This configuration hijacking is 'even more egregious than prohibiting rival software adoption,' the Moz researchers opined.

It wasn't until 2020 that Apple added settings to switch from Safari to another browser as the default on iOS, and even then you can't uninstall Apple's offering.Īnother annoying thing some OS makers do is find any excuse to override the user's browser choice, and point people's settings back to the giants' own browsers. In some cases, you can't even delete the bundled browser. Mozilla claimed Microsoft, Apple, and Google are abusing their market strengths by bundling their browsers with their OSes – again, Windows, iOS and macOS, and Android – and setting them as defaults, and making it tedious for users to unchain themselves from the software and pick an alternative, if said users are even aware there is an alternative. That same month, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov accused Apple of stifling web developers by cramming WebKit and Safari down users' throats. Most recently, the UK's Competition and Market Authority in June said it is probing the market dominance of Apple and Google in the world of browsers and gaming. Tech giants using their operating systems to force web browsers onto users is something that just keeps cropping up time and time again.

Mozilla's complaint reminds us, and likely you too, of the outcry in the 1990s over Microsoft using its Windows OS to thrust its Internet Explorer browser on everyone, annihilating Netscape and steamrolling any other rival browser in the way. As well as all this, you've got Meta bundling its own Chrome-based Oculus browser with its virtual-reality headsets, and Amazon uses Chromium's Blink engine in the browser included in its devices.

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