Comment by acheron
3 years ago
Google wanted more control over the Internet, so they created a browser that they controlled and pushed it on people by leveraging their monopoly in a separate area. You know, the kind of thing we used to think was bad in the 1990s.
I think it's hard to say it's some sort of monopoly thing. Browsers are free and they take about 41 seconds to download and install. That's an extremely low switching cost.
Unless you have a chromebook, it doesn't come preloaded on your Macbook or PC either. Consumers make the deliberate choice to go install Chrome instead of Firefox, and it's because they prefer Chrome.
Low switching costs doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't also leveraging powers they have due to their dominant market position. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
In the 90s, Netscape was free and installing it was easy.
Leveraged their monopoly ? How does that work exactly for Windows, MacOS and iOS in your mind ?
I assume that the previous commenter was referring to Google's monopolies in search, email, and video.
All of which they will use to yell at you to switch to Chrome, and will sometimes cause to actually be faster or more featureful when using Chrome rather than any other browser.
It's a pretty clear case of using your monopoly in one market to artificially prop up your entry into a different market, which is very much the sort of thing that has traditionally been frowned upon both legally and morally.
Back when Chrome was fresh, it was pushed very hard by Google through their home page and other related services until it became dominant. It was also the time when Firefox suffered from certain quality issues which really helped Chrome. So, it wasn't the ecosystem thing because Google was, and to some extent still is, the de facto home page of most people, regardless of the OS.
they implement features.only supported by chromium. see google meets blur background.
You think Chrome has ~62% market share because ..Meets has blurred backgrounds ?
If anything, it is impressive how Chrome has managed to be the majority browser, given that by default we get Edge on Windows, Safari on MacOS/iOS and Firefox on Ubuntu.
That's what they are supposed to do. The web standards bodies don't like to consider standardizing new features until there is an implementation in the field so they can see how well it works in practice.
So when one browser maker wants a new feature they make a spec and implement it. If it seems to be useful other browser makers will implement it, maybe with changes they think improve it. Then the standards bodies will look at all those and make a standard.
For that particular feature it was actually first suggested by people from Intel and Apple. Google thinks it is a good idea and is the first to write a spec for it and implement it. It seems highly likely that Mozilla and Apple will follow and it will be standardized.
And for any non-Google Android phone!
In my view, this isn't accurate. Chrome was created at the time because browsers weren't great and Google wanted browsers to be faster. Chrome grew in popularity not because of pushing but because it was genuinely a much higher quality browser for a long time.