Internet Explorer at least had some existential competition: Netscape in the early days of its reign, and Firefox in the latter half.Ĭhrome, on the other hand, pretty much stands alone. But since the turn of the century, the Internet has been dominated by one of two browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer in the 2000s, and Google Chrome in the 2010s. But that’s largely an illusion, for a couple reasons the biggest being that there really isn’t much choice anymore.įor a brief period of a decade ago, there actually were multiple browsers with meaningful market share that competed with one another for users. To a lay audience, web browsers give the appearance of being a simple gateway into the internet what we see is 100% the content of the web pages, and the web browser is neutral.

Websites don’t usually look or act all that different depending on whether I open them in Chrome or in Safari.

To the average non-tech user, web browsers seem like they’re more or less the same. Users can’t be price gouged by a monopoly supplier if they’re paying nothing. 2) Chrome is built on open source software, and anyone (including Google’s competitors) can build their own browser on top of the Chromium open source engine. Users have choice: they can use Firefox they can use Safari they can even use good old IE if they want, or Microsoft’s new browser Edge, which you’ve totally heard of. This may seem like an odd choice, for many reasons! After all: 1) There are plenty of other web browsers. The more I think about it, the more I think the answer could be Chrome. Which of these tech products is most deserving of antitrust scrutiny, and arguably the best candidate for forced divesture in a Big Tech Breakup? So, this post may either look better and/or go out of date in real time over the next coming days! Happy reading. Note: I wrote this post on Thursday, and then Friday night, news dropped that the US DOJ is preparing an antitrust investigation against Google.

Ghostery google chrome store