[Hansenq]

This seems like a very sensible and logical conclusion by the judge to me.

An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine because everyone else was worse. You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law--if Apple wants to make Google the default, they should be allowed to do so! The ban on exclusive contracts makes sense though; they should not be allowed to use contracts to furthur their monopoly position.

And similarly with Chrome; it made no sense to bring Chrome into this equation. Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today NOT through exclusive contracts, but because Chrome is just a better product. Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.

With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore) and AI search engines potentially shifting the search landscape, who knows if Google will still be a monopoly 5 years from now. Software moves fast and the best solution to software monopoly is more software competition.

[pinkmuffinere]

> Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today

I don’t think this is as settled as you imply. I tend to like Google products, and do almost everything in the Google ecosystem. But my browser is normally brave or Firefox, because better Adblock is so so impactful. I feel that chrome is a valid alternative, but that no browser is really clearly “the best”. In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best?

[ehsankia]

1. It might not be the best across all metrics today, but it definitely was a few years ago.

2. While it's true that other browsers like Firefox have been catching up to Chrome in speed, it's still true that Chrome help lead the way and if not for it, the web would've likely been far slower today.

3. There has been an explosion in other browsers in the past few years, but admittedly they're all chromium-based, so even that wouldn't have been possible without Chrome

[nwienert]

Safari has been better for going on 5 years now, funny thing is it was worse for long enough that it seems everyone, even to this day, refuses to believe it.

Faster in basically every dimension. Supporting way more than FF in terms of specs. Way more efficient on battery. Better feeling scroll, better UI.

[lnenad]

Any source for that?

https://www.browserating.com/ doesn't put it in top5 on any non-ios platform?

[nwienert]

Chrome caught up in the last year or so, but also speedometer is also fairly arbitrary. Open/close, tab open/close, tab switch, scroll, initial load, resizing all still far better. Actual app performance depends on the app but for a few years Safari was clearly better.

[lnenad]

So your source is your personal opinion. Got it.

[holografix]

Agreed. Only thing lacking is the multi Google account/profile support

[quitit]

Profile came to Safari in iOS 17. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/iphone/iphd27a9ff22/17...

Similarly with Safari 17 on macOS.

[overfeed]

> In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best?

As a former Firebug fan: Chrome/Chromium has had superior browser dev-tools experience for over a decade now.

[pfg_]

Whenever I use chrome, I'm missing the style editor and multi-line repl mode from firefox. When I switched to firefox from chrome, I didn't miss anything. There might be new features chrome has added since that I would want if I knew about them

[TJSomething]

While I agree on those counts, the debugger in Chrome handles large files of minified code, deep framework stack traces, and stopping in dysfunctional code better.

[unilynx]

Except for infinite loops in JS. Firefox still handles those better.

[righthand]

Firefox dev tools tell me why my requests and scripts fail because of CORS or blocked by a plugin or what have you. Chrome doesn’t remotely even provide that info.

I honestly have never seen a Chrome dev tools feature that was better or necessary for good web development that Firefox didn’t already have in the last 15 years. Yet I always see this bizarre sentiment of how the dev tools were better “just because”.

[dawnerd]

You should try out Firefox’s if you haven’t. It’s pretty good now and I haven’t found something that I’ve been like damn wish it was there. Lighthouse testing I guess?

[robin_reala]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/google-lighth...

[shadowgovt]

When Chrome started, it was the best because it introduced the process-partitioned model that allowed it to completely avoid a common failure-mode among its peer browsers at the time: one bug in the processing of one tab would crash the entire browser (a problem exacerbated by the existence of a now-defunct plugin ecosystem where third-party code was running inside the browser process; we basically don't do that anymore). That was becoming brutal on users as more and more of the work they did every day transitioned over to web-based.

The other browsers have picked up the partitioning since then as a feature so the playing-field is far more level.

[dabockster]

Chrome is the "best" because all of the other browsers continue to fail at real world marketing. The best ads and marketing continue to be real life stuff - billboards, bus signage, people handing out flyers, etc etc etc. You can't just hype a browser on social media or web forums, and you can't hype it solely to those who are tech savvy.

A solid example of this right now is all of the Mullvad VPN ads I've seen on the Seattle Light Rail lately. Google used to have ads everywhere for Chrome. The only time I saw Firefox stuff was the rare t-shirt at a tech conference.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Anecdotally, I've seen many geeks (who certainly don't make their browser choice based on an annoying popup, and are generally more on the anti-Google side) use Chrome rather than Firefox, at conferences etc. (but this is mostly 5+ years ago). Not the majority, but plenty of well-informed opinionated people.

I believe especially back then, Chrome performance was significantly better than Firefox. On Android, Firefox was so slow and unpolished that the ad blocking couldn't make up for it (and even that wasn't available from the start).

[inetknght]

> Anecdotally, I've seen many geeks use Chrome rather than Firefox, at conferences etc.

Have you asked them why? I'd be willing to bet that it's because of vendor lock-in if you boil down to it. Lots of things only work on Chrome. Video calls are especially prevalent right now, but there's a bunch of bot detection shit that only works on Chrome too.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Yes and IIRC it was not due to any forced factor, just because they considered it better.

[avrionov]

Brave is based on Chrome (Chromium).

[Stratoscope]

How is Chrome a better browser than Edge? They are both just custom builds of the underlying Chromium browser.

I switched from Chrome to Edge on my Windows machine a couple of months ago for the embarrassing reason that I had so many tabs open that Chrome slowed down to a crawl.

(Yes, I'm one of those lazy people who uses old tabs as if they were bookmarks.)

Of course I eventually opened enough tabs in Edge that it slowed down too! So I finally bit the bullet and started closing tabs in both browsers.

Otherwise, I hardly notice any difference between the two.

There are bigger differences on my Android device. Edge supports extensions! (Yay!) But it lacks Chrome's "tab group carousel" at the bottom of the screen. Instead, you have to tap an icon to open the full-page list of tab groups, then tap the tab group you already had open, and finally tap the tab you want from this tab group. (Boo!)

So I went back to Chrome on mobile but still use Edge on desktop.

[LeoPanthera]

> How is Chrome a better browser than Edge?

I thought this too, until I actually used Edge. It's quite shocking how much advertising there is in it. The default content sources contain an extremely high proportion of clickbait and "outrage" journalism. It genuinely worries me that this is the Windows default. It's such an awful experience.

[Stratoscope]

That's a fair criticism, but aren't you just talking about the http://www.msn.com/ default home page?

That's easy to change. The first time I opened Edge, I opened Settings, typed "home" into the settings search box, and changed the "Home button" setting to "New tab page", which gives a nice simple page with a search box, like Google.

Is there other advertising you've seen in Edge that is different from Google?

[LeoPanthera]

Yes, it has all sort of weird promotional things in it that keep popping up. Price comparisons. Coupons. Things like that.

[fakedang]

Microsoft is so frickking dumb they still haven't managed to grasp why the Google experience was better than the MSN/Bing experience.

[caminanteblanco]

Have you used edge recently? It feels as bloated and ad-filled as yahoo news. I would take Chrome anyday, and I used to be a proud member of the edge fanclub.

[hackinthebochs]

Tabs Outliner is my solution to having an absurd number of tabs open. Should be paired with Tabs Session Manager as Tabs Outliner does occasionally lose all your sessions (like once every couple of years).

[nine_k]

Tangentially, there are extensions, such as "Auto tab Discard", that unload tabs from memory, thus avoiding slowdown or memory exhaustion. It allows to keep bunches of tabs as contexts / bookmarks.

[jridgewell]

This is natively supported in Chrome now: https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+memory+saver

[raincole]

> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.

Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a disadvantage! Yet it just keeps winning.

[0]: https://x.com/frantzfries/status/1628178202395873286

[sumedh]

> they don't because Chrome is better.

That was because of marketing not because Chrome was better.

The Google.com homepage telling you to use Chrome is one of the best marketing campaign in the world.

[shadowgovt]

No doubt that Google using their mainpage as a megaphone for the first time in the company's history made a difference.

... but that only got people in the door. What kept them in the door was this image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

... or, rather, the word-changing technology underpinning that image: the ability to sandbox individual page rendering instances into subprocesses so that a failure on one page didn't crash the entire browser. I think people sometimes forget how fundamentally unstable browsers were in 2008, and how easy it was to trip over one bad page that would bring down your bank tab, your email tab, your document tab, the three tabs of source code you had open, the seven tabs of unread blogposts... Hugely disruptive. Just didn't happen in Chrome.

Firefox popularized tabs, Chrome let us have a hundred of them open.

[OvbiousError]

The regularly flood youtube with advertisments for chrome, I've yet to see my first youtube ad for firefox.

[shmeeed]

That's an interesting observation. If they don't even use it for advertising, what _IS_ Mozilla doing with all those Google millions?

JK, we all know what they're doing with them...

[deruta]

I'm honestly out of the loop, what are they doing?

[maxfurman]

Paying their executives exorbitant salaries

[shmeeed]

$6.9M to the CEO, to be precise, which is roughly the same amount as the total of all private donations, grants and government funding they receive. It's bizarre.

Meanwhile they're cutting down on devs, killing products like Pocket and Fakespot, ignoring user feedback, driving strange and off-putting community engagement, and introducing eye candy BS nobody asked for.

In short, they appear to be doing anything but advancing the brand and actually, you know, competing in the browser market. Note that I'm not shitting on the poor devs, I still think they are delivering a great core product despite it all. But market shares and even absolute user counts keep dwindling. What is management doing about that?

And all this would seem like a case of simple mismanagement, if one weren't to reflect the fact that the overwhelming majority of their income comes from Google. The way they're behaving is suspiciously convenient to the entity that is their main revenue source. One could resonably suspect they serve primarily as an antitrust litigation sponge.

[cvhc]

I have quite opposite experience. I've never seen ads for Chrome but frequently see Apple (including Safari). And when I search for "chrome" or "browser" in Play Store, Firefox/DDG/Opera come before the true Google Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/LJiUX4m

I just don't think Mozilla have spare money to film a nice commercial...

[swiftcoder]

> Google started, developed, and built Chrome

This is perhaps a tad ahistorical. Google forked Blink off from WebKit around 2013 - it owes a lot of it's early success to the same technical foundations as Safari (which in turns owes the same debt to Konqueror...)

[Cthulhu_]

That's the rendering engine, which was one part of their early success; the other part was the V8 Javascript engine which was miles ahead of the competition in terms of performance.

[coliveira]

> but even Apple testified

Of course, Apple didn't want to lose its part in the ilegal scheme.

[scarface_74]

Bing - you know the search engine by the struggling Trillion dollar market cap company - is free to match Google’s offer.

[benoau]

Except Google's offer is funded by their (court-ruled) advertising monopoly... which neither Bing nor all other competitors combined can compete with.

[JustExAWS]

During the Ballmer era, Microsoft wasted billions on mobile via acquisitions of Danger and Nokia and their internal efforts to make Windows Mobile a thing. I’m sure they could have found the money from somewhere.

[crazygringo]

You really think Microsoft, a company worth $3.8 trillion, doesn't have enough money to pay for placement?

[benoau]

Bing by itself reportedly doesn't even gross that much, overall $20 billion represents about a quarter of Microsoft's entire annual profit. Microsoft already decided it wasn't viable to spend that much to compete, and the rest of the search market (including AI) need not apply.

[crazygringo]

But the point is that's Microsoft's choice.

They have the money to compete and jumpstart Bing with default placements and reap the ad dollars and build Bing into a serious competitor.

If they don't want to compete because they think investing money in Xbox will have a higher return, that's their decision (and maybe their mistake). It's not Google's fault.

[JustExAWS]

And how will it ever if Microsoft won’t invest in it? Microsoft has wasted billions of dollars in other verticals to open revenue streams.

[jajuuka]

Who needs it marketplace when you have two trillion dollar companies to pick from. Am I right?

[attendant3446]

Most popular != the best. The days when Chrome was the best browser are long gone.

[Cthulhu_]

It depends on the criteria for "best" though, to be pedantic. Chrome and Edge are for example "the best" in synthetic benchmarks.

[attendant3446]

Can I install the original uBlock in Chrome? No? It can't possibly be the best.

[trymas]

Regarding Chrome - don’t forget Google used it’s market leading position of their products to block other platforms/browsers (from the top of my head - Windows Phone). Or develop their web apps (or browser APIs) deliberately in such a way that they work best only on Chrome.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=windows+phone+google

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[komali2]

> Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.

What's wrong with that?

[Ray20]

> What's wrong with that?

The absence of a clear objective boundary of what can be taken and what cannot.

And without such a boundary, such a practice could be quite widespread, with the poorest and smallest actors being the first to be subjected to it, simply because it is easier to take from them and they do not have sufficient influence on the distributing bodies. This is like theory of building socialism 101

[komali2]

> The absence of a clear objective boundary of what can be taken and what cannot.

I don't understand why this is an obstacle - this issue already exists with writing laws and various countries have different solutions, all of which seem to be working kinda ok. There's the USA's constitution which isn't working so well in most cases but working great in others (free speech for example, though this is now failing), whereas other countries depend on histories of case law for example (UK).

It seems to me that if a government specifically sought to target the largest and richest actors it could avoid the issue you're speaking of. Of course this would require removing the ability of capital to influence politics, maybe that's the issue you mean?

[Ray20]

>free speech for example, though this is now failing

I don't quite understand what you mean.

The great advantage of the American constitution in terms of freedom of speech is that it sets a relatively clear boundary. And it is obvious that in this regard the constitution copes with its task perfectly: freedom of speech in the USA is currently protected better than in any other country.

It is so well protected that Americans were able to elect Trump as their leader, despite the fact that more than 80 percent of the mainstream media openly opposed him, and the government tried to shut the mouths of all his supporters under the guise of fighting dis- and misinformation (regardless of how we feel about his personality and presidency).

So if we look at the freedom of speech in the current US on a historical scale, we see exactly the opposite of what you saying: we see how freedom of speech in the US has once again stood firm despite the strongest opposition.

> Of course this would require removing the ability of capital to influence politics

You describe it as if it is something ordinary, not something catastrophic. Just to understand, if the government gets enough power to deprive capital of ability to influence politics - we get Nazi Germany or Russia. In the best case. At worst - the USSR, North Korea or Kampuchea

[komali2]

> freedom of speech in the USA is currently protected better than in any other country.

I don't know every country so I'm not sure if this is true, but it seems to me free speech was decently well protected up to a certain point and so long as you didn't threaten American hegemony. For example there was a long era where you were able to be jailed for being a communist or speaking out against American wars. Or often speech as protest, such as during the civil rights era, was violently put down.

Aesthetically Americans seem to enjoy decent free speech but only so long as it doesn't meaningfully challenge the government. Protests are almost always violently suppressed in America it seems.

Recently the Americans' free speech rights seem to be degrading even further with media being ejected from the press room or sued by the president. Not to mention the chilling effect of calls by prominent politicians to do violence (typically deportation) to various dissidents such as anti Israeli voices.

Other countries elect unpopular politicians, that's not really unique. The American right to call for violence or use slurs against minorities is I suppose unique, I'm not sure why someone would be proud that that right remains unsullied when the bits of free speech that actually matter are being stripped away but so it goes.

> Just to understand, if the government gets enough power to deprive capital of ability to influence politics - we get Nazi Germany or Russia. In the best case. At worst - the USSR, North Korea or Kampuchea

I find this very interesting because you're the first person I've met to openly defend corruption, or the American word for it, lobbying. Most neoliberals want to "keep the good parts of capitalism" but argue that money shouldn't be able to influence politics. Or maybe you draw the line somewhere between corruption and not corruption, when discussing money influencing politics? If so where's that line for you?

The PRC for a while had virtually 0 influence of capital against their government and now they're the second most powerful country on earth - arguably the most powerful, if we compare the ability of either executive leader to control the military (the parade comparison is... embarrassing to say the least). Of course capital still has some influence in the PRC but seems to be not as much as the USA given the PRC will happily nationalize things to this day, or chuck billionaires it doesn't like in prison.

Taiwan seems to have less corruption the USA. The KMT are obscenely wealthy and yet still struggle to get their policy through, and have had a couple of their media stations pulled off air for corruption.

The EU seems to often act against the interests of capital, as well as member nations to a certain degree. I'd be surprised if you denied this since capitalists often use this as evidence FOR the superiority of capitalism against socialism, since America's gdp is so high and businesses prefer to incorporate there.

So it seems to me that Nazi Germany, Russia, USSR, North Korea are more political failures than economic ones. The Soviet Union after all did industrialize the entire empire and was the only serious challenger to American hegemony for decades. Not that I'm a fan but it was hardly a failure until it dissolved - a fate which may befall the United States after all.

[Ray20]

> Americans seem to enjoy decent free speech but only so long as it doesn't meaningfully challenge the government

Trump's election was such a challenge. As we can see, the government failed to restrict freedom of speech.

> Recently the Americans' free speech rights seem to be degrading even further with media being ejected from the press room or sued by the president.

But it always happened. Moreover, media being ejected from the press room is not violation of the free speech, and there have been fewer court cases against the press from the government recently. I'm not saying that free speech in the US is absolute. Just that it is better protected than anywhere else and that it works effectively in the areas where it matters most.

> Other countries elect unpopular politicians, that's not really unique.

But we are talking about exactly the opposite: the election of popular politicians who are opposed by the current government. And this is quite unique.

In Europe, in such cases, such politicians are silenced, imprisoned, banned from running, killed, or results of elections are simply cancelled if people voted incorrectly. And in the rest of the world, the situation generally is even worse than in Europe.

> first person I've met to openly defend corruption, or the American word for it, lobbying.

Lobbying occurs everywhere and it cannot not occur. Even in the most totalitarian and communist societies, the most bloodthirsty dictators do not live in a vacuum and are subject to the influence of various isolated groups. So the attempt to separate lobbying from corruption is primarily aimed at reducing this very corruption.

> argue that money shouldn't be able to influence politics.

This is an impossible situation. Or rather, it is possible, but it implies totalitarian powers of the government. Because politics is by definition influenced by everything, and money is by definition a measure of things that influences everything. And the only option when money will not influence politics is when the government has the power to directly manage capital. In any other case, money influences politics.

So neoliberals who believe that money should not influence politics are stupid prototalitarian pigs, no matter what else they say.

> The PRC for a while had virtually 0 influence of capital against their government

But that's not true at all. At the time when capital in China had no influence on politics - literally millions of people died of hunger there. And later, the Chinese government gave capital unlimited power over some areas of public activity.

> The EU seems to often act against the interests of capital

There is no common interests of capital. Each individual capital has its own interests, usually consisting of eliminating all competitors and becoming a socialist government with a monopoly over all spheres of public activity. And if we look at Europe - without a doubt, this is exactly what is happening there.

> So it seems to me that Nazi Germany, Russia, USSR, North Korea are more political failures than economic ones.

This is exactly what I'm talking about: giving the government such enormous powers to influence all elements of the economy makes it completely unaccountable. Which is certainly a political failure.

> it was hardly a failure until it dissolved

I think here you are already starting to substitute concepts. What do you mean by failure? Soviet industrialization is a propaganda myth, the pre-revolutionary standard of living was achieved only in the 60s, tens of millions of victims of famine, millions of political executions. What do you mean by not a failure? Lack of accountability of government to the public? But then North Korea is a huge success, but you call it a failure.

[makeitdouble]

> Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine

"We only accept bribes from other monopolies"

[SllX]

This shit is just revisionist. The first time Apple and Google signed a contract to integrate Google into Safari, Google had ~32% of the search engine market, less than Yahoo! at the time, and they kept renewing that deal for over 20 years.

[tgv]

> You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law

I think you can, under the assumption that Apple's decision wasn't independent/voluntary. At least, that seems how it works for people in cases of coercion, conspiracy or impairment.

[myko]

> With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore)

This is interesting to me in that I find Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude much better for coding / planning work than ChatGPT

[dartharva]

I just wish that also included Google Play Services. Google has a chokehold on all Android manufacturers preventing them of even thinking of using AOSP without Googleware

[chneu]

>built Chrome into the best browser available today

haha what? Not even close to true. Chrome is a locked down money maker for Google. It is primarily a data-collection tool for Google. No way is that possibly the best browser available today.

[skinnymuch]

Vast majority of users are not technically literate enough to know what is a good browser. They would have no clue why Chrome is better or not. They definitely don’t know what Blink is.

[dwoldrich]

Blink and you'll miss it!

[eclipxe]

Why does that matter?

[skinnymuch]

Consumers aren’t using chrome in 2025 because it’s the best. Not that the vast majority of people would know minor differences. This isn’t when Chrome came out and the differences between other browsers was large.

Monopolies usually don’t maintain their status because they are “the best” and as if consumers also are informed enough to know that. Similar arguments can be made to allow basically all of big tech.

In a better system instead of talking about allowing everything as if corporations are precious individuals, the govt should be creating funded competitors and being much more firm with monopolistic behavior (even if they aren’t legally monopolies)

[doug_durham]

What is your point?

[tgv]

That the argument "Chrome is better because so many people use it" is, frankly, bullshit. Which it is.