[Suppafly]

>Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition?

No? It used to be IE and Mozilla, and now it's Edge, Chrome, and Mozilla. Opera existed then and now, and probably more people use it now, but it's still small enough that no one cares. I suppose you could make a point about Edge using Chrome's engine, but that's because the IE one sucked and the new one Microsoft made for Edge sucked so they eventually switched to using Chrome's. But the idea that the browser market was somehow better back in the day is hilarious and wrong.

>There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.

Not really. I suppose early on during the smartphone era, blackberry was still around, but they mostly lost out due to Apple finally getting decent MDM, and not bothering to improve their product after a while, than the fact that Android was growing in popularity. Microsoft entered kinda late and never really developed their phone OS enough and eventually gave up, but that's because their product wasn't good enough, not because of anything the others were doing to stop them.

[Calavar]

Edge is reskinned Chrome. Opera is also reskinned Chrome. The whole point of having multiple browsers is to get multiple competing implementations of web standards, so a single vendor can't force unilaterally force its features or its particular interpretation of a feature over the entire market.

[DoctorOW]

Before: Trident, Webkit, Gecko, Presto After: Blink/Webkit, Gecko/Quantum

We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper. Also Quantum's development is pretty much driven by a desire to maintain feature parity with Blink which means Google gets control over what the web is according to every major browser. The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's control is irrelevant in terms of anti-competitive discussion.

[jorvi]

> The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's control

Que?

If Google did some heinous stuff, tomorrow Microsoft would hard-fork Chromium and Brave et al would just switch their upstream to Edge.

[paulryanrogers]

> Microsoft would hard-fork Chromium and Brave et al would just switch their upstream to Edge.

Doubt.

I'll believe it when I see it. Maintaining a hard fork is almost as hard as a greenfield browser like old Edge or old Opera. There are no serious competitors doing hard Chromium forks besides Apple. (Afraid to admit Firefox isn't a serious competitor anymore.)

[Suppafly]

>We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper.

That's moving the goalposts, but honestly in the past it was IE and sometimes mozilla deciding how the web was going to work and anyone else playing catch up, which is essentially still what it is.

[jorvi]

> Microsoft entered kinda late and never really developed their phone OS enough and eventually gave up, but that's because their product wasn't good enough, not because of anything the others were doing to stop them.

Not sure if this is meant tongue-in-cheek.

Google very aggressively chased any 3rd-party Windows Phone apps out of town that were Google—services compatible, whilst refusing to release 1st party apps themselves.

Microsoft shares a fair part in the blame because they made developers switch frameworks like… 5 times (?) in the span of 3 OS versions. Not to mention the constant sunsetting of devices.

The UI was amazing though. All content and no dressing, performant on low-end hardware, had dark mode half a decade before Android / iOS.

[Suppafly]

Microsoft just didn't want it bad enough. It's a similar situation to when they joined the video game market, except they wanted that and took a loss to stay in the market and now are essentially the main console.