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Comment by moss2 | Hacker News Reader

"Antitrust: Commission fines Microsoft for non-compliance with browser choice commitments", European Commission 2013:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_13_...

We need more legislation it seems.

That’s how the headline spins it but reading the article suggests the opposite: this is Google trying to avoid using the standard browser choice interface put into place in response to those legal requirements, which is rather less sympathetic.

It is Google allowing the user to set the default browser using its own interface, using the API Edge uses to allow the user to set the default browser using its own interface.

Microsoft loves to complain about applications doing things it doesn’t like, while its own applications are doing those exact same things. According to Microsoft the rule is that the rules just don’t apply to Microsoft Office and Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft likes to pretend they play fair. But when they can’t win by playing fair, the facade quickly drops.

Please, Google has explicitly made their products not work correctly in other browsers for years. This is totally playing fair, it’s just Google getting back what they give.

So Microsoft gets to use their monopoly powers to play the standards judge, jury and executioner?

I’m fine if they go tit-for-tat to be honest.

Except we know from the time that Windows source code leaked that the reason Microsoft internal products use undocumented features or APIs is that the Office team is a bunch of incompetent hacks that ignore all the documentation and do things the wrong way all the time. There are literal comments in the code cussing out the Office team for doing something so wrong that the kernel team has to hack around it like they do for other popular misbehaving apps.

They are purposely separate teams because if it were any other way, IBM would have sued them into the ground for anti-competitive actions.

At least, this was the case ten years ago.

> the kernel team has to hack around it like they do for other popular misbehaving apps.

Like Google Chrome? Or is that not a popular app?

If you think the Office team doesn’t have access to the source code of the rest of Windows and doesn’t get special apis to do things you aren’t supposed to do, you’re in for a surprise.

Where do you think that crazy crypto code Chrome uses to set itself as the default browser comes from? It’s obviously decompiled code from a Microsoft app that sets itself as the default. Because they have privileged access and can do the things they prevent others from doing. And exactly the same goes for Office. Little tricks to set the defaults, to allow their windows to pop up when others are blocked from doing so, privileged access to the update system, preinstallation with the OS, the list goes on and on.

They are superficially separate teams for legal reasons.

For a long time (I'm not sure if this is still the case): There effectively was no "set a default browser" interface in Windows 10/11. The closest thing was a file handler to program association screen, where you had to manually set Firefox or Chrome as the default application for every possible filetype a browser could open (IIRC there were maybe 8 or 10); and one of them with an unassuming and non-obvious name was the "magic" one which caused the browser to become the default for opening links (I think it was ".html files" or something like that).

Point being; there's history and context to this fight, and I don't think that sympathy is a valuable experience to hand out to any megacorporation. Both Google and Microsoft can be in the wrong; its not binary.

> Point being; there's history and context to this fight, and I don't think that sympathy is a valuable experience to hand out to any megacorporation. Both Google and Microsoft can be in the wrong; its not binary.

Agreed - I mentioned that only in the sense that the article seemed to be portraying it very much in Google’s terms and this has more history as you mentioned. I’d especially feel it worth mentioning how for years Google used their sites to push Firefox, Safari & Edge users to switch to Chrome so it’s rather dubious that they’re suddenly deeply concerned with consumer choice.

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