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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

For those disagreeing, the power of defaults is incredibly powerful, most users are blissfully unaware on how to, or why they might want to change them. Sure, plenty will change it back, but many won't. We've seen this play out with Apple Maps already — Something that may get Apple in trouble too.

Remember that Google was paying Apple 20 BILLION for the privilege, and a key reason they had an antitrust case against them!

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No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful.

Chrome utterly dominates Edge on Windows, despite Edge being default.

How do you explain that?

The reality is that people know what they like, and most will switch to the thing they like most. Especially when it costs nothing.

On top of that, the mindshare of "Googling it" dominates users brains just as much as Kleenex branding does. I'm sure most of us have watched someone use another search engine to look up Google before.

Yeah, I still say "Google it" even though I've been using DDG and more recently Kagi for years - I discovered saying anything else seems to lose people when trying to help them. Even just saying "search for" gives me deer in the headlight responses until I say "search on google".

Have you tried it recently? "Search for" gets me less 'deer in the headlights' looks than "google it", probably because these days most people are searching for things through apps instead of browser. Browsers are quietly becoming a niche technology with wide swaths of the population.

Browse the web as a normie would, without adblocker/etc extensions and other techy web saavy, and it should quickly become apparent why. Telling people to google something is like telling them to wade into a sewer.

Yeah as recently as this last week with tech peers, apparently "search for" came across as "look for this in sharepoint" not to search for it on the internet, but "google it" instantly was understood.

Defaults are incredibly powerful, Safari and Edge are the second and third most popular browsers next to Chrome. Chrome itself is a default on a lot of android devices. Speaking of android devices, Samsung Internet is 4th/5th most popular as it comes default on Samsung devices.

To say defaults don't matter because Chrome is used on Windows is a bit absurd. Chrome in 2012-2014 was still trading blows with IE even after the tremendous shortcomings during the Windows 8 and 8.1 era. This was a time when everyone was telling people to not use IE, and yet it retained ~20% use. Nothing like now where Chrome dominates ~70%.

I think you're confusing defaults with lock-in. Safari, Edge, and Chrome are native browsers tightly coupled to their operating systems. They can't be removed.

Further, anytime a user has to connect to an account for email, calendars, and other essentials, the OS will direct them through the native browser app. This means the so-called "popularity" reflects little more than the number of active devices: Android > iOS > Windows.

Not all browser marketshare statistics are sourced the same way, but often those native redirects aren't included, likewise for things like electron and CEF use.

Also Edge use being far lower in Desktop use indicates that there's little difference between defaults and lock ins functionally.

Google: Hands 20 billion to Apple to keep defaults to Google.

You: No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful.

Yeah I mean obviously people here in the forum know how to spend 20 billion dollars than the dumb executives there...

Those are not incompatible statements at all.

Obviously, defaults matter to some degree. They have a price. Google and Apple are companies with market caps in the trillions, and at their scale the default has a price in billions, since a small shift redirects a ton of ad revenue. That's fine.

But they're not "incredibly powerful", which implies that most users won't change them. As I pointed out, most users do change from Edge to Chrome.

If defaults were so "incredibly powerful", Edge would be winning. Obviously, therefore, they're not. Defaults have a small-to-medium amount of power. (Which, at Apple+Google scale, happens to be a lot of cash.)

> Google and Apple are companies with market caps in the trillions, and at their scale the default has a price in billions

This is HN's regular reminder that market cap measures the value of the company in the eyes of investors, not its revenue or profit.

Apple had gross revenue of $365 billion and Google $257 billion in 2021, the year in which Google paid Apple $26 billion.

That means that in that year Google paid Apple a solid 10% of their revenue and Google's payment accounted for 7% of Apple's gross revenue. To put that in perspective: that puts this deal on the same scale of importance as a car payment or utilities are for the average US household.

Simple: All they know is Google.

Launch Edge > Search "Google" > Bing displays Google Search link > Click > Google Search tells user to install Chrome > User installs Chrome > Google maintains browser and search engine monopoly

a lot of that is from past intertia. if the default becomes good enough then newer people who don't know what they like will use defaults unless it's so bad/people recommend that they switch

Edge still makes up more than a fifth of Chrome's share on Windows. Without being the default, I expect it would be close to zero.

That’s because Chrome is vastly better than Edge and that is an exceptional situation. In most other places you look, you will see people using defaults all the time, because defaults are incredibly powerful.

How is chrome vastly better than Edge ? They feel pretty similar but Edge support uBlock Origin on manifest V2.

>They feel pretty similar but Edge support uBlock Origin on manifest V2.

For now. Don't expect it to last: Edge is just a re-skin of Chromium, so after V2 support is completely removed by Google, Edge will have to follow along or fork the code.

That's their opportunity to differentiate from Chrome; they need to support V2 Chromium and fork away from Google's dominion over Chromium.

Why? What's in it for MS? The only people who will notice are people running ad-blockers, and the intersection of those people and people who willingly use Edge is quite small I think. And ad-blockers still work with MV3, just not as well, so this really only appeals to hard-core ad-blocking people who insist on having the full capabilities of uBO and not uBO Lite. People like that are more likely to just use Firefox, rather than migrating from Chrome (by Google) to Edge (by Microsoft).

What you're proposing just sounds like a lot of extra work for MS, without any measurable gain. Sure, it'd be nice, in the broader interest of reducing Chrome's dominance and promoting browser diversity, but I don't see how there's any incentive for MS to do it.

Google leverages their monopoly search position to push people towards Chrome, using messages that, to lay people, imply a lot of websites won't work correctly unless they install Chrome. This is the most charitable reading, assuming they don't deliberately impede compatibility with third party browsers.

Defaults matter because many people won't change them, and even people that will change them aren't going to change them every time they touch a new system. Especially when the "defaults" have been that way for decades which brings a sense of gravitational pull back to those tools/sites even if the new defaults change.

Some defaults can absolutely be over ridden by a non-stop barrage of interstitial pages and ad banners imploring your to install Chrome because all the default tools you use are Google sites, which just circles back to defaults mattering.

On Windows, the default browser is edge, but Chrome is far more popular.

What will happen is that people will use Bing without knowing it and then complain that “Google is broken”. To many people, search is google in the same way that a Kleenex is a tissue.

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