoft was hit so hard in the US and the EU.
Because Microsoft was found to be a monopoly that abused its power over the marketplace to extend to other markets. Apple hasn't been in such a lawsuit, yet.
I don't necessarily agree with such policies. For example the EU is thinking of breaking up Google because supposedly local players cannot compete, with inferior products in a market that Google created, but that's not mentioned.
Of course, iOS does suck because of its restrictions and I sold my iPhone 6 that I received as a gift. So I just exercised my right to vote with my wallet, which imho is more effective.
common misunderstanding of antitrust law. "Prominence", dominance or even monopoly is not actually illegal. There's nothing wrong with being absurdly successful, after all.
The anti-trust laws are for when that power gets abused -- when one uses their monopoly power as leverage over another market. In the case of Microsoft, by bundling IE with Windows, they were using their OS monopoly to crush a competitor in the market for web browsers.
None of this applies to Apple because they have nothing close to a mobile monopoly. If they did, the lawsuits would be over their position as gatekeepers of the entire market for mobile apps.
Probably because iOS doesn't have a monopoly on phones. Windows had to do this because they had 95% of the desktop market - so bundling IE forced the default browser for 95% of machines as well.
I'm hoping that with the ballot screen gone I'll see fewer computers from technically illiterate people with with every browser choice installed and unused.
Good riddance -- that screen was nothing more than a historic artifact at this point.
With Microsoft's monopoly on web-enabled devices finally broken by Android/iOS, not to mention the emergence of Chrome on Windows desktops, IE-dominance has finally more or less ended[1].
As far as I can tell, most Chrome users are aware of Firefox, IE, or Safari though. So the victory of Chrome isn't manipulative and exploitative -- the browser-wars culture is very different these days. People _choose_ Chrome for the most part.
There is nothing wrong with offering a product that everyone wants to use. That's how Google became big in the first place.
If you click the "Usage relative" button, then the bars do resize to reflect usage. The numbers here are based on StatCounter measurements, which show Chrome with a 42% page view share (about 3 times higher than the next most popular browser):
