Original Toot: https://strangeobject.space/@silvermoon82/110969122337810598
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Nothing comes before profit -- especially not the consumer.
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How to make people care, though
A few days ago, a friend asked me what browser I was using, a question he asked me in a genuine manner of getting my opinion. When I asnwered that I was using Firefox, he - again, what seemed to be genuine - wanted to know why. Knowing that he likes to use adblockers, I then told him about Google's recent attempts of attacking an open web, specificly mentioning ManifestV3 and WEI API and how they are a potential threat to his use of adblockers.
"Well, I use ublock origin on chrome and it still works, so I'll keep using that."
Apparently, I am not convincing enough.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox
Unless they sort out their funding (find someone that is not Google for majority of their money), people shouldn't care.
I don't understand. You think people shouldn't care about privacy? You think people shouldn't care about one or two massive corporations having complete control over the internet?
Explain.
I think his point is that as long as Google is the primary funding source for Mozilla it's not worth relying on Firefox because there's always the risk Google will demand Mozilla capitulates and tows the line. Once/If Mozilla secure independent funding then they can be 'trusted'
Oh, I see. For some reason, I thought they were referring to content creators and others who profit from Google ads or something like that.
And yeah, there's a lot that Mozilla's corporate branch needs to sort out, but Firefox and its forks are the only viable alternatives to chromium browsers right now, so people should still care about that.
"Perfection is the enemy of progress" ... or something like that
🤔 So why can't we just make our own browser then?
Making a browser isn't terribly hard, and there's dozens of 'browsers' (see nyxt, qutebrowser, vimb, brave, vivaldi, etc). Making a browser engine is hard, and expensive, which is why all of the alternatives i've used are either chromium or webkit based. The webkit ones seem to crash on anything with complex javascript. The chromium engine ones work great, however that doesn't stop Google from making changes to the engine which people are up in arms about.
Browser engines are very, very, very, very very hard to make and maintain.
See: Opera and Microsoft Edge, which formerly ran on bespoke engines until they converted to Chromium because no one would support their browser.
It doesn't matter, we literally have no choice. We either accomplish something very hard in our lives or suffer. And life is very very unkind to the indolent and downtrodden.
Not at all. They should find an alternative that cannot be just unplugged on demand.
Mozilla cannot be unplugged on demand. That would cause Google to become a monopoly, and they would be held to extreme harsh laws by the EU. Like in the case of IE6 back in the day.
Google does not want that, so they donate to Mozilla to keep Firefox as a competitor. And Firefox has to do jack shit in return other than exist.
The only way Firefox could be unplugged is if a new non-chromium browser becomes one of the big browsers.
This is all technically correct. Although I think it's a little naive to say that a corporation "cannot" do something today. There are lots of things they technically cannot do yet it happens on daily basis.