[agust]

Chrome is competition, and no, it's not alone: on the desktop market, where competition is not rigged as much as on mobile, Edge has 10% market share, and Firefox 7.5%. It's not insignificant.

> I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it.

OWA has taken into account anti-competitive practices used by Google to gain browser market share, and made recommendation to mitigate or prevent them. In there submission to the japanese regulator [1], they include:

- 3.1.7: No Chrome Preferencing: > Google should not use their control over the operating system to provide unfair preference to their own browser, Chrome, either through the operating system or agreements with partners.

- 3.1.8: Website Transparency Obligations: > OWA suggests that where a Gatekeeper’s website does not support a browser which has above a 2% market share, they be compelled to publish a document containing detailed reasoning that prevents support of certain engines.

[1]: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)...

[frumper]

If you're taking the approach that iOS browsers are just re-skinned safari, then Edge doesn't count as it's own browser on desktop.

[agust]

Yes it does, that's a totally different situation. Edge chose to use Chromium as its engine, Microsoft takes part in its development, they are free to remove or add any component from it, and if ever they wanted to they would be free to fork it and drop it for another engine at any time. None of that is true for WebKit skins on iOS.

[snowwrestler]

Microsoft were were quite transparent about being forced to adopt Chromium because of the prevalence of Electron apps on Windows.

[migueldeicaza]

That wasn’t the reason.

Edge could just not compete with chrome, despite throwing hundreds of engineers at the problem. They tried, and tried, and tried.

In the end “edge doesn’t work” was just code for “edge is not chromium”

Electron was and is still a separate beast, Microsoft doesn’t even need to deal with that: third party developers do, they have to ship the binary.

[snowwrestler]

Seems like you would certainly know! Thanks

[nneonneo]

Those recommendations are weak sauce. Websites are going to say stuff like “works best in Chrome!” and Google is going to encourage that. Nothing in those recommendations, assuming they’re even adopted, will solve that.