Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, says US justice department

IE ~ 50%
Firefox ~ 30%
Chrome ~ 5%

Very much the underdog in browser markets.

And today:

IE/Edge ~ 5%
Firefox ~ 3%
Chrome ~ 67%

What happened in between and during netscape era I wonder. Surely firefox did not fall behind and lose dominant position to a newcomer?

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Google used their search engine and other assets (youtube, Android, etc) to promote Chrome. That’s monopolistic practices. Consumers don’t choose products just based on how good they are

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How is that monopolistic? They own those products right? Who wouldn’t promote another product through those products?

I get promotions of Proton products in my Proton Mail, what a monopoly…

That’s the definition of a monopoly. No one else can compete with Chrome because it’s preinstalled on Android, and no one can compete with Google because it’s the default everywhere. You can’t use your dominant position in one market to compete in another.

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Samsung devices come with Samsung Browser, Xiaomi devices come with Mi Browser, but nobody is using those because they’re worse than Chrome.

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Chrome is still preinstalled on all Samsung devices and it can’t be uninstalled. I don’t know anything about Xiaomi.

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And people choose it over the Samsung Browser.

I mean the fact is that Samsung Browser sucks ass, so that doesn’t really say much. No one is arguing Chrome is a bad browser, just that Chrome’s dominance allows Google to dominate other markets, which is anti-competitive. The same applies to Google using Android to leverage its other apps. You won’t find an Android device that ships the Proton Suite by default.

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Which is good.

And the same should apply to Google apps as default.

Yes, but you aren’t getting Google Certified if you don’t include all the bloat. EU should just kill this certification bullshit and MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY check.

Exactly which is anti-competitive. It’s hard enough to get people to switch from default apps, and you can’t even include sane default apps if you want play certification.

The statistics show as well; Chrome dominates the mobile browser market.

You are comparing the current situation to the past. All the things you cited, like Search, YouTube, Android, were not dominant then. There were other search engines, there were other browsers, there were other video providers, there were other Mobile OS. Google won because of better, cheaper products. It incredibly useless to say people don’t choose products based on how good they are, because they do. The definition of good does vary across consumers.

It doesn’t make any sense to blame Google for getting more users than the dominant solutions then. Blame the other orgs and projects for not innovating. Would you blame NVIDIA for providing better AI tooling than AMD? Is it AMDs fault that Intel is fallibg behind? The insane lack of personal responsibility from these projects is unbelievable.

Google wasn’t a monopoly before. Google is monopolistic now, and yet I prefer it over something like the Firefox or Linux situation BECAUSE these projects and orgs have proven they are tremendously incompetent.

If anyone has a better solution that can prove chromium wouldn’t become insecure unreliable Amazon product or constantly lagging and Luddite version of itself under Linux/Mozilla type structure, I am all ears.

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People on this sub go crazy to defend Google dont know anything about monopoly. The magnitude of Google owning android and pushing the default browser and search engine and Samsung or proton’s practices is completely different.
Thats why eu defined gatekeepers and go after big tech.

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Yep, I agree with @Tech-Trooper and @phnx, we just need to go back in time a little with the Microsoft case and IE.

United States v. Microsoft Corp. - Wikipedia.

Google is doing exactly the same, but the antitrust actions have been really weak in the past years.

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It’s preinstalled only on androids, nothing else. Everyone else on other platforms can choose whatever they want. They choose chrome for some reason. That doesn’t make it a monopoly.

Most people just use the default. Thats why its a monopoly

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The only default is only on android though? People choose chrome over default safari & edge.