alt Hacker NewsAnd that argument is dumb in 2026. What are they supposed to do, use ftp to download a web browser?
> Notice that they quite successfully bankrupted Netscape with this.
Were you around back then? Absolutely no one paid for Netscape even before IE. And famously what bankrupted Netscape was because it “did things you should never do”.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Netscape was trying to make money selling web servers also. Should Linux and Windows not come with web servers? Should Apache not have been free?
People seem to forget that Netscape sucked around the time IE came out. It was so crash prone on every operating system it ran on that people use to brag on .advocacy groups about how good their operating systems were by how well they handled Navigator crashes.
And there has never been a point that Microsoft had to unbundle their browser in the US and there was never a browser choice screen.
> And it seems pretty obvious that Apple is tying their OS to their hardware and vice versa. Is that even supposed to be ambiguous?
This is about as bad of an argument as saying that Fors ties its motor to its cars or Nintendo forcing you to use their OS with their consoles. Apple doesn’t sell operating system, Apple sells computer products. What do you think should happen? Force Apple to create versions of its operating systems that run on other computers? Force Apple to sell Macs without operating systems? Anyone is free to choose an x86 PC and 90% of the market does
Firefox is also free to bundle an ad blocker with Firefox even if it does use WebKit and when you download Firefox for iOS - they get money from searches.
Are you suggesting that iOS shouldn’t come with a browser? Should ChromeOS also not come with a browser?
Absolutely no computer operating system comes bundled with Chrome besides ChromeOS yet Chrome still has the majority of the market share on desktop computers. Firefox competes with Chrome on an equal playing field on computers - people choose Chrome
> What are they supposed to do, use ftp to download a web browser?
How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one, or give the customer a choice which browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc.
> And famously what bankrupted Netscape was because it “did things you should never do”.
Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows 95. The Netscape release before they attempted to rewrite was released in 1997. The rewrite was a failed attempt to make their browser good enough that people would pay for it when Microsoft was already bundling IE with Windows.
> And there has never been a point that Microsoft had to unbundle their browser in the US and there was never a browser choice screen.
Indeed, Microsoft successfully paid off the Bush administration to settle the case for a slap on the wrist after they'd already been found guilty by the court.
> This is about as bad of an argument as saying that Fors ties its motor to its cars or Nintendo forcing you to use their OS with their consoles.
Ford will happily sell you a motor without an entire car, or a frame or any other part of the car without a motor. Nintendo is forcing you to use their OS with their consoles.
> Force Apple to create versions of its operating systems that run on other computers?
This makes it sound like it's someone making Apple do something instead of Apple making someone do something.
What stops you from running macOS in qemu or a virtual machine on any non-Apple hardware with the same architecture? What stops Samsung from writing iOS drivers and offering iOS on Galaxy phones? Only Apple's refusal to sell it to you without making you also buy hardware.
> Anyone is free to choose an x86 PC and 90% of the market does
60% of phones in the US are iOS.
> Firefox is also free to bundle an ad blocker with Firefox even if it does use WebKit and when you download Firefox for iOS - they get money from searches.
The Firefox ad blockers are extensions, e.g. uBlock isn't from Mozilla, but the ability to use it is a reason to use Firefox. The iOS browsers can't use extensions. Then you can't use uBlock on iOS and fewer people use Firefox.
> Absolutely no computer operating system comes bundled with Chrome besides ChromeOS
Android. And then people who want to use the same browser on desktop and mobile for sync.
> yet Chrome still has the majority of the market share on desktop computers. Firefox competes with Chrome on an equal playing field on computers - people choose Chrome
Chrome is made by the largest advertising company in the world. For years if you opened google.com, gmail or their other services in a non-Chrome browser you would get a huge banner imploring you to install Chrome. This was a successful strategy to overcome the inertia of the default browser on desktop operating systems, but Mozilla never had anything like that available to them, and then the two-front assault from Microsoft/Apple on one side and Google on the other resulted in declining Firefox market share and correspondingly declining revenue with which to improve it.
Mozilla the organization also suffers from significant mismanagement, but that doesn't explain why no one has been able to establish a popular fork or new independent browser, whereas the OS vendors successfully impeding anyone who can't command the equivalent of billions in advertising explains it really well.