Is Google Chrome anti-competitive?

[moggett88]

I saw a thread on here the other day about the pros and cons of various browsers, and there was a consensus that Chrome generally runs faster than Firefox (which is what I use). I thought I would give it a try, and after 5 hours felt that they were basically as fast as each other, but that I preferred Firefoxs interface, so I uninstalled Chrome.

Since then, Firefox has been loading incredibly slowly, crashing and hanging a whole bunch - issues that I never had before. It seems like installing Chrome actually affected Firefox, and I was wondering if any of the more tech savvy users on here could tell me if that's actually a thing?

I would think there would be laws against it, but the legal system seems a little antiquated when it comes to software...for added discussion value, has anyone else had similar issues of programs poisoning each other?

EDIT: A reinstall has fixed my issues, but almost didn't happen - after uninstalling Firefox and loading up Internet Explorer to get to the Mozilla website, I discovered Internet Explorer has developed an issue too. About 5 seconds after navigating to any page, it will report a problem and force a reload. Luckily the download button was right there on the Mozilla page :s

 

[JoJo]

I have all three of those browsers installed on my laptop and have never experienced any issues, I'm pretty sure what you described would be illegal if it was done deliberately by the developers. Could have happened inadvertently I guess.

 

[Esotera]

Could just be your perception of how fast it runs. Although Chrome definitely doesn't play nice with system standards, if you attempt to set firefox as your default browser through Windows Explorer there's a bug that means you have to manually edit your registry. That's more of a case of Google not bothering to fix bugs because it doesn't benefit them.

A more likely explanation is that your firefox has updated or somtehing. It all sounds very weird and would definitely be anti-competitive if a program did this intentionally, and probably illegal.

 

[idarkphoenixi]

Chrome runs a bit faster, and doesn't have flash crash as much as my Firefox, but Firefox has the better customisation options, so that's what I go for.