That wasn't Chrome at all. It was Firefox. Where is this history re-write coming from. Firefox lost market-share when they went to Australis and became followers of Chrome instead of leaders (helped in part no doubt by funding from Google).
"Linux" has a minuscule market share and the people that use it are already more likely to use Firefox than Chrome since FF is open source.
>Windows comes with Edge pre-installed.
Edge is now Chromium-based as not even Microsoft wants to deal with Google breaking websites for non-Chromium browsers "by mistake" and rushing to fix it.
>MacOS comes with Safari pre-installed.
>OSX comes with Safari Mobile pre-installed.
Which are minuscule portions of the market.
>Android devices appear to have a decent choice of browsers, and the default is chosen by the manufacturer. For a lot of them that's Chrome, but not all.
Irrelevant. All of Android's browsers use a wrapper around WebView which is Chromium. Only Firefox comes to mind as a non-Chromium browser and it's not preinstalled on anything.
>I don't think there's actually any large group of devices that has Chrome pre-installed.
Android phones, Microsoft Windows and every user that installed Flash or Avast! in the past 12 years.
>Also, pure Android users are free to install any browser and set it as the default.
Again, most browsers are a wrapper around Chromium. Again, most users don't change defaults.
>Chrome is so popular because it has been the best browser for years.
And anti-competitive practices like being bundled with popular software and having free advertisement from the most popular website in the world (which also happens to be the most popular email provider and video sharing platform.)
>I see where TFA is coming from: if we could agree that browsers don't need to be this complex, then there would be more of them. But that would mean less flexible web pages, and we'd end up with something Flash-like being an attractive alternative.
Websites are not flexible. They're flexible for ad companies and web designers who like pointless animations, but now they're harder to parse, modify, save and their compatibility with text-to-speech has gone down the drain the past years.
The problem with Flash is that it gave us a bunch of unresponsive, needlessly flashy websites that were harder to use. Web designers are doing the exact same thing with HTML5 and their 50 MB of JS libraries.
Linux comes with Firefox pre-installed (or some variant of it, depending on distro).
Windows comes with Edge pre-installed.
MacOS comes with Safari pre-installed.
OSX comes with Safari Mobile pre-installed.
Android devices appear to have a decent choice of browsers, and the default is chosen by the manufacturer. For a lot of them that's Chrome, but not all.
I don't think there's actually any large group of devices that has Chrome pre-installed.
Also, pure Android users are free to install any browser and set it as the default.
Chrome is so popular because it has been the best browser for years. Whether that's still true is open for debate. But I remember when it came out, finally an answer to the godawful shite that was IE. We may dislike it now, but it saved us from Microsoft's disaster. It's fascinating that you're now claiming that "even IE is having an uphill battle fighting that kind of power". How the tables have turned.
The problem is not so much with marketing power, but with coding investment. Writing a browser is a mammoth undertaking, with all the strange edge cases and standards. Even Microsoft has decided it doesn't see the point in writing one. We're going to be left with two browser choices not because of corporate power, but because it's just too much effort for not enough reward to write a third.
I see where TFA is coming from: if we could agree that browsers don't need to be this complex, then there would be more of them. But that would mean less flexible web pages, and we'd end up with something Flash-like being an attractive alternative.