Hacker News Reader

Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

> Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault

Clearly it is Mozilla fault: the world is not fair, if they are where they are they should crunch their resources and win. Google haven't started being the home of most computers. It is the nature of competition. Is it hard? Sure.

View on HN

"The world is not fair" in part because we refuse to punish Google for their blatantly anti-consumer practice of purposely making their websites work worse on non-chrome browsers and advertising chrome on every google property.

How the fuck is mozilla supposed to compete with a GIANT that is nearly everyone's homepage? Even if they had comparable budgets (Which they don't) mozilla still wouldn't get the free advertising that google gives chrome

I think the Mozilla foundation has enough money to lobby about monopolistic practices. Did they?

If your argument would be 100% true there will be no innovation or market dynamics. Business history has proven that one day you are at the top and another you aren't anymore.

If firefox sued google over monopolistic practices, that lawsuit would have to be funded completely by google. Google is 80% of firefox's revenue and 0% of its expenditure.

> purposely making their websites work worse on non-chrome browsers

This is wild exaggeration that I never hear about except from people defending the mismanagement of Firefox. I've used Firefox since forever, and I don't have much trouble anywhere that I can remember. The browser works. This is an article showing that it's outperforming Chrome on some metrics. It's Firefox's business and design decisions that wreck their browser. It went from being awesome to being janky Chrome that calls you abusive when you complain that they put an ad for a tv show in your browser.

I find it amazing how people forget that being a monopolistic power doesn't help if your product sucks: Google has, time and time again, failed to gain traction in the messaging app market on Android, the market being entirely occupied by competitors like WhatsApp.

Chrome won partly because of the marketing and being preinstalled, sure, but also by being a good product. If nagging people to install Chrome was all it took to win, then why is Edge in such a precarious position on Windows with all the nagging Windows 10 and 11 brought? Microsoft failed to succeed time and time again.

People on HN have weird preconceptions about how suggestion and marketing works.

I don't know where you are from but you seem very biased to your own friend or country bubble. For reference I don't know anyone at all who use WhatsApp. I use Google Chat and Facebook Messenger with a few but SMS with Google's RCS with everyone else, including my younger and much older family members.

WhatsApp is used all over Europe and Latin America. Very easy to check. For example [1].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311229/whatsapp-usage-m...

According to statista.com 12% use WhatsApp in Denmark. As I said, living in a bubble if one believes everyone uses it.

Edit: A quick search said this from the same source:

>Using WhatsApp less often than once a month was the most common usage frequency among Danes in 2019, according to 23 percent of the service users. 15 percent used the app weekly and 13 percent used it several times a day.

Please don't joke about Denmark, it has a population of 6m. Anyway, it is easy to check what I said, I am from Latam and anyone uses WP.

I live in France, and WhatsApp has a pretty big presence. Not a monopoly style one though, there's plenty of other apps used: Facebook Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, Discord.. I have friends who have family in other countries and some different apps will be dominant, like Viber, but the common theme is that the only time I've seen people use SMS is when they're unsure as to whether the other person has any other means of communication. Most importantly, I've never seen someone use Google's own non-RCS chat apps, like Google Chat, Google Hangout, Google Allo, Google Talk.. Google has had many chat apps, sometimes just different names for the same thing, but in the end, they have no users here. Google continuously tried to make a dent in that market and failed.

RCS is a non-starter if you need to do group chats with iPhone users or send them pictures without a massive loss in quality, as iPhones do not support RCS. As long as Apple refuses to support it, it will continue being a terrible choice in any country with significant Apple user base. An Android user with WhatsApp shares an identical experience with an iPhone user with WhatsApp. RCS on the other hand will drop you back to what cell phone messaging was many decades ago.

>I find it amazing how people forget that being a monopolistic power doesn't help if your product sucks:

Which is why none of our companies use microsoft teams, right? Or wait, maybe when it comes to products that aren't that different, what comes with the package matters.

If you use anti-trust practices to get your foothold, it isn't fair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com