[Hansenq]

This seems like a very sensible and logical conclusion by the judge to me.

An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine because everyone else was worse. You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law--if Apple wants to make Google the default, they should be allowed to do so! The ban on exclusive contracts makes sense though; they should not be allowed to use contracts to furthur their monopoly position.

And similarly with Chrome; it made no sense to bring Chrome into this equation. Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today NOT through exclusive contracts, but because Chrome is just a better product. Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.

With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore) and AI search engines potentially shifting the search landscape, who knows if Google will still be a monopoly 5 years from now. Software moves fast and the best solution to software monopoly is more software competition.

[pinkmuffinere]

> Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today

I don’t think this is as settled as you imply. I tend to like Google products, and do almost everything in the Google ecosystem. But my browser is normally brave or Firefox, because better Adblock is so so impactful. I feel that chrome is a valid alternative, but that no browser is really clearly “the best”. In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best?

[ehsankia]

1. It might not be the best across all metrics today, but it definitely was a few years ago.

2. While it's true that other browsers like Firefox have been catching up to Chrome in speed, it's still true that Chrome help lead the way and if not for it, the web would've likely been far slower today.

3. There has been an explosion in other browsers in the past few years, but admittedly they're all chromium-based, so even that wouldn't have been possible without Chrome

[overfeed]

> In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best?

As a former Firebug fan: Chrome/Chromium has had superior browser dev-tools experience for over a decade now.

[shadowgovt]

When Chrome started, it was the best because it introduced the process-partitioned model that allowed it to completely avoid a common failure-mode among its peer browsers at the time: one bug in the processing of one tab would crash the entire browser (a problem exacerbated by the existence of a now-defunct plugin ecosystem where third-party code was running inside the browser process; we basically don't do that anymore). That was becoming brutal on users as more and more of the work they did every day transitioned over to web-based.

The other browsers have picked up the partitioning since then as a feature so the playing-field is far more level.

[dabockster]

Chrome is the "best" because all of the other browsers continue to fail at real world marketing. The best ads and marketing continue to be real life stuff - billboards, bus signage, people handing out flyers, etc etc etc. You can't just hype a browser on social media or web forums, and you can't hype it solely to those who are tech savvy.

A solid example of this right now is all of the Mullvad VPN ads I've seen on the Seattle Light Rail lately. Google used to have ads everywhere for Chrome. The only time I saw Firefox stuff was the rare t-shirt at a tech conference.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Anecdotally, I've seen many geeks (who certainly don't make their browser choice based on an annoying popup, and are generally more on the anti-Google side) use Chrome rather than Firefox, at conferences etc. (but this is mostly 5+ years ago). Not the majority, but plenty of well-informed opinionated people.

I believe especially back then, Chrome performance was significantly better than Firefox. On Android, Firefox was so slow and unpolished that the ad blocking couldn't make up for it (and even that wasn't available from the start).

[avrionov]

Brave is based on Chrome (Chromium).

[Stratoscope]

How is Chrome a better browser than Edge? They are both just custom builds of the underlying Chromium browser.

I switched from Chrome to Edge on my Windows machine a couple of months ago for the embarrassing reason that I had so many tabs open that Chrome slowed down to a crawl.

(Yes, I'm one of those lazy people who uses old tabs as if they were bookmarks.)

Of course I eventually opened enough tabs in Edge that it slowed down too! So I finally bit the bullet and started closing tabs in both browsers.

Otherwise, I hardly notice any difference between the two.

There are bigger differences on my Android device. Edge supports extensions! (Yay!) But it lacks Chrome's "tab group carousel" at the bottom of the screen. Instead, you have to tap an icon to open the full-page list of tab groups, then tap the tab group you already had open, and finally tap the tab you want from this tab group. (Boo!)

So I went back to Chrome on mobile but still use Edge on desktop.

[LeoPanthera]

> How is Chrome a better browser than Edge?

I thought this too, until I actually used Edge. It's quite shocking how much advertising there is in it. The default content sources contain an extremely high proportion of clickbait and "outrage" journalism. It genuinely worries me that this is the Windows default. It's such an awful experience.

[caminanteblanco]

Have you used edge recently? It feels as bloated and ad-filled as yahoo news. I would take Chrome anyday, and I used to be a proud member of the edge fanclub.

[hackinthebochs]

Tabs Outliner is my solution to having an absurd number of tabs open. Should be paired with Tabs Session Manager as Tabs Outliner does occasionally lose all your sessions (like once every couple of years).

[nine_k]

Tangentially, there are extensions, such as "Auto tab Discard", that unload tabs from memory, thus avoiding slowdown or memory exhaustion. It allows to keep bunches of tabs as contexts / bookmarks.

[raincole]

> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.

Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a disadvantage! Yet it just keeps winning.

[0]: https://x.com/frantzfries/status/1628178202395873286

[sumedh]

> they don't because Chrome is better.

That was because of marketing not because Chrome was better.

The Google.com homepage telling you to use Chrome is one of the best marketing campaign in the world.

[OvbiousError]

The regularly flood youtube with advertisments for chrome, I've yet to see my first youtube ad for firefox.

[swiftcoder]

> Google started, developed, and built Chrome

This is perhaps a tad ahistorical. Google forked Blink off from WebKit around 2013 - it owes a lot of it's early success to the same technical foundations as Safari (which in turns owes the same debt to Konqueror...)

[Cthulhu_]

That's the rendering engine, which was one part of their early success; the other part was the V8 Javascript engine which was miles ahead of the competition in terms of performance.

[coliveira]

> but even Apple testified

Of course, Apple didn't want to lose its part in the ilegal scheme.

[scarface_74]

Bing - you know the search engine by the struggling Trillion dollar market cap company - is free to match Google’s offer.

[attendant3446]

Most popular != the best. The days when Chrome was the best browser are long gone.

[Cthulhu_]

It depends on the criteria for "best" though, to be pedantic. Chrome and Edge are for example "the best" in synthetic benchmarks.

[trymas]

Regarding Chrome - don’t forget Google used it’s market leading position of their products to block other platforms/browsers (from the top of my head - Windows Phone). Or develop their web apps (or browser APIs) deliberately in such a way that they work best only on Chrome.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=windows+phone+google

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[komali2]

> Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.

What's wrong with that?

[Ray20]

> What's wrong with that?

The absence of a clear objective boundary of what can be taken and what cannot.

And without such a boundary, such a practice could be quite widespread, with the poorest and smallest actors being the first to be subjected to it, simply because it is easier to take from them and they do not have sufficient influence on the distributing bodies. This is like theory of building socialism 101

[makeitdouble]

> Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine

"We only accept bribes from other monopolies"

[SllX]

This shit is just revisionist. The first time Apple and Google signed a contract to integrate Google into Safari, Google had ~32% of the search engine market, less than Yahoo! at the time, and they kept renewing that deal for over 20 years.

[tgv]

> You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law

I think you can, under the assumption that Apple's decision wasn't independent/voluntary. At least, that seems how it works for people in cases of coercion, conspiracy or impairment.

[myko]

> With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore)

This is interesting to me in that I find Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude much better for coding / planning work than ChatGPT

[dartharva]

I just wish that also included Google Play Services. Google has a chokehold on all Android manufacturers preventing them of even thinking of using AOSP without Googleware

[chneu]

>built Chrome into the best browser available today

haha what? Not even close to true. Chrome is a locked down money maker for Google. It is primarily a data-collection tool for Google. No way is that possibly the best browser available today.

[skinnymuch]

Vast majority of users are not technically literate enough to know what is a good browser. They would have no clue why Chrome is better or not. They definitely don’t know what Blink is.

[dwoldrich]

Blink and you'll miss it!

[eclipxe]

Why does that matter?

[doug_durham]

What is your point?