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0 pointsLiquid_Fire4y ago0 comments

Bundling Chrome with Flash and other software, such that it would install by default unless you uncheck the right checkbox (and make itself the default browser).

Making Google web applications (YouTube) use technologies only available in Chrome with much slower fallback used in other browsers.

Bundling Chrome with Android.

Ads pushing it aggressively on Google/YouTube. Ads IRL.

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tentacleuno4y ago

What else do you reasonably expect them to bundle with Android, though? Safari?

Liquid_FireOP4y ago

I agree that it's probably too far to call that one a dirty tactic.

However, Microsoft was once forced to offer a choice of browsers to EU users of Windows, which included all major competitors and even a number of minor browsers. Google doesn't have quite as strong of a monopoly as Windows did, but it wouldn't be too unreasonable to offer the user a choice.

Additionally, while I see a small number of Android apps that actually embed the default browser when they want to show some web content, I see many more that embed what is clearly a Chrome-based web view. I'm not familiar with what the relevant underlying APIs are, but I would prefer it if more apps respected my choice, and Google are probably in a position to make that the easy/default choice, but they don't.

tentacleuno4y ago

> However, Microsoft was once forced to offer a choice of browsers to EU users of Windows, which included all major competitors and even a number of minor browsers. Google doesn't have quite as strong of a monopoly as Windows did, but it wouldn't be too unreasonable to offer the user a choice.

I mean technically apps on Android can bundle whatever web rendering engine they want. The majority of them either use Android's WebView components (see: DuckDuckGo, and a LOT of others), or are just a hard fork of Chromium (see: Kiwi Browser, Bromite, Brave, etc.)

On that note, I remember trying to find a non-Chromium browser on Android (bar Gecko / Firefox, of course). It was practically impossible. I think there was some sort of WebKit thing, but it was like 10 years out of date.

The only practical alternative is Gecko, but IMO it has a lot of catching up to do with performance, battery life, etc. etc. Personally I don't like the redesign, but I'm not sure what the public sentiment is aside from vocal Firefox users.

It's the same with desktop mostly IMO: either Firefox or Chromium. I'd love to be proven wrong here, though.

It'd be interesting to see if Servo would change things on both mobile and desktop, though. Again, it has a lot of catching up to do in comparison to Chromium.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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tentacleuno4y ago

What else do you reasonably expect them to bundle with Android, though? Safari?

Liquid_FireOP4y ago

I agree that it's probably too far to call that one a dirty tactic.

tentacleuno4y ago

It's the same with desktop mostly IMO: either Firefox or Chromium. I'd love to be proven wrong here, though.

It'd be interesting to see if Servo would change things on both mobile and desktop, though. Again, it has a lot of catching up to do in comparison to Chromium.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse