Microsoft Removes Google’s Chrome Installer from the Windows Store

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/12/19/16797358/microsoft-google-chrome-windows-store-removal

by amelius • 9 years ago

42 59 9 years ago

retox• 9 years ago

Who needs to worry about net neutrality when big companies can bicker and degrade their competitors experience at a whim.

sabujp• 9 years ago

having to use a competitor's rendering engine is quite ridiculous

pjmlp2• 9 years ago

Google doesn't have any issue having to deal with it for iOS.

hpaavola• 9 years ago

I'm sure they have many issues with it, but they just don't have any options. Ditching Windows 10 S is an option since it has such a small market share.

smilekzs• 9 years ago

M$ Edge on Android uses WebKit.

hooluupog• 9 years ago

But it's not compulsory on android.

Ari_Ugwu3• 9 years ago

I feel like the 'M$' pejorative is a bit out dated and not really representative of Microsoft as a company anymore.

Apple, and Google practices as of late do seem sufficiently profit oriented to the point of poor consumer experience. Throw Facebook and Twitter in the mix for good measure. At the very least MS is no longer the only bully in the room....if they are still a bully at all.

I'm not sure I've seen quite as drastic a shift in fundamental thinking from a company as I've seen from Microsoft in recent years (under Nadella).

tl;dr - Any large and diversified (tech) company has so many powerful stakeholders within the company that decisions bubble up which are in the best interest of those stakeholders and their departments, not necessarily the consumer.

vetinari• 9 years ago

It was a cost-saving measure, the Edge engine doesn't run on anything that isn't Windows.

Firefox for Android uses it's own engine.

cm21873• 9 years ago

I think Windows 10 S has more to lose than Chrome in this new browser battle. Even on regular Windows 10 people go against every trick Microsoft throws at them to use Chrome rather than Edge (which is kind of a low feature Internet Explorer). If Windows 10 S wants to define itself as the only version of Windows where you will be forced no matter what to use Edge, they will stay in the low single digit market share.

This is not a mobile version of an OS where the browser doesn’t really matter because there aren’t many things you can do with only fingers anyway. This is a full blown desktop OS to be used by laptops.

[edit] actually how would the Chrome installer work in the first place? I thought the very definition of Windows 10 S was that it only allows apps from the store. How would that download app install anything?

skrebbel• 9 years ago

Edge (which is kind of a low feature Internet Explorer).

I agree with your comment in general, but Edge really is significantly better than IE. It supports most modern web stuff, it's much faster and the UI is pretty nice and clean. Sure, the latter is a matter of taste too but it really beats IE on all fronts.

Opinions clearly vary on whether it can compete with the likes of Chrome and Firefox, but it's not a "low feature Internet Explorer". It's a decent piece of work.

majewsky• 9 years ago

IE probably wouldn't even exist anymore if it weren't for legacy intranet websites that require Java applets and run ActiveX plugins.

pjc503• 9 years ago

Edge has ugly font rendering (seems to be common to all Metro apps) and loses all your tabs when you quit (total dealbreaker for me).

frou_dh• 9 years ago

To me, it feels like they jumped from having a D-grade browser to a B-grade browser.

Good work, but I'm still not going to use it, given I've already had A-grade browsers for many years.

piscisaureus• 9 years ago

IMO Edge is a fine browser - snappy, stable, up-to-date with web standards.

My big beef with it is that it tries to force feed me Bing wherever it can (even after switching the default search engine). That's a big no-no.

poizan42• 9 years ago

[edit] actually how would the Chrome installer work in the first place? I thought the very definition of Windows 10 S was that it only allows apps from the store. How would that download app install anything?

It didn't:

[Note to Windows 10 S users] Windows 10 S is incompatible with apps like Google Chrome. To use Google Chrome, upgrade for free (for a limited time) to Windows 10 Pro.

You can still see the cached version at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

romanovcode3• 9 years ago

Last time I reinstalled Windows I just used Edge without any problems. All websites work fine and it is fast. Also has uBlock and other critical addons.

Artlav• 9 years ago

they will stay in the low single digit market share.

After the whole "Windows 10" thing i seriously doubt there is anything they can do that would result in them losing much of a market share.

cm21873• 9 years ago

Windows 10 S is competing with Windows 10, so there is a potential for really tiny market share.

blooo• 9 years ago

Can't really blame Microsoft for this. Neither Google, nor Apple will ever allow publishers to publish just links to their own download pages in the Play/App Stores.

kbwt• 9 years ago

Blame all three.

dis-sys• 9 years ago

the title is misleading, it is not even a full installer, it is an app that just redirect you to a download link.

google refuses to provide a full Chrome app for the Microsoft Store because it requires browsers to use the built-in HTML and JavaScript engines provided by Windows 10. google agreed to let its ios version of Chrome to use Apple's webkit, but apparently it is not happy to do something similar for Microsoft.

now who is the problem here? Microsoft or Google? ;)

Lio• 9 years ago

Microsoft.

They have historically provided a low quality, non-standard rendering and JavaScript experience.

That they are trying underhanded means to stop people opting out of that experience is a reveal that the old Microsoft is still there.

Apple should not to be emulated on this.

romanovcode3• 9 years ago

Did you try Edge?

dbbk• 9 years ago

Edge's renderer seems fine? And being improved at a regular pace.

cm21873• 9 years ago

I don’t think Google is thrilled by the iOS approach either but iOS is a too big market share to ignore. Windows 10 S isn’t.

tonyedgecombe• 9 years ago

The Verge understands Google created this installer app to combat the fake Chrome apps that can be found in the Windows Store, a problem Microsoft has been trying to address for years.

It obviously hasn't been trying that hard.

nikanj• 9 years ago

User installs ”Chrome” from Windows Store, gets malware and crap. I’d bet 87% of the users would blame Google, not Microsoft.

Fnoord2• 9 years ago

I bet 95,73% of all statistics are made up.

thisisit• 9 years ago

Everyone wants a walled garden for their stuff. So this comes as no surprise. Personally, I struggled for couple of days to get Chrome installed on my Windows 10 laptop. Finally, installed Firefox to avoid Edge.

pjc503• 9 years ago

"Windows Store apps that browse the web must use HTML and JavaScript engines provided by Windows 10"

Why is this restriction allowed? Isn't this a violation of the browser choice consent decree, or has that expired?

Edit: I see this is "Windows S", which inherits from the failed "Windows RT" the attempt to jam everything into the walled garden of the store. This is unlikely to work and I hope it doesn't; only Apple have succeeded in doing this so far, but a world where every application developer has to give 30% to the platform feudal lord and suffer arbitary restrictions on development is going to have a lot less innovation.

headmelted4• 9 years ago

Windows RT, for the record, was a horrifically missed opportunity for Windows to compete with "low-end" ARM devices.

I use quotes as I much prefer the ARM Chromebooks I've owned over the years to any other computer I've used, regardless of price.

Thin, light, cheap and with battery life for millenia.

Microsoft is trying to address this now with running x86 code on Snapdragons (which may well be too little too late), but at the time it would have been trivial for them to build a basic laptop with a 15" form factor and three full days of battery life. I'd have thrown money at that.

kogepathic• 9 years ago

Microsoft is trying to address this now with running x86 code on Snapdragons (which may well be too little too late)

I disagree. I think it's a fantastic idea. Windows has a lot of legacy software, which I'd guess is mostly closed source.

If you want to have a laptop with all-day battery life, but run the application from your defunct vendor that's x86 only, then this is a great solution.

For Microsoft, it's the best of both worlds. Lower power consumption of ARM and all the backward compatibility of x86, in one piece of (low cost) hardware. The only other ARM productivity OS (IMHO) is Chrome OS, but it's lacking backward compatibility with pretty much everything. Unless you're going to use a Linux chroot, but that's something only power users will do and not at scale.

The potential of this combination (ARM+x86 emulation) is so huge that Intel is threatening Microsoft/Qualcomm over it. [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel...

pjc503• 9 years ago

Microsoft is trying to address this now with running x86 code on Snapdragons

Is this real Windows or a crippled app store only version?

Mindwipe• 9 years ago

Isn't this a violation of the browser choice consent decree, or has that expired?

It's expired (sadly, and rather than the better option which would have been that it should apply to all operating systems).

paulus_magnus2• 9 years ago

I'd like EU court to look into Apple iOS and now MS Windows, Google Chromebooks lock the user into a single source of "apps". It's like you were limited to fill / charge your car at stations owned by the manufacturer.

headmelted4• 9 years ago

To be fair, Chromebooks require a Google account, which I agree should be completely optional for the user.

Beyond that though, there's very little dependence on Google for apps. The web store opens in a browser window and (if someone were to create one) could easily go to a different store.

Likewise, Android-compatible Chromebooks can use Aptoide same as any other compatible Android device (although Android should be looked at too IMHO - I should at least have the option to say "I trust X app store in addition to Google Play" without removing un-named sources protection altogether. Likewise iPhone.).

pgeorgi• 9 years ago

"I trust X app store in addition to Google Play"

That's in Android 8.0: http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/03/21/android-o-feature-sp...

amelius• 9 years ago

It's like you were limited to fill / charge your car at stations owned by the manufacturer.

Sounds like the Nespresso business model too.

Fnoord2• 9 years ago

It is, but in world of the OS walled garden its Apple and Google (via Google Play) who made it popular. With the important notion that you can sideload with Android. Symbian and Windows Mobile back in the days didn't use a centralized repository with a GUI (aka an "app store").

lucozade• 9 years ago

It's like you were limited to fill / charge your car at stations owned by the manufacturer

Only if you're looking to find fault. The analogy to cars works fine but only if you compare like for like.

There's a direct analogy to fueling and that's charging, which can be done from any electric source as long as you have the right connector (like cars).

Apps are more like car modifications. For most modern cars this is very hard to do without using the manufacturers own fitters or preferred suppliers. Some modifications are possible without their consent but they'd definitely void any warranty and they're not exactly encouraged.

BTW I'm not arguing that this is fine. Just that cars are as much, if not more, walled gardens than phones.

To be honest, given the economics of most consumer goods, it's hard to find anything that encourages non-manufacturer modification or repair. If courts were to really start fighting this, they need to fight pretty much everyone.

PhasmaFelis• 9 years ago

I'm sure MS would like everyone to get their software from the Windows Store, but I've been using Windows 10 for a year and a half and I've never used the Store. Regular installers still work fine.

Android is actually more restrictive, since you can distribute software outside the Google Play Store but hardly anyone does.

hungerstrike3• 9 years ago

Google had a Metro/Modern/whatever version of Chrome in the App Store when Windows 8 came out. I didn't search very much, but here is one reference to it - http://www.omgchrome.com/open-chrome-metro-mode-windows-8/

I don't remember when they took it away, but I wonder why they stopped producing it? My guess is that they realized what a flop the Windows Store turned out to be.

Personally, I don't use a single Metro app outside of Settings because I don't like walled-gardens and I don't want to give Microsoft anymore incentive to turn Windows into one (Apples profits have already incentive-ized them enough!)

Microsoft Removes Google’s Chrome Installer from the Windows Store

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