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Comment by diputsmonro | Hacker News Reader

And it was true

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

IE6 post-dates the conclusion of this lawsuit, and held ~90% of browser, not desktop browser, but browser market share for the better part of the next decade.

What changed? Firefox was released, Safari was released, and quite a bit later, Google Chrome was released, but it would still be a while before IE6 would lose its dominance even once IE7 was released.

Key differences between this situation and IE6/7:

1. IE6/7 were just egregiously bad experiences for both users and developers, with Microsoft being almost entirely disinterested to the point of disbanding their browser team. Holding the web back was clearly part of their strategy.

2. Chrome, on the other hand, is well-maintained and rather good. Unlike Microsoft in the 2000s, the web is a core pillar of Google's business. Any challenger to the throne will have to overtake a moving target powered by a world-class engineering powerhouse, rather than a static dinosaur like IE6/IE7.

3. The barrier to entry in the browser market today is roughly an order of magnitude greater than it was back then. Browsers today are far more complex; they're more like operating systems.

As far as the free market is concerned, nobody is seriously challenging Chrome in this area. Ever. Unless/until Google loses interest and stops competing.

All of your criticisms of IE6 are fair and on point, but if you recall IE7 was Microsoft putting the gang back together again and trying to put some effort in again. Still not a great browser, but still a marked point where they abandoned their abandonment of Internet Explorer as a project.

Google also originally piggy backed on WebKit to build their browser. The JavaScript runtime was homegrown, but Google worked within WebKit before forking out of there. My guess is when Google Chrome is eventually overtaken, it will be by another Chromium-based browser under similar circumstances.

The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS and iPadOS.

    The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much
    harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major 
    browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per 
    Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS 
    and iPadOS.

Yeah and, perhaps I'm giving them too much credit for strategy/foresight, but it feels like this all plays precisely into Google's hands.

There is just enough competition, and Google's web apps are just functional enough on Webkit/Firefox, for Google to sail clear of accusations of monopoly.

Well, not sure what to tell you mate. You can make the case that Google Chrome is a monopoly that should be brought to heel by the Law, under new legislation if necessary, or you can’t.

Again, I don’t even particularly like Google Chrome, but do you know the only reason I keep a Chromium-based browser installed at all is? Government websites. Not Chrome though, currently it’s Brave with all the crypto stuff turned off. I don’t even need one for anything else. To the extent that Google Chrome is entrenched, it’s the same entities whose powers you mean to bring to bear on them helping them stay entrenched.

Some of us feel trepidation about Chrome being 'too big to fail' simply because Google has demonstrated itself to be capricious and fickle in terms of continued support for products. One only has to glance at killedbygoogle.com to see a pattern of rather arbitrary decisions to kill various things. If for any reason Google decided to kill off Chrome, it would be nice to have an alternative to fall back upon.

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