Some of the top browser makers around have issued a letter to the European Commission (EC) alleging that Microsoft gives the Edge browser an unfair advantage and should be subject to EU tech rules.
A letter seen by Reuters, sent by Vivaldi, Waterfox, and Wavebox, and supported by a group of web developers, also supports Opera’s move to take the EC to court over its decision to exclude Microsoft Edge from being subject to the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
As Edge comes pre-installed by default on Windows machines, users must navigate the Microsoft offering in order to download their browser of choice. The letter states that, “No platform independent browser can aspire to match Edge’s unparalleled distribution advantage on Windows. Edge is, moreover, the most important gateway for consumers to download an independent browser on Windows PCs.”
Ooo what about safari on mac? Isn’t it the same thing but just not as hated?
Forget mac, it’s even worse on iOS/iPadOS, where all third-party browsers must use Safari’s rendering engine too.
Haven’t they been told they’ve got to stop doing that now?
I thought the European commission had forced them to allow other browsers to actually use their own render engines
I’m not 100% but I do vaguely seem to recall reading something about that being the case.
I think it’s only for the EU, and the other browsers don’t have a solution ready - porting their engines for iOS is a lot of work, which takes time, and might not even be worth it when they still need to maintain the safari-based version for the rest of the world.
An out of the box OS should include a browser. Microsoft takes a ham-fisted approach, however, Apple makes it entirely possible to uninstall Safari. You do have to jump through the hoop of disabling System Integrity Protection to remove it, but it’s simple as trashing the app and deleting the data. I speak from experience. Very easy to do.
Seriously, showing a pop up confirmation if the user tries to uninstall the last browser on the device is all that is needed.
It would be if Mac’s held the dominant market position for computers, yes.
They should make second dominant subject to such laws too.
Would not be Linux then? I’m pretty certain Mac OS isn’t even in the top three mostly because their os is tied to computers and their computers are stupidly expensive and only westerners can really afford them with any degree of regularity.
Not by market share on desktops in particular Western countries, no.
In the world - yes, I’d expect there to be more Linux desktops really existing than MacOS desktops.
Apple is the West in a nutshell, though. When a real need or a problem is mentioned, it’s mentioned only rarely as some selling point - like Jobs saying MacOSX is “very Linux-like” (sic). When a solution reaches reality, it’s done in a neutered way - like Apple still regularly releasing sources. When a real need is fulfilled, you can expect twice the effort to have been covertly spent on negating its effect - like with Apple’s “just works” and sterility and even privacy selling points, which come with walled gardens, closed APIs, short and bad support, and them actually still spying on you. A declaration of effort to tackle any problem existing in the wild is always aimed at portrayal of said effort to be persuasive enough to sell the product and the more efficient, the better, where efficiency means that actually doing anything other than persuasion is against the goal.
See, the difference between market mechanisms and geopolitics is not in people deciding that there’ll be this set of rules here and that set of rules there. It’s due to structure. The bigger that structure makes companies, the more similar market dynamic and scientific&technical progress will be to geopolitics.
Which is why I genuinely don’t understand people who frown at “techno-luddites” like me dreaming of going back to decentralized, even if with worse compatibility, hardware production and simpler software and formats. I would even say that some degree of protectionism from less developed countries would help, where hardware can be imported only if there’s domestic alternative production to match.
I’m more on the libertarian side, but if in XIX century weapons ownership was widespread, and in XX century it stopped being such, because of one’s ability to kill much more people quickly, then the same with electronics would make sense by the same principle. Only the qualitative difference in power comes not with the device, but with the centralized production line it comes from.
Of course, that’s not my proposition. It wouldn’t work.
My proposition would be to try to design some “civilization minimized”, where sufficiently usable computers can be produced in an area of 100k people, with society, industry, communications and warfare approaches optimized for that limitation. That kind of limitation for a self-contained unit of civilization, so to say.
So - one can buy a reasonably good laptop for 500$ today.
What kind of laptop can one produce for that sum in a 100k people settlement? Is that even possible to make it close to 500$ in relative value?
I’d expect we’d need to solve all heavy problems with specialized boards. I think lithography is actually applicable here - we don’t need it very precise, it’s far above our possibilities in such a hypothetical unit, and it would improve resource usage efficiency. And I think a more compact machine of PDP-11 level is possible, with specialized boards in Amiga ideology. I also think we can even have some kind of machine learning, but with analog storage of coefficients to reach anything close to sufficient efficiency. It would be a Fallout-kind computer, nothing fancy, but - possibly usable. For dedicated boards (some of which can, again, solve problems with analog approaches) there is a possibility of optronic elements being more accessible and energy-efficient.
There’s a question of portability - one can expect lithium to just not be realistically available in any random area of the world populated by 100k people. I mean, trying to imagine some autarky …
So maybe not a laptop, LOL.
Nah. That’s bullshit. That won’t work. At least not every 100k people. Maybe every 10mln.
The issue is with how aggressive Microsoft is about it.
Trying to download chrome? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
Changing default browser? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
Windows update… “We’ve done you a solid, because we know you want to use Edge”.
I’m sure at one point, it was a warning in the security center that you aren’t using Edge.
Also Teams (in sure there are others) will open links in Edge, despite what default browser you have set.
Yes, but they’ve got the advantage of having done it for longer, and not stirred the pot.
I honestly don’t think it would have been an issue for Microsoft if they just decided to sit on Internet Explorer instead of trying to push everyone into using Edge.