This was coming one way or another. AI's threat to Google search is merely icing on the cake.
Google has deserved this for a long time coming. AMP, Chrome, removal of ad blocking, defaulting to Google on Chrome and Android, strong arming of web standards...
> And absolutely nothing came of browser bundling in the US.
But that has much less to do with the merits of the case, and much more to do with the fact that just before any action could be taken, George W Bush was elected president and began our current trajectory toward unbridled corporate governance of America.
Merits of the case decided by who? A bunch of not-lawyers on HN?
Do you think the government should step in and not allow any device to bundled with a browser? Why stop at browsers? Why don’t we just force all manufactures to ship every device without an OS?
Windows and Mac scare the user when switching to a non-first party browser. That, at minimum, should be highly illegal. It's wildly anti-competitive when the platform already has home field advantage.
System dialogues and prompts continue opening in the platform browser, which further continues to nag the user to switch back. Again, totally unfair. These nags and scares should not be allowed.
Competition is what makes our economy, our industry, and the pace of innovation great. Apple, Microsoft, and Google should have to work harder to maintain their insurmountable leads, not fall back on the almost sovereign militaristic advantages they hold. They have gluttonous cash flows that are impossible to attack, and they use that money to force themselves into new markets where innovators are working night and day with every fiber of their being. I don't mind these companies being the biggest in the world. What I hate is that they can so easily put their thumb on anyone trying to do better, and that they can easily extinguish the hard work of others.
I also really love how they set up the lock screen in windoze to open a new instance of Edge whenever someone clicks it in the middle. Time and again someone asks me why their computer is running slowly and I alt-tab to reveal dozens of copies of Edge displaying idiosyncratic Bing queries about the various subjects of lock screen photos. Yes thanks, these inexperienced users really need that sort of help to open many instances of an also-ran browser that makes their jobs more difficult. These users are incapable of clicking anywhere but the middle of the lock screen, even when they're trying to do so.
> That, at minimum, should be highly illegal. It's wildly anti-competitive when the platform already has home field advantage.
So should it also be illegal for third party browsers to keep nagging the user that they should be the default? That’s what Netscape did for years and what Chrome does
Apple will nag you to switch to Safari, even if you have literally never used Safari. It just pops up from time to time with a notification that cannot be ignored.
It is my default browser, so I guess not. That feels like less of a nag than the platform urging you to switch browsers without any indication that you'd like to do so.
Decided by the entirety of the legal apparatus prior to the election in 2000. I don't recall the details at this late date, and you can Google as well as I can, but my memory is that the judge in that case had recommended that Microsoft be broken up for it before Bush came to power.
That is too reductive. U.S. v. Microsoft was all about how Microsoft had strong-armed O.E.M.s into not shipping anyone else's browser. That's not the same as having a default browser.
