MS managed to kill established competition on their OS platform with their behavior around IE. Apple doesn't allow competing browser engines on iOS in the first place, so this gives them a kind of a free pass on that one. They could be on the hook for abusing their iOS gatekeeper status against other types of apps, though.
I guess you must be young enough to not remember when Google didn’t exist. The anti-trust trial against Microsoft being referred to above began several months before Google was founded. The FTC inquiries into whether MS was abusing a monopoly position with IE began before Sergey Brin even started at Stanford.
No I remember that, I was referring to the browser war happening now. The old IE days aren’t even relevant to what’s happening now though. Except maybe to show that the only reason Microsoft even had to fight that case in the first place is that they weren’t lobbying the government as much as they “should” have.
> The old IE days aren’t even relevant to what’s happening now though.
Why do you say that? MSFT has been engaging in the same behavior for 30 years, trying to force people to use their browser by bundling the browser and default browsing behaviors into the OS. Why does this feel any different than what was happening in 1995? It seems exactly the same to me. Google brought new competition into the middle of an ongoing browser war, and they also do pushy things to nudge people toward their browser. But I don’t see the line you’re trying to draw.
Firefox is far from dead. I switched back to Firefox from Chrome and it’s been freeing. The extension migration was a pain, but I found almost everything I needed and purged stuff I didn’t.
i'm a firefox user, but firefox is 2,4% from being dead. that's still a lot of people but dangerously close to the kind of numbers where people stop bothering to test if their websites work in it (if they were even doing it to begin with, let's be honest)
