Comment by dfabulich
1 year ago
It's a common misconception that tons of users manually install Chrome, but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser.
Chrome is the only browser with a business model that makes sense to do this. Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default. Firefox makes no money at all, and makes 95% of its revenue from Google's payments to be the default search engine. Safari isn't even available on Windows, and even then, 99% of Safari's revenue is from Google.
(Safari was available on Windows from 2007-2012, but it never captured much market share, because Apple was never willing to pay PC makers to make Safari the default.)
Here's StatCounter's estimates of desktop browser market share. The overwhelming majority of users are using their computer's default browser.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Chrome: 65.55%
Edge: 13.9%
Safari: 8.69%
Firefox: 6.36%
Opera: 2.9%
FWIW, I don't think it makes any sense at all to sell off Chrome. Google could probably sell off YouTube, AdSense, and Google Cloud, but not Chrome.
The only viable business model for a web browser, the one that literally all major browsers use, is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default. Even Kagi makes its own Orion web browser, for exactly this reason.
How could Chrome make its owner any money at all if Chrome couldn't accept money from Google to be the default search engine? How could Chrome possibly do what Firefox and Safari can't?
> It's a common misconception that tons of users manually install Chrome, but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser
Maybe 10 years ago, but which ones do it now? thinkpads and HP machines, at least, ship with Edge as the default. Dell or something?
Windows is also _hyper_ aggressive about pushing Edge now too. Like it's nuts how hard it pushes it, to the point that it embarrasses people who do actually prefer Edge. "Recommending" at every turn that you not switch, having the edge browser itself warn against downloading Chrome, pushing edge into various OS-level browser launches even if it's not your default, and, of course, randomly resetting the browser default on various updates.
edit: at least from this page, it's edge by default on at least some dell machines too, but I haven't owned one in so long I won't say that for sure: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000128257/how-to-ch...
It doesn't seem to be a default on PCs.
I don’t remember chrome being default anywhere. You always needed to open edge to download chrome and I have installed windows numerous times in past.
I believe the claim was that it's coming default on prebuilt PCs. If you're installing Windows, that's not the situation where Chrome would be the default.
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Chromebooks are a thing, and are extremely popular
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Before Edge, everyone had to install Chrome because the web wouldn't work with IE. It is still the case that some major sites don't work with Firefox either. Edge is as close to a de-Googled Chrome as you can get to work properly. Unfortunately de-Googling meant re-Microsofting
> Unfortunately de-Googling meant re-Microsofting
That's an understatement. Microsoft Edge is, in fact, a more privacy invasive browser than Chrome. And that was a pretty high bar.
In the EU, straight from the get-go, Edge presents users with the IAB interstitial, informing them that Edge is going to share their data with the entire advertising industry. Note that Chrome doesn't do this, as Google only wants you to share data with them, and it's not the browser that asks for consent. Edge's IAB interstitial is filled with dark patterns as well, such as legitimate interests being unlawfully declared.
Edge is also filled with Microsoft's telemetry, which you can't turn off. Every browser instance, of course, comes with a unique ID that's reported to Bing Ads. Using Edge without Bing is fairly difficult. And end-to-end encryption for its synchronization feature isn't supported.
I entirely understand why people want to degoogleify, but picking Bing in that process is fairly stupid.
The web wouldn’t work with IE just because Microsoft had this unique strategy of deviating from standards, having non-working APIs and providing an awful experience to developers. It’s unique.
Firefox compliance is another story, but very mild compared to IE. Chrome also had to deal with compatibility issues when Firefox was the leader, but Mozilla relinquished their leadership position because it was very important to them to fire their CEO / original writer of Javascript for ideological reasons - he had given $1000 to an anti-abortion NGO, which is an unacceptable thoughtcrime. Then they spent their time politicking and not enough coding.
Sounds like the history of browsers is just made of strategic mistakes.
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> It is still the case that some major sites don't work with Firefox either.
This comment keeps popping up. Every time I ask the commenter to show me some sites that dont work with Firefox. Nobody has ever shown me one. I think people are stuck in the past here, Firefox has been absolutely fine for about 10 years now.
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Wouldn’t it be funny if the aggressive “are you sure you want to leave Edge?!” kind of messages actually made people ton the whole think it was a lower quality product…
If you buy a cheap computer with Windows S it is very hard to get out of the S configuration and in S configuration you can't install Chrome at all or Firefox.
You can switch out of S mode (for free) https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...
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Not very hard in my experience. Not even hard.
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I can confirm Dell's default for Windows devices is Edge. I believe Dell's Ubuntu laptops come with both Firefox and Chrome installed.
I agree with you. Of all the remedies to address Google's "monopoly" this seems to the most bizarre.
My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser? In the article it said that they'd need approval for any new joint venture, collaboration, or partnership with any company that competes with Google in search or in search text ads.
It makes no mention of web browsers.
> My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser?
I'm not a lawyer, and didn't read the verdict, but your query is very Hacker News. Justice is not code. If Google is forced to divest from Chrome, it of course means it can't turn around and make the Google Dhrome browser. If Google did, they'd be sued for ignoring the verdict.
There court hasn't set a remedy to its verdict yet. From the article
The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must “promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve.” It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine.
Think of it like MySQL and then MariaDB. So if Google sells Chromium to say Saleforce (they seem to buy everything) then Chrome is no longer Google's. Google would have complied with the verdict.
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You're right in the short term but look how quickly the required outcomes from United States v. Microsoft Corp were relaxed and eventually ignored.
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The only reason Google is trying to take away cookies is because they make you log into Chrome which gives you all their browsing data anyway and probably anything you type. So maybe not having a browser controlled by Google would be good.
Selling might not make business sense for Google or for Chrome, but it makes a ton of sense for the American public. Google is using Chrome to benefit advertisers, data brokers, and surveillance over users. Exhibit: the manifest v2 / Ublock Origin saga. And this is huge because so many other browsers use Chromium or its engine under the hood. Google can also use Chrome to push user-unfriendly web standards or de-facto standards.
Of course, this doesn't appear that related to the DOJ's reasoning.
The problem is that it doesn't make business sense for anybody else to buy Chrome. Bare in mind that 99% of Chrome is the free Chromium open source project, so you're not buying any sort of technological asset. You're just buying a big pre-existing user base, which would be extremely difficult to monetize without making the product much worse, although I'm sure Microsoft or Facebook would be happy to give that a go. It certainly wouldn't make any sense to buy it without a sprawling advertisement business or some major conflicts of interest. But what's the point of selling it to someone else like that?
It's easy to say "just sell it" without thinking about the actual implications, but you're basically talking about destroying it. Maybe that's the point, but we should at least be honest about it.
Yeah, Chrome is "Google-flavored Chromium", just as Edge is "Microsoft-flavored Chromium."
If (say) Meta bought Edge, then they'd get the userbase and the trademark, but the product seems pointless. Why would Meta want a browser whose killer features are integrations with Bing and Office 365? If Meta wanted a browser, they'd make a "Meta-flavored Chromium."
I'm assuming this is the point - say "just sell it" to satisfy anti-monopolists, while knowing no one will buy it for any reasonable price to satisfy monopolists. Political points across the board with no consequence, why not?
The right answer is to nationalize it. Set up some sort of independent non-profit steering committee, and maybe redirect some of the massive savings Elon has pulled out of his ass to fund the actual core development. That solves the "who spends $1b per year on development if not an adtech" problem. If the US was a functioning state right now, I might suggest making it an international organization to encourage buy in from developers and backers outside our borders.
Browsers are one of the most critical pieces of modern software infrastructure, both from a security-footprint perspective and as a vehicle for (mis-)information delivery, so maybe they're too important for ANY commercial entity to use them as a bludgeon to for their agenda.
If they no longer control the core project, then Google (or Microsoft) have a much harder job doing self-serving stuff. They could nuke Manifest v2 in THEIR Chromium derivative, but core Chromium isn't going to give it up-- the Operas and Vivaldis of the world don't have to spend their limited resources trying to unwind the change to keep a desired feature.
> The problem is that it doesn't make business sense for anybody else to buy Chrome
I don't see why divesting it necessarily means selling it to another company. Google could create a non-profit like Mozilla, or a for profit and float it as its own business.
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I suppose then we could treat as some kind of public good and fund its development directly from our tax dollars?
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Yeah, I agree with all this.
> Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default.
Have you used a Windows PC lately? It seems like once a week I have to ignore/decline prompts to change my default browser to Edge.
I’m not sure PC makers have any say/control over this behavior.
I think you might be holding it wrong? I've only been asked once, I said no. Quite sternly. It apologised, we laughed about it. Now Edge has no internet access.
I just opened Edge, first thing it did was ask me to become default browser:
https://i.imgur.com/u2Nby1b.png
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Where on the statcounter page does it show that people are using their default browser? You're making a lot of claims about Chrome commonly being the default browser without linking to any evidence of your correction of this "common misconception" that people install chrome manually.
About one in five Windows updates shows a notification along the lines of "Update your browser preferences to secure defaults?", which is code for "Can we bing you mate?"
Every time I visit my parents, I need to de-bing them again
Why bother to "de-bing" their computer?
Cite? I’ve literally never had a PC come with Chrome on it.
Hell, MS makes it super hard to even install Chrome now, including numerous irritating nag messages and ‘are you sure?!?’
I like your analysis, but wonder about this line:
>> The only viable business model for a web browser is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default.
Mostly, it's just that giving away browsers for free as a source of garnering search traffic distorts the market.
According to this maybe somewhat broken website (idk there's a warning that it's broken but it still seems to work) https://www.netmarketshare.com/, Chrome has 65% market share on OS X.
"Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default."
Why would they pay the manufactures when they can just add annoying reminders and make it hard to switch in the OS they ship it with?
> (Safari was available on Windows from 2007-2012, but it never captured much market share, because Apple was never willing to pay PC makers to make Safari the default.)
I think it must have been bundled with iTunes as I remember family members having Safari installed on Windows computers at the time.
But I think it being available for Windows right when Firefox and then later Chrome started to become popular didn't help - it was just some other browser that no one was recommending.
Since Chrome's engine is used by Edge, Opera, Brave, etc.. Probably the best move is to become a non-profit and have all those organizations chip in.
The main reason even Microsoft gave up and rebased their browser on top of Chrome is because of the breakneck speed at which Google introduces new standards and features to the ecosystem. Having them be forced to slow down might be a good thing for browser diversity and the future of the Internet.
Or maybe because Chromium is pretty good, open-source and there's nearly no upside to reinventing the wheel?
If Mozilla would fork Chromium now and base Firefox on their fork I would switch from Brave. The engine simply technically superior.
> The only viable business model for a web browser, the one that literally all major browsers use, is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default. Even Kagi makes its own Orion web browser, for exactly this reason.
The only viable business model ... while the incumbent (IE, now Chrome) is allowed to give the product away for free in service of some other predatory agenda.
> but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser.
Unless you have a source for that, that's flat-out wrong. I've never heard of that, I've never seen that, and I can't find any supporting evidence of that.
> Here's StatCounter's estimates of desktop browser market share. The overwhelming majority of users are using their computer's default browser.
That's not what that graph shows. It doesn't show anything about defaults.
>> Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default.
Not only is this not true for lots of manufacturers, but the minute you click on a web link anywhere in windows (help, start menu, etc) it opens in Edge, and Edge cannot be uninstalled on a windows machine.
This is just flat out wrong. Edge is the default browser on ~all new Windows machines, and Safari is the default (obviously) on macOS. If you have data showing the opposite, please provide it.
People go out of their way to install Chrome because it's better than the competition. Just like they used to do for Firefox, back when Firefox was a better browser than the competition.
The main problem with Google anti competition is how chrome is being leveraged to mine user behavior signals for search engine algos. That is the unfair advantage that needs to be killed off
Your source shows the "Market Share Worldwide". I don't see it shows the "Default Browser Worldwide".
AFAIK, in the US, the default for:
- Windows: Edge
- Mac: Safari
- Ubuntu: Firefox
I think the claim that "Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser" needs a clear source.
At this point Microsoft has embedded bing so deeply into windows they don’t care
If spun off, why wouldn’t Chrome then be free to sell its default search provisioning back to Google?
Because the DOJ demands two things. First, Google must sell Chrome to a DOJ approved buyer. And second, Google must not pay anyone for the default search engine spot.