Microsoft does so many scammy things when it comes to trying to prevent people from using Chrome/Google. Even though Edge/Bing hasn’t caught on, I really think them abusing windows dominate OS position this way should be enough for an antitrust lawsuit.
Not just Google. There was a performance “bug” in Windows Defender a while back that specifically harmed Firefox. It had been reported but Microsoft took 5+ years to fix, and Mozilla did the bulk of the sleuthing and proposing fixes themselves.
Now, whether MS were intentionally crippling a competitor’s browser in the beginning when the bug surfaced (which coincidentally was around the time Edge was relaunched as a chromium browser), there’s no way to know.
But after a certain point, a software company with a market cap in the trillions loses any benefit of doubt I’d give them in scenarios like this where it benefits them not to find a solution. And 5 years is far beyond that point.
Unfortunately for Firefox, they didn’t really have the money for a lawsuit against a juggernaut like Microsoft.
I was installing chrome on a work computer, and windows defender was automatically flagging the chrome installer (official, directly from google) as malware and deleting it automatically as soon as it was downloaded. It wasn’t blacklisted for very long, I was able to download it without issues the next day, but I always have wondered if that was something they were testing out on purpose or not.
Hope for EU sanctions because it’s going to be a rubber stamp for at least the next four years in the US.
