alt Hacker News> Google spends something around 30 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine across many platforms. You can spend the same amount and tomorrow your search engine will have 88.9% of searches.
It is a widely held belief that users don’t change the defaults, and I’m not asserting it’s wrong in general, but why doesn’t it apply to web browsers?
As an (unhappy) Windows user, I note that Microsoft pushes Edge aggressively, with each major Windows update “helpfully” offering to “optimize my computer” by making it the default browser again. However, Edge market share is only ~12% on desktop [0], despite the fact it is significantly more work to install Chrome than it is to change a mere default setting. Is that just because desktop users are more willing to jump through hoops?
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Chrome didn't get its marketshare out of thin air either. It paid other software to be bundled just like malware apps, and automatically configured itself to be the default browser.
It also prominently advertised itself on the Google home page, which would probably cost many many billions of dollars if a non-Google browser wanted to do the same thing. On top of that, if you used another modern browser like Firefox, Google websites had popups that you should upgrade your outdated browser to Chrome.
Once Chrome on desktop was popular, then came the "oopses". [1] Accidentally breaking Google websites on non-Chrome browsers left and right.
After Android became popular, it's not hard to guess which browser they shipped by default on millions of devices. Device manufacturers weren't allowed to remove Chrome if they wanted to have working Google Play Services and access to the Google Play Store. I think recently in the EU manufacturers are allowed to remove Chrome and keep Play Services because Google got fined 4 billion euros.
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...