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Comment by random5634 | Hacker News Reader

Heads up - googles browser, despite not being packaged with Windows or Mac, absolutely dominates market share. They, not these other companies, developed a web browser that people want.

The point I'm making - GOOGLE, not these standards bodies decides what is a standard.

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I’ve heard this line before, except back then it was Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

The users didn't choose internet explorer though: the comparison may hold for Android Chrome but not really for Chrome on Windows.

Back when NN and IE were still in heavy competition, users did choose IE - partly because it was better at standards in some respects (ironically), but mostly because it was free. Once that happened, IE-only websites proliferated, effectively locking the users into the ecosystem.

We're now seeing the same process play out with Chrome. I agree that Chrome became dominant for better reasons than IE, but the outcome is harmful either way.

Keep in mind Google is the default browser on Android. Many corporates load Chrome as the default browser as part of their setup process for new machines. For many naive people Chrome is the default browser. It's been a long time since I've seen a a windows machine provisioned by a corporate with Edge as the default browser. Many corporates also warn people away from Edge, Safari, Firefox and other "undesirable" browsers. So IMHO it's not demand from people but really for many the decision has been imposed on them by others.

I don't know why you are downvoted - this is absolutely true. Again, this is not because Chrome ships by default for Mac's or PC's, but because it's a great development target for corp environment and there is a feeling there that security is better on chrome than it was for IE (corps are slow / but have longer memories and IE has had some miserable bugs). Where I work the switch to gsuite and chrome seemed to knock down spam / malware amazingly (if you turn on the delayed delivery / strong malware protection) This does result in I think chrome uploading code or hashes of code you download to google or something as part of advanced monitoring.

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