Best product?

This make me question the story of Microsoft. MS-DOS, Windows and especially the Internet-Explorer (Trident). All of them won in a competitive marketplace and where of questionable quality and in long term harmful.

I cannot defend Apples locked platform! Yes, WebKit is crucial to the web and also needed on Linux (WebKitGtk, GNOME, Qt-WebKit, Epiphany, RasPi). Actually I'm quiet happy with WebKit but would appreciate always more speed. Feels like a lot of folks use Chrome and expect every other web-browser must use the same engine so they don't need to care about compatibility? Which is bad.

    * KHTML - gone
    * Trident - gone
    * Opera - gone

It is only Blink, WebKit and Firefox. Firefox is also in struggle and Microsoft Teams still blocks it? Like back in 2001. The EU also doesn't require Microsoft to present the modal browser choice dialog anymore. And Google is pushing hard on iOS-users to install their apps. Same on Windows. I would appreciate if politics put strict control over Google, Microsoft and Apple and require them to allow full access without the luring users with locked-down systems, lower fees and other things. I prefer strict control of companies because it worked very well with AT&T until it was broken up.

> Best product?

To be read cum grano salis. The list is long (including VHS) so, what is the best product in a marketplace? Probably, the definition will not be a technical one. It may be more like with an auction, where the result doesn't honor the value, but rather defines it. More cynically, it may be like with competing (traditional, non-alt – not entering that discussion) coins, where it's the worst coin which is the one left in the marketplace. (© Adam Smith, I believe.) In both perspectives, there are reasons for this. To say the least, to the customer technical aspects are just features among others. Vendors exhausting their capacities in rapid development cycles doesn't help either, often it's the vendor left with most capacities for marketing and connecting to non-technical users and media who wins the competition, often with a clearly inferior product, even with no development at all (DOS anyone?).

(E.g., personally, I'm absolutely horrified by the experience of the desktop Chrome UI. Even more so on macOS, where there's a menubar anyways, so why don't use it to make functions accessible? This is really mocking the user. – And no, at this point it's not about screen estate, it's about who's controlling the window, if there's a controllable app with controls worth controlling at all, or just that god-given/sent viewport. Mozilla on Win isn't much better nowadays: even, if you activate menus, there's not much to be found, in contrast to the Mac edition.)

P.S.: Also agree with the statement on developer bias by laziness and locked-in expectations. (As is, Chrome is the new IE. An example may be the storage implementation. Apple's implementation was fully standard compliant, but we must do it the Chrome-way, because Chrome and anything else is a bug. On the other hand, when Chrome messed up the Web Audio API for several iterations, nobody complained. Or, when Chrome messed up repaint of the canvas element, etc, etc.)

"The funny thing is that the author thinks competition in one market would be good, but competition in another market hasn't yet led to the utter dominance of his prefered product. Something doesn't add up ..."

I guess, since the only available browser engine on that one platform is thus broken and unusable, the entire (i)OS should have vanished by now? It's just those stubborn customers, seeking the worse experience possible…

> So, if the best product wins in a competitive marketplace, where is the problem?

Are you aware of how a company with a large market share in one part of a market, can anti-competitively use it's market power to effect another market?

For example, Microsoft could ban all competing browsers from the PC, in windows, and this would likely work to cause more people to use internet explorer, or edge.

This, of course, would be illegal and anti-competitive. But it would work.

This is pretty much why Chrome is perceived as the best product, to the point of being identical to the standard. It's only when you turn away from Chrome as the principal development platform and develop for other browsers first and then checking on Chrome, because, what works on WebKit should work on Chrome, as well, that you start to see its many shortcomings.

E.g., did you know that Chrome doesn't manage to render preformatted mono-space text at a uniform character width, 30 years after the introduction of the "pre" tag, in its +100 iteration? (E.g., Greek characters in formulas. So, where is the problem, there's MathML, a standard since the 1990s and part of HTML5. Oh… So let's add training wheels for Chrome, making each character a span of its own and fixing it in CSS… – To be fair, MathML doesn't enjoy a decent implementation in any browser, but with regard to implementing standards… Or take the implementation of certain UI elements like range inputs: let's make a slider from -100 to +100 preset to 0 in the center. Now +2, a discrete value, is rendered as an accent-colored range of 103 units, which somehow is supposed to make sense, and users become subtly shamed into picking higher values by the means of a more or less colorful experience. No option to disable this utter nonsense and Mozilla even followed on this path, because Chrome is the standard. As a result, if you need a basic, non-biased input, you have to come up with a non-standard implementation of your own, probably involving all kinds of accessibility issues.)

You just ignored everything that I said.

I was responding to you making the false claim that users can just choose to use chrome, in the competitive market.

That's not true because Apple anti-competitively prevents users from installing the real version of chrome, that isn't handicapped.

And then I used the analogy of Microsoft banning all competing browsers, which I'd hope you agree is and should be illegal.

The point being, it doesn't run just one way and it works in multiple ways. And, BTW, users can choose to use another mobile OS, by the very same vendor bringing you Chrome, and no, you can't run Safari on that OS. And that OS has already more users than the other one.

> it doesn't run just one way

So then you agree completely with me that apple is engaging is some anti-competitive practices, you just think other people are also engaging in anti-competitive practices.

That doesn't refute my point. You are agreeing with me that yes Apple engages in anti-competitive practices that limit user choice.

So back to the original point. You said this "if the best product wins in a competitive marketplace".

This statement is false because Apple is engaging in anti competitive practices that prevent a competitive market from happening.

So that is "where the problem is". The problem is the anti competitive practices that you agree with me that Apple is engaging in.