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.
Which reminds me it is about time to send one of my approximately twice-a-year reminders to competition authorities around here and remind them about it.
If anyone else feels the same, please do, maybe if letters start arriving from other persons than old grumpy reitan they will actually care?
But something along the lines of:
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header, greetings etc
I'm writing you in the hope that you would have time to look into the abuse of market power by Google that has destroyed a well functioning market for web browsers.
Background:
Back before 2008 IE was both stale and very dominant and [...]
The reason for this was both that Internet Explorer (IE from now) started out as a very good browser for it time, but more importantly that Microsoft (MS) abused its market position to push it everywhere and to intentionally degrade experiences for other browsers as proven by Opera Software when they showed that MS technical support web pages magically started working if one let their browser identify itself as IW.
Microsoft was fined severly for this and was also forced to create a browser ballot on machines sold in the EU at least where they had to present IE togheter with competing browsers. Around this time MS also to some degree started changing their ways
This was followed by the rise of OS independent browsers, especially Firefox in the beginning but also Chrome later.
Since around 2010 the growth of Chrome has been happening by eating every other browsers share and there is a lot to indicate that technical superiority is far from the only reason why this has happened:
- remeber to mention bundling (w/Adobe and probably others)
- ads on the front page of Google, something that no others have been allowed to
- misleading ads (showing download a better browser also to firefox users and opera users)
- and last but not least: Google has also been caught red handed in degrading experiences for other browsers, not based on technical capabilities but how they identify themselves
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This should serve as a starting point. I need to get back to work and English is not my first language so make your own : )