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Reading the early history of Microsoft I once came across a quote from someone that the company …

… Reading the early history of Microsoft I once came across a quote from someone that the company intentionally made the possibility of booting different operating systems on the PC difficult by design. What I found interesting is that this was before Linux became popular. They were already contemplating the possibility of booting other operating systems. Google's argument at trial was something like, "Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively." (Hence it should be set as a "default".) Could we imagine Microsoft arguing, "Everyone agrees Windows is the best and that's why they will never want to boot another operating system." Maybe some relics of this sort of subtle subterfuge live on today. For example, it was historically difficult if not impossible to dual boot Windows along with non-Microsoft OS without allowing Windows to be first in the boot order, e.g., Windows partition must be the first partition. Even in the UEFI era, I see hints that this issue may still persist: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/u9siuc/how_... …

Original discussionGoogle loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones731 source comments · at import
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HU

We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine: 1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to. 2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box. 3. On Chrome for Linux, the default search engine API is not available, so Linux users have …

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TH

> Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively. What a specious argument. Just because it is the best now[1], doesn't mean it is the best possible, and blocking competition can prevent something that is better from gaining traction. [1]:which is itself debatable, and I question if any search engine can unilaterally be the best since different engines may be better in different situations

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MR

>Google's argument at trial was something like, "Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively." Hence the logical question is: why is Google collectively paying billions of dollars to Apple and Mozilla if they are so sure they have the best search engine in the industry? I think they know that they do not have the best search engine possible and they just want to control the whole distribution channel both vertically and horizontally. Imo, long story short; Google is house of cards built of Google Search, Google Chrome and Android and if you take one card out the whole structure would collapse. They came to realize by observing Microsoft that if you control distribution channels, you control the end product and I think their weakest link is Chrome. So anyone who can create better internet browser than Google's Chrome can disrupt Google's dominion over …

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