No, they did not do "this very thing."

They bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, and yes, they did some dirty tricks to try to keep users on IE rather than use alternate browsers. But "other browser engines are forbidden on the phone or tablet" was not something they did.

They still are not "doing the same thing" as that.

Then again, I'm not in your imagination.

> They bundled Internet Explorer with Windows

Yeah... this wasn't what actually got them in trouble and is a gross oversimplification. They were actively working against Netscape by making other browsers *not work* on the OS. It also wasn't standards-compliant and had all sorts of proprietary tech (VBScript, JScript, OCX, and MSHTML) that would only work with their browser

>Then again, I'm not in your imagination.

Something something don't be snarky something something HN rules.

If the company supplies the hardware and software as a bundled unit, they are much more able to arbitrarily restrict and wall-in the device. It's just how the law works. This is how Apple seems to get away with a lot of super anti-competitive stuff that Microsoft simply could never with it's Windows OS (Microsoft being crucified for favoring IE being a prime example, while Apple blatantly does the same thing with Safari). That said, Microsoft can and does do all the same stuff on their Xbox or surface tablets, because in that case they do supply both the hardware and software. There's no "good" or "bad" company when it comes to this issue, as they both willing to do this in every scenario when they can get away with it.

Why it's structured this way, I've no idea. I don't think supplying the hardware should be the distinguishing factor that allows them to wall-in the device. It's one thing to force them to support and integrate devices/software into their product, which is probably not fair on the company, but it's another thing to actively get in the way. It's a thin line with a lot of grey area, but the way it's setup currently probably isn't right.

Are you sure it doesn't have something to do with Microsoft holding 80% of the desktop market at the time, while Apple only has 50% of the smartphone market now?

At 50%, do you start fudging numbers to ensure you go no higher? "No, Senator, we are not the majority of users, so we can't be a monopoly." Or maybe that's too immoral, so start funding the other(s) to prop them up? Microsoft propped up Apple to ensure there were other consumer OS makers with Apple being the most viable* competitor.

*viable is doing a lot of heavy lifting as they did need that propping up

> At 50%, do you start fudging numbers to ensure you go no higher?

I get why you wouldn't want to trust Apple's self-reported numbers, but why would Wikimedia [1] also report Android as being more popular than iOS? What do they get out of it?

[1]: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...

Not the same thing because Microsoft never tried to prevent the user from installing Firefox or Chrome.

From their position of power they don't need anymore to prevent users from installing other browsers; it's enough for them to continuously pester the user with annoying requests to make their own the default one until the user surrenders. For 99.999% of users, a browser that doesn't load by default and a browser that is not installed are essentially the same thing.

Any push back against allowing a user to do whatever the user wants is the same thing in my book. Microsoft has recently made it harder to use non-MS browsers.

If you want to play a game of semantics, then sure, point to you. If you want to just have a normal conversation about users doing what they want, then I'd say you're outside of the lines on that last shot.

Netscape Navigator, probably. I don't think Mozilla was around quite yet, certainly not Chrome.