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Microsoft Edge is apparently usurping Chrome on people’s PCs
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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This has been annoying the shit out of me recently. I use several different computers so I keep running into this dumb shit. I feel like I'm in an endless fight to not use Edge. Microsoft knows I don't want to use it but they keep shoving it in my face again and again regardless. I really wish regulators would step in and put a stop to this nonsense.
Gasslight Gateskeep Girlboss
They're not going to step in to fix it. They have no justification for daring to stand up to a 3 trillion dollar company.
They might throw a 5 million fine at them or something, but nothing that's actually going to stop this horrible anti-consumer monolith of practices
You don’t seem to be familiar with the history of browsers or the billion dollar fine Microsoft received in the 90s.
EU regulators can and will make Microsoft hurt if they want to.
Or this fine from 2013 which related to Microsoft breaching the settlement agreement from the first fine: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-fined-731m-by-eu-in-browser-choice-screw-up/
The other muppet clearly mentioned those fines as an example, that fines can harm Microsoft if so desired. Of course they'd need to be scaled up given that MS is considerably more wealthy than back then.
Aside from the fact that they were being condescending in their reply, that 900 some odd million dollar fine was only a small fraction of the profits they made from doing crimes and misdemeanors.
If you can rob a house and the only penalty is that you have to give the cops some of your loot then there's not really a reason to not rob houses.
Anybody with a lick of sense would say that if you do a crime you don't get to keep any of the profit.
So while 900 million looks really good on paper and it really looks like you're sticking it to the big bad Microsoft, when they made tens of billions of dollars off of those crimes it's a giant nothing Burger.
Now that Microsoft is a 3 trillion dollar company, any fine that isn't over a hundred billion dollars is something that they can easily ignore.
If you're talking about these fines: it was 1.35 billion euros in total, the "900 million" number only refers to the biggest one. And there were two complicating factors:
I do agree that it's a bit small, considering their size back then (they were already a 300B company), but the case still triggered some action from MS, forcing it to release a WMP-less version of Windows.
And, if this happened today, with Edge, I predict that the fine would be considerably larger, since MS has today ten times the market share that it had in 07, and because browsers are seen as a bigger deal than media players. Perhaps not hundreds of billions, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 50B.
I also predict that it would be far more effective because their strategy with Edge is to push it down your throat until you don't spit it back, so an "Edge-less version" would be actually seen as desirable by the customers.