[Justsignedup]

Here's whats so odd here:

- google can push chrome on people in their search results. and google pushed HARD. So hard they dominate the browser market and chrome is unfortunately not known for privacy.

- google pretty much makes it impossible to get away from chrome entirely in android. Example being that you MUST use chrome webview when using the google search app. Even though everything else uses firefox for me.

- ms doesn't have search results. sure they try with bing but its not nearly as good or widespread. MS does have windows itself though, so they push where they can.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to MS at the moment. And this is coming from the pitchforks and torches guy against IE6/7/8/9 back in the day.

[notRobot]

"Google does this wrong thing so MS should be able to too!"

No, that's not how this works. If it's wrong, stop Google from doing it, instead of letting others do it too.

[Justsignedup]

Not disagreeing with you on it. But to stop google we'd need acts of legislature from multiple countries. At best we'll see results in 5 years.

MS can't wait that long for a maybe sort of kind of. Just being practical here.

[nashashmi]

I think in monopoly playbook 2.0, it’s not a monopoly if it’s free. And it’s not a monopoly if your public relations are terrific.

[eli]

I'd bet that we see a serious US antitrust investigation into Google within the next year. No new legislation needed.

[wdn]

No there won’t. The only reason why there was an anti-trust case against MSFT back in the day was because MSFT was too busy making and neglected to do political “contributions”.

Silicon Valley took noticed and now they are the top political “contributors”.

[eli]

$100 to charity; I'll meet you back here in a year (or less)

[minikites]

The difference is that people are stuck thinking it's still 1997 and that when Google does it, it must be good, because Google is an upstart and on our side. When Microsoft does it, it must be evil, because they're big and evil Microsoft and not on our side.

[aNoob7000]

Microsoft and Google are both monopolies, and thus bad for competition. One has a desktop/server operating system and office productivity monopoly and the other search and smartphone software monopoly.

Google figured out that to compete with Microsoft and Apple you have to basically give it away for free. Look no further than Android and Google docs.

[d1zzy]

> - google can push chrome on people in their search results. and google pushed HARD. So hard they dominate the browser market and chrome is unfortunately not known for privacy.

I didn't pay Google $200 (Windows 10 Pro retaile I payed for recently) for the privilege to use their search, so they are free to push some advertising alongside it. When I will pay $200 to use their search then I don't want any advertising from Google either.

> - google pretty much makes it impossible to get away from chrome entirely in android. Example being that you MUST use chrome webview when using the google search app. Even though everything else uses firefox for me.

Funny, I have used InBrowser ever since I started using Android 10 years ago (which btw, makes it possible to read all those news articles without running into free article monthly limits because InBrowser doesn't store any state between sessions). Doesn't seem impossible to not use Chrome at all to me.

> - ms doesn't have search results. sure they try with bing but its not nearly as good or widespread. MS does have windows itself though, so they push where they can.

They are free to do whatever they want with their software but I don't find it acceptable to pay $200 for that and still get ads. If they were to give me Windows 10 Pro for free, then sure, go ahead and put a bunch of ads on my desktop.

[kitsunesoba]

> google can push chrome on people in their search results. and google pushed HARD.

And still push hard. I use whichever browser is most "native" to the platform I'm using at the moment (Safari on macOS, Edge on Windows, Firefox on Linux) so I see prompts to install Chrome constantly. Very irritating.

[eitland]

Pushed extremely hard: no one else was allowed to advertise on the front page of Google, not even humanitarian organisations during the worst disasters as far as I know. Chrome were allowed.

Still pushing hard: if I open the gmail app on my iPad and click a link it pretends I need to choose a browser every single time it seems and one if the choices is always Chrome (that I haven't installed and won't install).

I've already been writing relevant authorities here (Norway) twice last year and I'll keep pushing.

The moment they kill competition, that moment ad blocking disappears.

[pitaj]

> Example being that you MUST use chrome webview when using the google search app.

On my Pixel, when I start a search from the home screen, and then click on a result, it opens that page in Firefox.

[mminer237]

How did you get it to do that? I have a Pixel 4a, but the Google app will only open results in a Chrome webview, even when I use Firefox or Brave as my default browser everywhere else. I don't use the Pixel launcher if that matters. I would actually like to fix it.

Edit: I figured it out. I'm not allowed to uninstall Chrome, but disabling it made it finally use Brave as a fallback. So they actually implement using whatever browser you want, but they just ignore it unless it's actually impossible to use Chrome.

[pitaj]

I didn't have to disable Chrome. I do have the "Open pages in the app" setting disabled though.

[pbuzbee]

You can open the destination pages in your chosen browser with the Google Search App in Android: (1) Tap "More" at the bottom of the screen, (2) Tap "Settings", (3) Tap "General". Then disable "Open web pages in the app".

[r00fus]

You can choose not to use google (it's hard but possible - my default search is DDG on all my machines - amusingly that uses MS Bing for the most part).

However, if you want a non-Mac PC, your choices are slim to none to avoid Windows.

Microsoft a convicted monopolist, DoJ has acted twice already against them. Google isn's there yet.