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Comment by tmister | Hacker News Reader

I think Mozilla have made a big mistake by not complaining about bundling Safari in iOS devices. It looked jokingly funny when they attacked Microsoft for IE bundling Windows8 RT when they had 0% market share. Now look at the market, Android have almost 70% of market share and iOS took other. So where does Firefox stands now? This situation forced Mozila to write a new mobile OS which I think does not stand a chance against other big contenders. In 3/4 years I think Firefox will be like what Opera is currently right now, small niche market share. I am sadly saying this as die-hard Firefox user. This is what you get when you compromise openness.

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For monopoly type things it's not your power in the new market that counts, it's your power in the old market. People are often confused about this because the last time Microsoft was so succesful in extending its monopoly from desktop to browser that it nearly wiped out every alternative browser and peaked at something ridiculous like 90% market share, so there's longstanding confusion about which monopoly they were punished for abusing.

(Just checked Wikipedia, apparently several sources pegged them at about 95% share around 2002-2004).

Isn't the same thing happening right now even if there is no visual monopoly situation? Do you really think people will switch to Firefox and Opera when default offering is good enough? Also, though I haven't used IE6 at that time but several commenter here and reddit says that IE6 was ahead of completion at that time, netscape was also partly to blame for their demise. So what was the point of blaming Microsoft for bundling a Better browser at that time, while same thing is perfectly acceptable now?

IIRC, Microsoft took active steps to cripple the Windows platform if your application happened to be Netscape.

Yes, that may be the case. I am not taking side of Microsoft. I agree that if Microsoft have won antitrust lawsuit we would not be in current highly competitive situation. I am pointing the fact that people should have complained same way as they have complained for Microsoft's case.

I use Firefox on my Android.

But it is not default. Does a normal user have an urge to change the default browser even it performs worse than non-default browser http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/12o9oy/why_is_chrom... ?

Was Firefox ever the default on anything?

Well, it's the default in a number of desktop GNU/Linux distributions, but that's not really the point he was making.

I assume most people install Firefox because it's better then the default browser experience. The argument in the parent comment is that this isn't the case so those that would normally go out of their way to install it have no reason to do so.

e: Or maybe I read it incorrectly? Firefox is a better mobile experience? If that's the case, I'm not really sure what the parent comment's argument is.

Well I was actually arguing that default browser performance have almost gotten to the point where there is no reason to switch browser for normal user even it performs worse than non-default browser. For Chrome in Nexus 10's case, no reviews have said that Chrome performs badly than other browser.

These arguments make no zense. IExplorer was once the best browser, until Microsoft stopped developing it. Healthy competition is good.

To nitpick: yes. It was and is the default on Ubuntu desktop and other Linux distributions. Admittedly by market share desktop Linux might as well be a rounding error.

In the rounding error of GNULinux desktop OSes defence, Windows is the default on 99% of the hardware consumers are buying too.

Defaults are a big deal.

Well, should a normal user have an urge to do so in that situation ? I mean, I understand why it is detrimental on the long term, but should people have had to use something else than ie6 back when it was superior to the competition ? I don't really think so.

I have asked myself the same question, why doesn't Mozilla file an antitrust complain or something like that against Apple? They're not only bundling their own browser, but also actively preventing competitors from using the platform.

If Apple actually had a monopoly share in the smartphone market, such a complaint would likely proceed quite quickly. They don't have a monopoly market share so they face many fewer constraints under anti-trust law.

What does a company need to have in order to be considered a monopoly? Is there a legal definition of monopoly in the U.S.A.?

For the E.U. I quote Wikipedia:

"By European Union law, very large market shares raise a presumption that a company is dominant, which may be rebuttable. If a company has a dominant position, then there is "a special responsibility not to allow its conduct to impair competition on the common market". The lowest yet market share of a company considered "dominant" in the EU was 39.7%." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Law

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