Comment by traderj0e
1 day ago
There's nothing forcing you to use Chrome instead of Edge, but some websites don't work with Safari or Firefox because Google has pushed nonstandard stuff. And it's weirdly not only advanced WebWhatever stuff, but also some things that affects basic features like forms. Though sometimes they have a separate mobile site that was tested in iPhone Safari.
I find the discrepancy kinda minor though. It's enough that I have Chrome installed alongside Firefox and Safari, but not enough that I use it often. It used to be worse.
> There's nothing forcing you to use Chrome instead of Edge
This is what I mean. How is it a "monopoly" when one can easily just use something else?
The only thing people are saying its "its a monopoly because it has high market share". But a high market share does not a monopoly make, there's more to it than just purely market share. A monopoly requries outsized market power, something that to me at least it doesn't seem like Chrome, the web browser has.
The argument others are making is that Google has a monopoly on browser engines, or that it's becoming that way. IE switched to Chromium partially to resolve compatibility issues. I don't have a strong opinion on this though.
People being able to switch relatively easily means that they're a lot more likely to lose their market power in five years. It doesn't do much to diminish their current market power, which is enormous.
High market share almost always means high market power. That's why people focus on market share since it's easy to cite.
> they're a lot more likely to lose their market power in five years
It doesn't take users five years to install a different browser. It takes maybe two to five minutes. If they really do things to piss off their users they'll be gone far faster than that.
What kind of lock-in does a browser even really have? Its not like some kind of social network or financial setup or anything like that. The browser itself doesn't have the content. Its run an installer, have it import bookmarks and extensions, and you're using a different browser. Its not like we're back in the days of ActiveX where there were entirely proprietary extensions to the web that only Microsoft blessed browsers could run that only ran on certain OSes.
> almost always means high market power.
It doesn't when the competition is so readily available, practically interchangeable, and also zero cost.