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I feel like browsers are more important to keep competitive than search engines. They dictate the standards that the whole web conform to, while search engines really just redirect people to the same sites. There’s also a much larger cost for users switching browsers than search engines. I still depend on safari as I can’t pay my rent on Firefox, while I can switch to kagi, yandex, or ddg immediately.

Additionally, a bad browser will always be more harmful than a bad search engine due to the shear amount of things it interacts with. Breaking the default search engine agreement is good in theory, but seems worse practically.



I’d argue a search engine with a monopoly could dictate which site get visited at all, based on any criteria. That could include standards.

But agree a browser monopoly is no better.

Finally, question: what do you mean you cannot pay your rent on Firefox? Curious.


Not OP, but I think badly implemented online-banking. With many banks it's like this:

Chrome on Windows/MacOS/Android, Safari on MacOS/iOS, or their own crap-app and NOTHING ELSE!

(Not even Chrome/Chromium on Linux or some Chromium on xBSD)

If you try to spoof that, and it doesn't work out, your account may be locked down for a while,

until you have proven (in person, in some branch office) that it was you,

and some corporate drone sternly waggles its index fingers at you for having the gall of even trying that (repeatedly).

This seems to be more often the case in the US than in Germany.

Your'e lucky when you have choices which don't fuck this up, or are wealthy, and thus 'important/valued' enough to ignore such shit.

But when you rent your house, you probably aren't, because why else would you?




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