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This seems like a very sensible and logical conclusion by the judge to me. An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that

This seems like a very sensible and logical conclusion by the judge to me. An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine because everyone else was worse. You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law--if Apple wants to make Google the default, they should be allowed to do so! The ban on exclusive contracts makes sense though; they should not be allowed to use contracts to furthur their monopoly position. And similarly with Chrome; it made no sense to bring Chrome into this equation. Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today NOT through exclusive contracts, but because Chrome is just a better product. Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore) and AI search engines potentially shifting the search landscape, who knows if Google will still be a monopoly 5 years from now. Software moves fast and the best solution to software monopoly is more software competition.

skinnymuch 1y ago
Vast majority of users are not technically literate enough to know what is a good browser. They would have no clue why Chrome is better or not. They definitely don’t know what Blink is.
- eclipxe 1y ago
  Why does that matter?
  - skinnymuch 1y ago
    Consumers aren’t using chrome in 2025 because it’s the best. Not that the vast majority of people would know minor differences. This isn’t when Chrome came out and the differences between other browsers was large. Monopolies usually don’t maintain their status because they are “the best” and as if consumers also are informed enough to know that. Similar arguments can be made to allow basically all of big tech. In a better system instead of talking about allowing everything as if corporations are precious individuals, the govt should be creating funded competitors and being much more firm with monopolistic behavior (even if they aren’t legally monopolies)
- doug_durham 1y ago
  What is your point?
  - tgv 1y ago
    That the argument "Chrome is better because so many people use it" is, frankly, bullshit. Which it is.
- dwoldrich 1y ago
  Blink and you'll miss it!
coliveira 1y ago
> but even Apple testified Of course, Apple didn't want to lose its part in the ilegal scheme.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Bing - you know the search engine by the struggling Trillion dollar market cap company - is free to match Google’s offer.
  - jajuuka 1y ago
    Who needs it marketplace when you have two trillion dollar companies to pick from. Am I right?
  - benoau 1y ago
    Except Google's offer is funded by their (court-ruled) advertising monopoly... which neither Bing nor all other competitors combined can compete with.
    - JustExAWS 1y ago
      During the Ballmer era, Microsoft wasted billions on mobile via acquisitions of Danger and Nokia and their internal efforts to make Windows Mobile a thing. I’m sure they could have found the money from somewhere.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      You really think Microsoft, a company worth $3.8 trillion, doesn't have enough money to pay for placement?
      - benoau 1y ago
        Bing by itself reportedly doesn't even gross that much, overall $20 billion represents about a quarter of Microsoft's entire annual profit. Microsoft already decided it wasn't viable to spend that much to compete, and the rest of the search market (including AI) need not apply.
raincole 1y ago
> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a disadvantage! Yet it just keeps winning. [0]: https://x.com/frantzfries/status/1628178202395873286 https://x.com/frantzfries/status/1628178202395873286
- OvbiousError 1y ago
  The regularly flood youtube with advertisments for chrome, I've yet to see my first youtube ad for firefox.
  - shmeeed 1y ago
    That's an interesting observation. If they don't even use it for advertising, what _IS_ Mozilla doing with all those Google millions? JK, we all know what they're doing with them...
    - deruta 1y ago
      I'm honestly out of the loop, what are they doing?
      - maxfurman 1y ago
        Paying their executives exorbitant salaries
        shmeeed 1y ago
        $6.9M to the CEO, to be precise, which is roughly the same amount as the total of all private donations, grants and government funding they receive. It's bizarre. Meanwhile they're cutting down on devs, killing products like Pocket and Fakespot, ignoring user feedback, driving strange and off-putting community engagement, and introducing eye candy BS nobody asked for. In short, they appear to be doing anything but advancing the brand and actually, you know, competing in the browser market. Note that I'm not shitting on the poor devs, I still think they are delivering a great core product despite it all. But market shares and even absolute user counts keep dwindling. What is management doing about that? And all this would seem like a case of simple mismanagement, if one weren't to reflect the fact that the overwhelming majority of their income comes from Google. The way they're behaving is suspiciously convenient to the entity that is their main revenue source. One could resonably suspect they serve primarily as an antitrust litigation sponge.
pinkmuffinere 1y ago
> Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today I don’t think this is as settled as you imply. I tend to like Google products, and do almost everything in the Google ecosystem. But my browser is normally brave or Firefox, because better Adblock is so so impactful. I feel that chrome is a valid alternative, but that no browser is really clearly “the best”. In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best?
- overfeed 1y ago
  > In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best? As a former Firebug fan: Chrome/Chromium has had superior browser dev-tools experience for over a decade now.
  - dawnerd 1y ago
    You should try out Firefox’s if you haven’t. It’s pretty good now and I haven’t found something that I’ve been like damn wish it was there. Lighthouse testing I guess?
    - robin_reala 1y ago
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/google-lighthouse/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/google-lighth...
  - pfg_ 1y ago
    Whenever I use chrome, I'm missing the style editor and multi-line repl mode from firefox. When I switched to firefox from chrome, I didn't miss anything. There might be new features chrome has added since that I would want if I knew about them
    - TJSomething 1y ago
      While I agree on those counts, the debugger in Chrome handles large files of minified code, deep framework stack traces, and stopping in dysfunctional code better.
makeitdouble 1y ago
> Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine "We only accept bribes from other monopolies"
- SllX 1y ago
  This shit is just revisionist. The first time Apple and Google signed a contract to integrate Google into Safari, Google had ~32% of the search engine market, less than Yahoo! at the time, and they kept renewing that deal for over 20 years.
Stratoscope 1y ago
How is Chrome a better browser than Edge? They are both just custom builds of the underlying Chromium browser. I switched from Chrome to Edge on my Windows machine a couple of months ago for the embarrassing reason that I had so many tabs open that Chrome slowed down to a crawl. (Yes, I'm one of those lazy people who uses old tabs as if they were bookmarks.) Of course I eventually opened enough tabs in Edge that it slowed down too! So I finally bit the bullet and started closing tabs in both browsers. Otherwise, I hardly notice any difference between the two. There are bigger differences on my Android device. Edge supports extensions! (Yay!) But it lacks Chrome's "tab group carousel" at the bottom of the screen. Instead, you have to tap an icon to open the full-page list of tab groups, then tap the tab group you already had open, and finally tap the tab you want from this tab group. (Boo!) So I went back to Chrome on mobile but still use Edge on desktop.
- hackinthebochs 1y ago
  Tabs Outliner is my solution to having an absurd number of tabs open. Should be paired with Tabs Session Manager as Tabs Outliner does occasionally lose all your sessions (like once every couple of years).
- nine_k 1y ago
  Tangentially, there are extensions, such as "Auto tab Discard", that unload tabs from memory, thus avoiding slowdown or memory exhaustion. It allows to keep bunches of tabs as contexts / bookmarks.
  - jridgewell 1y ago
    This is natively supported in Chrome now: https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+memory+saver https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+memory+saver
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  > How is Chrome a better browser than Edge? I thought this too, until I actually used Edge. It's quite shocking how much advertising there is in it. The default content sources contain an extremely high proportion of clickbait and "outrage" journalism. It genuinely worries me that this is the Windows default. It's such an awful experience.
chneu 1y ago
>built Chrome into the best browser available today haha what? Not even close to true. Chrome is a locked down money maker for Google. It is primarily a data-collection tool for Google. No way is that possibly the best browser available today.
dartharva 1y ago
I just wish that also included Google Play Services. Google has a chokehold on all Android manufacturers preventing them of even thinking of using AOSP without Googleware
trymas 1y ago
Regarding Chrome - don’t forget Google used it’s market leading position of their products to block other platforms/browsers (from the top of my head - Windows Phone). Or develop their web apps (or browser APIs) deliberately in such a way that they work best only on Chrome. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=windows+phone+google https://hn.algolia.com/?q=windows+phone+google https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=firefox%20slow%20youtube&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
swiftcoder 1y ago
> Google started, developed, and built Chrome This is perhaps a tad ahistorical. Google forked Blink off from WebKit around 2013 - it owes a lot of it's early success to the same technical foundations as Safari (which in turns owes the same debt to Konqueror...)
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  That's the rendering engine, which was one part of their early success; the other part was the V8 Javascript engine which was miles ahead of the competition in terms of performance.
tgv 1y ago
> You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law I think you can, under the assumption that Apple's decision wasn't independent/voluntary. At least, that seems how it works for people in cases of coercion, conspiracy or impairment.
attendant3446 1y ago
Most popular != the best. The days when Chrome was the best browser are long gone.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  It depends on the criteria for "best" though, to be pedantic. Chrome and Edge are for example "the best" in synthetic benchmarks.
  - attendant3446 1y ago
    Can I install the original uBlock in Chrome? No? It can't possibly be the best.
komali2 1y ago
> Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. What's wrong with that?
- Ray20 1y ago
  > What's wrong with that? The absence of a clear objective boundary of what can be taken and what cannot. And without such a boundary, such a practice could be quite widespread, with the poorest and smallest actors being the first to be subjected to it, simply because it is easier to take from them and they do not have sufficient influence on the distributing bodies. This is like theory of building socialism 101
  - komali2 1y ago
    > The absence of a clear objective boundary of what can be taken and what cannot. I don't understand why this is an obstacle - this issue already exists with writing laws and various countries have different solutions, all of which seem to be working kinda ok. There's the USA's constitution which isn't working so well in most cases but working great in others (free speech for example, though this is now failing), whereas other countries depend on histories of case law for example (UK). It seems to me that if a government specifically sought to target the largest and richest actors it could avoid the issue you're speaking of. Of course this would require removing the ability of capital to influence politics, maybe that's the issue you mean?
    - Ray20 1y ago
      >free speech for example, though this is now failing I don't quite understand what you mean. The great advantage of the American constitution in terms of freedom of speech is that it sets a relatively clear boundary. And it is obvious that in this regard the constitution copes with its task perfectly: freedom of speech in the USA is currently protected better than in any other country. It is so well protected that Americans were able to elect Trump as their leader, despite the fact that more than 80 percent of the mainstream media openly opposed him, and the government tried to shut the mouths of all his supporters under the guise of fighting dis- and misinformation (regardless of how we feel about his personality and presidency). So if we look at the freedom of speech in the current US on a historical scale, we see exactly the opposite of what you saying: we see how freedom of speech in the US has once again stood firm despite the strongest opposition. > Of course this would require removing the ability of capital to influence politics You describe it as if it is something ordinary, not something catastrophic. Just to understand, if the government gets enough power to deprive capital of ability to influence politics - we get Nazi Germany or Russia. In the best case. At worst - the USSR, North Korea or Kampuchea
myko 1y ago
> With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore) This is interesting to me in that I find Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude much better for coding / planning work than ChatGPT

skinnymuch 1y ago

Vast majority of users are not technically literate enough to know what is a good browser. They would have no clue why Chrome is better or not. They definitely don’t know what Blink is.

eclipxe 1y ago
Why does that matter?
- skinnymuch 1y ago
  Consumers aren’t using chrome in 2025 because it’s the best. Not that the vast majority of people would know minor differences. This isn’t when Chrome came out and the differences between other browsers was large. Monopolies usually don’t maintain their status because they are “the best” and as if consumers also are informed enough to know that. Similar arguments can be made to allow basically all of big tech. In a better system instead of talking about allowing everything as if corporations are precious individuals, the govt should be creating funded competitors and being much more firm with monopolistic behavior (even if they aren’t legally monopolies)
doug_durham 1y ago
What is your point?
- tgv 1y ago
  That the argument "Chrome is better because so many people use it" is, frankly, bullshit. Which it is.
dwoldrich 1y ago
Blink and you'll miss it!

coliveira 1y ago

> but even Apple testified Of course, Apple didn't want to lose its part in the ilegal scheme.

scarface_74 1y ago
Bing - you know the search engine by the struggling Trillion dollar market cap company - is free to match Google’s offer.
- jajuuka 1y ago
  Who needs it marketplace when you have two trillion dollar companies to pick from. Am I right?
- benoau 1y ago
  Except Google's offer is funded by their (court-ruled) advertising monopoly... which neither Bing nor all other competitors combined can compete with.
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    During the Ballmer era, Microsoft wasted billions on mobile via acquisitions of Danger and Nokia and their internal efforts to make Windows Mobile a thing. I’m sure they could have found the money from somewhere.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    You really think Microsoft, a company worth $3.8 trillion, doesn't have enough money to pay for placement?
    - benoau 1y ago
      Bing by itself reportedly doesn't even gross that much, overall $20 billion represents about a quarter of Microsoft's entire annual profit. Microsoft already decided it wasn't viable to spend that much to compete, and the rest of the search market (including AI) need not apply.

raincole 1y ago

> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a disadvantage! Yet it just keeps winning. [0]: https://x.com/frantzfries/status/1628178202395873286 https://x.com/frantzfries/status/1628178202395873286

OvbiousError 1y ago
The regularly flood youtube with advertisments for chrome, I've yet to see my first youtube ad for firefox.
- shmeeed 1y ago
  That's an interesting observation. If they don't even use it for advertising, what _IS_ Mozilla doing with all those Google millions? JK, we all know what they're doing with them...
  - deruta 1y ago
    I'm honestly out of the loop, what are they doing?
    - maxfurman 1y ago
      Paying their executives exorbitant salaries
      - shmeeed 1y ago
        $6.9M to the CEO, to be precise, which is roughly the same amount as the total of all private donations, grants and government funding they receive. It's bizarre. Meanwhile they're cutting down on devs, killing products like Pocket and Fakespot, ignoring user feedback, driving strange and off-putting community engagement, and introducing eye candy BS nobody asked for. In short, they appear to be doing anything but advancing the brand and actually, you know, competing in the browser market. Note that I'm not shitting on the poor devs, I still think they are delivering a great core product despite it all. But market shares and even absolute user counts keep dwindling. What is management doing about that? And all this would seem like a case of simple mismanagement, if one weren't to reflect the fact that the overwhelming majority of their income comes from Google. The way they're behaving is suspiciously convenient to the entity that is their main revenue source. One could resonably suspect they serve primarily as an antitrust litigation sponge.

pinkmuffinere 1y ago

> Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today I don’t think this is as settled as you imply. I tend to like Google products, and do almost everything in the Google ecosystem. But my browser is normally brave or Firefox, because better Adblock is so so impactful. I feel that chrome is a valid alternative, but that no browser is really clearly “the best”. In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best?

overfeed 1y ago
> In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best? As a former Firebug fan: Chrome/Chromium has had superior browser dev-tools experience for over a decade now.
- dawnerd 1y ago
  You should try out Firefox’s if you haven’t. It’s pretty good now and I haven’t found something that I’ve been like damn wish it was there. Lighthouse testing I guess?
  - robin_reala 1y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/google-lighthouse/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/google-lighth...
- pfg_ 1y ago
  Whenever I use chrome, I'm missing the style editor and multi-line repl mode from firefox. When I switched to firefox from chrome, I didn't miss anything. There might be new features chrome has added since that I would want if I knew about them
  - TJSomething 1y ago
    While I agree on those counts, the debugger in Chrome handles large files of minified code, deep framework stack traces, and stopping in dysfunctional code better.

makeitdouble 1y ago

> Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine "We only accept bribes from other monopolies"

SllX 1y ago
This shit is just revisionist. The first time Apple and Google signed a contract to integrate Google into Safari, Google had ~32% of the search engine market, less than Yahoo! at the time, and they kept renewing that deal for over 20 years.

Stratoscope 1y ago

How is Chrome a better browser than Edge? They are both just custom builds of the underlying Chromium browser. I switched from Chrome to Edge on my Windows machine a couple of months ago for the embarrassing reason that I had so many tabs open that Chrome slowed down to a crawl. (Yes, I'm one of those lazy people who uses old tabs as if they were bookmarks.) Of course I eventually opened enough tabs in Edge that it slowed down too! So I finally bit the bullet and started closing tabs in both browsers. Otherwise, I hardly notice any difference between the two. There are bigger differences on my Android device. Edge supports extensions! (Yay!) But it lacks Chrome's "tab group carousel" at the bottom of the screen. Instead, you have to tap an icon to open the full-page list of tab groups, then tap the tab group you already had open, and finally tap the tab you want from this tab group. (Boo!) So I went back to Chrome on mobile but still use Edge on desktop.

hackinthebochs 1y ago
Tabs Outliner is my solution to having an absurd number of tabs open. Should be paired with Tabs Session Manager as Tabs Outliner does occasionally lose all your sessions (like once every couple of years).
nine_k 1y ago
Tangentially, there are extensions, such as "Auto tab Discard", that unload tabs from memory, thus avoiding slowdown or memory exhaustion. It allows to keep bunches of tabs as contexts / bookmarks.
- jridgewell 1y ago
  This is natively supported in Chrome now: https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+memory+saver https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+memory+saver
LeoPanthera 1y ago
> How is Chrome a better browser than Edge? I thought this too, until I actually used Edge. It's quite shocking how much advertising there is in it. The default content sources contain an extremely high proportion of clickbait and "outrage" journalism. It genuinely worries me that this is the Windows default. It's such an awful experience.

chneu 1y ago

>built Chrome into the best browser available today haha what? Not even close to true. Chrome is a locked down money maker for Google. It is primarily a data-collection tool for Google. No way is that possibly the best browser available today.

dartharva 1y ago

I just wish that also included Google Play Services. Google has a chokehold on all Android manufacturers preventing them of even thinking of using AOSP without Googleware

trymas 1y ago

Regarding Chrome - don’t forget Google used it’s market leading position of their products to block other platforms/browsers (from the top of my head - Windows Phone). Or develop their web apps (or browser APIs) deliberately in such a way that they work best only on Chrome. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=windows+phone+google https://hn.algolia.com/?q=windows+phone+google https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=firefox%20slow%20youtube&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

swiftcoder 1y ago

> Google started, developed, and built Chrome This is perhaps a tad ahistorical. Google forked Blink off from WebKit around 2013 - it owes a lot of it's early success to the same technical foundations as Safari (which in turns owes the same debt to Konqueror...)

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
That's the rendering engine, which was one part of their early success; the other part was the V8 Javascript engine which was miles ahead of the competition in terms of performance.

tgv 1y ago

> You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law I think you can, under the assumption that Apple's decision wasn't independent/voluntary. At least, that seems how it works for people in cases of coercion, conspiracy or impairment.

attendant3446 1y ago

Most popular != the best. The days when Chrome was the best browser are long gone.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
It depends on the criteria for "best" though, to be pedantic. Chrome and Edge are for example "the best" in synthetic benchmarks.
- attendant3446 1y ago
  Can I install the original uBlock in Chrome? No? It can't possibly be the best.

komali2 1y ago

> Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. What's wrong with that?

Ray20 1y ago
> What's wrong with that? The absence of a clear objective boundary of what can be taken and what cannot. And without such a boundary, such a practice could be quite widespread, with the poorest and smallest actors being the first to be subjected to it, simply because it is easier to take from them and they do not have sufficient influence on the distributing bodies. This is like theory of building socialism 101
- komali2 1y ago
  > The absence of a clear objective boundary of what can be taken and what cannot. I don't understand why this is an obstacle - this issue already exists with writing laws and various countries have different solutions, all of which seem to be working kinda ok. There's the USA's constitution which isn't working so well in most cases but working great in others (free speech for example, though this is now failing), whereas other countries depend on histories of case law for example (UK). It seems to me that if a government specifically sought to target the largest and richest actors it could avoid the issue you're speaking of. Of course this would require removing the ability of capital to influence politics, maybe that's the issue you mean?
  - Ray20 1y ago
    >free speech for example, though this is now failing I don't quite understand what you mean. The great advantage of the American constitution in terms of freedom of speech is that it sets a relatively clear boundary. And it is obvious that in this regard the constitution copes with its task perfectly: freedom of speech in the USA is currently protected better than in any other country. It is so well protected that Americans were able to elect Trump as their leader, despite the fact that more than 80 percent of the mainstream media openly opposed him, and the government tried to shut the mouths of all his supporters under the guise of fighting dis- and misinformation (regardless of how we feel about his personality and presidency). So if we look at the freedom of speech in the current US on a historical scale, we see exactly the opposite of what you saying: we see how freedom of speech in the US has once again stood firm despite the strongest opposition. > Of course this would require removing the ability of capital to influence politics You describe it as if it is something ordinary, not something catastrophic. Just to understand, if the government gets enough power to deprive capital of ability to influence politics - we get Nazi Germany or Russia. In the best case. At worst - the USSR, North Korea or Kampuchea

myko 1y ago

> With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore) This is interesting to me in that I find Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude much better for coding / planning work than ChatGPT