[zanny]

Firefox peaked at like 40% market share back in 2007 / 2008, before Chrome was even a thing.

The case against IE was not that Microsoft bundled it with the OS. Its completely different from what Safari on iOS is. The problem with IE back in 2000 was that Microsoft was:

1. Bundling their browser with their OS. 2. Had 90% of the browser market share as a result of (1). 3. Using that market share to break web standards and implement proprietary IE only features that broke html for everyone else and made it impossible to compete, because if you made a standards compliant web browser in 2002 it would not render pages properly that were designed for IE.

I don't exactly know what made the US fed care so much about preserving web standards over a lot of other violated standards by monopolistic entrenched interests, but their suit was entirely about Microsoft using its position as an overwhelming market dominator of web browsers to usurp web standards.

Apple really can't do that. Safari's market share, even as the only iOS browser engine, is peanuts. All they are doing is making their own platform irrelevant, and since they are not doing the whole "proprietary web that cannot render right in Chrome" thing, they aren't an antitrust case for being incompetent.

[jlarocco]

What? The antitrust case against Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with web standards.

You can read all about it here (search for Netscape): http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

Even when the EU looked into IE specifically, they weren't directly concerned with web standards: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-09-15_en.htm?local...

[kuschku]

> Using that market share to break web standards and implement proprietary IE only features that broke html for everyone else and made it impossible to compete, because if you made a standards compliant web browser in 2002 it would not render pages properly that were designed for IE.

Well, Chrome is doing exactly that today. Extending HTML with proprietary features, leading to situatons where websites work "best in Chrome", even today.

[TheDong]

The real difference is utterly unrelated to all that.

The reason Microsoft was on the hook was because it was a software vender forcing its choice. Apple is a hardware+software vendor, and when you own both the software and the hardware, you can make more restrictive choices and are not open to the same class of laws.

it's dumb, but that's the main legal difference here as to why the microsoft case doesn't apply to apple.