zlacker

>>samwil+(OP)
I’m truly scared of Chrome.

It pushes proprietary features, from what I know it starts enforcing some analytics/ads without possibility to block it out and there are other thing too, but since I’m not really an user I don’t track them deeply.

Based on my personal experiences with IE, ActiveX, Adobe Flash and not being able to fill my taxes without Microsoft license (that was around 800$ back then for me not adjusted for inflation) I am afraid the same will happen with Chrome once it gets enough ground.

“Hey, sorry but we can’t sell you toothbrush because you’re using Safari/Firefox/Vivaldi/whatever. Please switch to Chrome and continue with your tracked and dissected purchase route.”

Is there any other anti-Chrome bastion than iOS’ Safari?

Old E2E runner installed Google Chrome on my machine (didn’t even ask but that’s user space on dev machine so whatever) which grew into my MacOS machine. It cannot run in background but there is another daemon that constantly updates it. Multiple times a day I get notification that new service has been installed to run in background.

I’m not sure if that’s something I want to fight for.

>>xlii+5h
Fighting Apple's monopoly behaviour around Safari is not fighting for chrome.

Since you asked, Firefox is the browser to use if you do not want chrome.

>>onli+Xh
As a Firefox user who is very upset with Apple for (clearly intentionally) lacking support for PWA features, I am still happy that Safari exists as a counter-weight to Chrome. Any contribution counts.

>>kristi+Ml
Nobody is arguing Safari shouldn't exist. They're arguing that Apple shouldn't get to force monopolize it on iOS even more aggressively than Microsoft was doing with IE 20 years ago.

>>kllrno+wQ
Microsoft was hardly even aggressive about leveraging their OS monopoly to promote their Internet Explorer browser. All they did was switch from selling it as a separate product to giving it away for free in order to crush Netscape. And Microsoft made IE the default handler for web links. But they never did anything to prevent users from installing third-party browsers on Windows.

>>nradov+eX
I guess we'd have to argue what "aggressive" means here, but what you describe as "all they did" can and has been found to be monopoly behavior and against the law in the US. This is known as bundling and there are a bunch of prior cases which confirm it can be considered a violation of antitrust law. The bundling concept was the basis of the antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the late 90s.

That said, Apple is doing something worse with Safari, in that not only are they bundling the browser, they are using their tight control over the operating system to prevent other browsers from being installed in the first place. It's slighly murkier than the MS antitrust case because the counter-argument is "but they do allow other browsers! You can see Chrome/Firefox/Brave/etc in the App Store!" and then you have to get into a technical discussion of the difference between a browser application and a browser engine.

Sigh.

>>angora+W71
Describing what Microsoft did as "bundling" seems a little silly in retrospect. I mean of course a desktop OS should come with a browser. If they had just added IE as a standard feature of Windows from the start without ever selling it as a separate product then they would have had a stronger legal case. It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.

>>nradov+8r1
> I mean of course a desktop OS should come with a browser.

This was not that obvious in the 1990s.

> It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.

This is absolutely a situation where a bundling case could apply, if a large incumbent uses their monopoly power in one product area to enter another and unfairly compete. IANAL but I don't believe whether or not the product was available separately or not would factor much into such a case.