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Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

For anyone having trouble with the logic here, which seems like a lot of people in this thread for some reason:

[Google's browser] comes with [code] that [does things] in a default installation of [Google's browser] that [Google's competitors] can't do in a default installation of [Google's browser].

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Didn't you leave out that [Google's browser] allows [Google's websites] to do things [other websites] cannot?

Ostensibly [Google's websites] are websites like any other, but [Google's browser] treats them differently. IIRC Mozilla does similar things for addons.mozilla.org, but googles seem more broad since they are not as clearly linked to browser functionality.

We’re saying the same thing. There are some who believe this is okay. But it is clearly monopolistic behaviour that should be regulated.

My reading of your comment was defensive of google, basically "google ships a software package so of course they should be able to do stuff others can't" where I tried to highlight "google ships a browser which should of course treat websites equally". Seems like I misunderstood the intent behind your comment.

I don't have a problem with the logic, I'm just not sure why I should care. I imagine Edge probably can do magic stuff on microsoft sites that it can't on the rest of the web too. It makes sense for the browser to have a higher level of trust for the company that makes it than it does for the wider web.

There was massive antitrust lawsuit about behavior like this, when browses where new.

>There was massive antitrust lawsuit about behavior like this, when browses where new.

I'm still no sure why I should care.

> I'm still no sure why I should care.

Because the Web is supposed to be based on open standards and browsers are supposed to be neutral platforms that implement the standards.

If you don't care about that, fair: nobody really cares that you don't care. What everybody cares about is what happens if some of the various antitrust agencies of the world start caring.

Some people remember when the government went after Microsoft for having secret APIs that only IE could use.

... but other people remember that in the time since, that entire Microsoft monopoly fiasco is held up as an example of bad prosecution, and we don't go after companies like that anymore.

>... but other people remember that in the time since, that entire Microsoft monopoly fiasco is held up as an example of bad prosecution, and we don't go after companies like that anymore.

This, but also, I still don't see anyone posting a compelling reason why I should care about this issue. The government and I don't necessarily have the same interests. Personally I don't care that google gives their own browser more access to my computer when I use google services, and if it improves my experience, I actually want that to be the case.

The bulk of the complaints about this just seem to be tattletale behavior you see from children, not any thought out complaints based upon an actual harm.

The actual harm is that other companies can't use that additional access. If they could they might be offering better products than Google to me and you. You might not care about better products, but I (and probably many people on this post) do.

Except allowing other companies to have that access results in a huge loss of security. I trust google enough to install their browser, they already do what they want with my computer, I don't really want to evaluate whether or not I trust every other random website to have that access or trust that they'll continue to be trustworthy at some random point in the future.

[does relatively innocuous, relatively boring things]

That only Google can do, which makes competing with them harder. This isn't difficult to understand.

yes the resource monitoring and alerting on meet was instrumental to my decision to cancel all other software subscriptions and give all my money to google

It's generally anti-competitive behavior, your personal experience with it has no bearing?

I’m joking a bit, but I do think it’s important to articulate the purported harms of claims of anti-competitive behavior. What did they do with this capability? How did that harm their competitors? Is the actual conduct worth getting up in arms about?

What the fuck are you talking about?

Like [slowing Youtube down] on [Firefox] [0].

[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/youtube-is-slowing-video-loads...

A "bug", like breaking Google Docs on Vivaldi ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can you elaborate?

Is it just Google's competitors, or it is everyone?

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