Disagree. People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. The minute Apple changes the iPhone default, all but a few iPhone users stop using Google.
> People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it.
Is this actually true?
Microsoft has bent over backwards trying making it inconvenient to get Chrome + Google on any new device. There's even the whole "Edge is the #1 browser to install Chrome" meme. Normies just really like Google.
It's funny you say that because as an Edge user, I constantly get bombarded with popups on Google websites asking me to switch to Chrome. It's all about who's on top and how to keep it that way, not quality.
But can Bing the default for Edge after this suit? I believe even Edge needs to ask which search engine to be used in the beginning. If that happens, possibly even more non techie's may use Google.
Fair point, but I wasn't able to verify the claim that most Windows users are not using Edge since its release. I am curious what the actual % is for new Windows PC installs that are not governed by a corporate policy.
How many stories have you seen with "I search for X, and all the top results are advertisements"? The latest that I recall that I saw on HN was "Now all results above the fold are ads".
Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.
Bing may be equally crappy too. Microsoft "welcome to edge" page is a bunch of advertisement for Microsoft products and then in the corner there is a search window. I have not tested bing itself to see if their flood of advertisements are as bad as google, but I sure do not trust Microsoft. Windows start menu being overloaded with advertisements are a cautionary tale of what happen when Microsoft is copying google.
Normies do not like having advertisement being thrown in their face, but they will tolerate it if they have no choice or if the advertisement is hidden enough that they do not know that what they see is a bought listing.
> Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action racketeering charge brought. And this is exactly how a protection racket works. You wouldn't want some other brand in the top position when they search for your brand term. You should just pay us to make sure that doesn't happen.
> Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.
While I was at eBay, there was a company announcement praising one executive who had noticed that eBay spent a lot of money on placing Google ads for searches like "ebay", when obviously someone searching for "ebay" can find it in the search results. He canceled the ads, and it worked! There was no significant decline in traffic.
But that's a problem for Google, and the situation you describe is the obvious solution. If people won't advertise on searches where they should appear in the actual results, the way to get them to advertise is to stop having actual results.
Id wager SEO/AI slop is a much bigger problem for Google than ad load for their userbase. Only 20% of queries have ads so 4 out of 5 times ads won't even be seen. But on those 4 out of 5 do have the chance of turning users away from Google with awful SEO optimized sites and AI slop.
Yes, it has been demonstrated time and time again that most people do not go and change the defaults even if they could. Most people actually prefer having less dials, even if they say they want more dials.
No, because Chrome isn't the default in Windows (ChromiumEdge), MacOS (Safari), iOS (Safari), most if not all the Linuxes (Firefox), and most if not all the BSDs (Firefox). Chrome is only the default browser in Android, but Android is a Google operating system so this shouldn't be a surprise. Also, this is one of the most spectacular exceptions to most people not changing defaults.
People have buy-in to Chrome that I think might be more than the buy-in to the search engine at this point. People like their set of extensions, and know how to use it.
Meanwhile if the search bar works when typing things in and gives you good results, I think a lot of people will be fine with whatever.
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!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Perhaps, but it's worth noting that Chrome became the dominant browser on Windows even though Internet Explorer/Edge is the default browser and comes preinstalled.
But your article argues the opposite of your claim.
Your article says that Microsoft themselves were working to move people away from Internet Explorer 6 and encouraging people to upgrade to a modern browser by declaring IE 6 to be at its end of life.
The article says that Youtube displayed a banner recommending users to upgrade to either Firefox, IE 8, or Chrome and that due to concerns by Google's lawyers, the order of the browsers was to be randomized so to avoid the appearance of giving undue prominence to Chrome. Finally the article ends by noting that each of the three options Youtube recommended were chosen equally as opposed to Chrome being the option picked by most people who saw the banner.
This sounds like the exact opposite of shoving it down peoples throats and instead trying to be very careful to move people away from a browser that Microsoft themselves had declared was dead, and onto an alternative option by trying to be as fair as possible.
The significance of your article isn't that Google shoved Chrome down everyone's throat in order to kill off a competitor, it's that due to its popularity and dominant position, Youtube was more effective at getting people to stop using Internet Explorer 6 than Microsoft was, but both companies had the same objective.
Here is an article about Microsoft's own "Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6." which discusses Microsoft's own efforts to get people to stop using IE 6. It's about the same period of time as the article you mentioned.
Fascinating how two people can read the same article and take away two opposite conclusions from it. If anything what Youtube did helped Firefox far more than it helped Chrome, but I suppose from your point of view it's the opposite.
This... this is not ancient history. It happened 10-15 years ago. Unless you're very young, and I've fallen under the curse of the old age:
--- start quote ---
One disorienting thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well
That's more the exception that proves the rule, though. Chrome originally came out when IE was still a steaming pile of garbage, and Google spent lots of marketing money promoting it as a better, faster alternative. (Something that Mozilla had been previously somewhat succeeding at, more or less, but they didn't have the same resources and eventually lost their gains and fell behind.)
These days Chrome just has so much mind-share that it overcomes the defaults on Windows. This is by no means a common outcome. This is anecdotal, but I know far more people who use Safari instead of Chrome on macOS than who use Edge instead of Chrome on Windows; Microsoft just has such a bad reputation when it comes to browsers that Chrome is able to get over that defaults hump on Windows. But a lot of people genuinely like Safari, and trust Apple in general, so the effect is (somewhat) lessened on macOS, even though IIRC Chrome still does have the lead in market share there. Just less of one, percentage-wise.
You're right on some points, other points don't match up with my understanding of the issue.
Chrome was a much better browser compared to the default that came installed on Windows, and certainly if someone is going to switch away from the default they will do it towards a much better alternative, on that we agree.
However, despite how much I think Google as a search engine has declined in quality, I still find them to be significantly superior to the alternatives, such as Bing and even DuckDuckGo (which I believe predominantly makes use of Bing) and that people will switch from whatever default search engine Apple sets to Google.
You're also missing the power of reputation. It takes time to build a good reputation, and it takes a really long time to overcome a bad reputation. MS built itself a really bad reputation, especially with browsers, so even if (hypothetically speaking) Edge were as good as Chrome now, it would still take a very long time to overcome the terrible reputation they earned with IE.
Chrome is a complicated case in general because Google poured money into promoting Chrome and had some of the most popular sites on the web promoting it heavily and actively sabotaged Firefox at several key points. I respect a lot of the Chrome team’s early work but it’s very hard for me to see that as a story about fair competition alone.
Not just advertising: Mozilla could not have put a “better in Firefox” button on Gmail or YouTube at any price, or forced Google to follow through on their promise around H.264, etc.
Google also tried to push PC OEMs to pre-install Chrome on their new PCs when Chrome was new.[1] Sony/VAIO is the only manufacturer to have known to take the bait.[2]
Specifically, Google was leveraging their existence as "THE web" to push their web browser. Every single Google property aggressively displayed banners and reminders and nag prompts ensuring you "Gmail is best in Chrome" and other nonsense that "Just one click here to fix".
Yes, putting a single button with vague words in front of users almost always gets a lot of clicks, which we've known for decades, and it turns out, if you have the attention of nearly the entire web-browsing world, you can put that button in front of people's faces way more than your competitors. It should have been considered billions of dollars of free advertising for Chrome that should have been assessed against them somehow.
It's blatantly unfair and should have been shut down in literally days, but nooooooooo we aren't allowed to have regulation here in the states.
Yeah, this is the thing that gets me. Chrome is the (rare) exception when we're talking about defaults generally winning, not the rule.
An interesting thought experiment might be to imagine if Chrome was actually somehow the default browser on Windows and/or macOS. I think we could expect Edge's and/or Safari's market share numbers to be much lower than they are now if that were the case.
Very strange statement to make given a large mobile phone operating system (Android) has Chrome as the default browser. Also the default in some Linux distros such as the Raspberry Pi OS. And many PC builders bundle Chrome with their usual crapware. Other posters have also pointed out Google's own Chromebooks use Chrome by default as well. Quite a significant base especially among people who don't have the money to buy into the Apple ecosystem.
Of course defaults mean very little for tech-savvy people. An average 50 year old who just got a new laptop isn't going to change the search engine because Bing was the default.
