this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2022
102 points (99.0% liked)
Firefox
18515 readers
17 users here now
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It is a problem, but I don't think it's as big as you or the video lets on. If Google does make particularly problematic changes, it's not going to be some random users forking it, it's going to be Microsoft. Microsoft is perfectly capable of maintaining an alternate version, after all they made edgeHTML almost from scratch and it worked fine. True, edge only has ~6% market share but it's growing and whatever bad decision Google makes is likely to drive users away from chrome. Other chromium browsers would also likely switch to Microsoft's fork.
And of course, Google also has to worry about pushback from other corporations or even governments, like they did with FLoc.
Google knows this, and so doesn't do anything too out of line.
Manifest v3, which you gave as an example was delayed and google backtracked on like half the changes, just because some extension devs and a vocal minority of nerds protested. And in that situation, Google's power over chromium was only half the reason, because google also has the chrome webstore, which they do truly have full control over and is not open source, but that's a separate issue.
Another megacorp forking Chromium doesn't really help solve thee problem. We need a browser that's an actual community driven open source project. Microsoft is unlikely to have problems with features harmful to users such as tracking or disabling adblocker APIs because that sort of thing is perfectly compatible with their business model.
The entity maintaining the browser has to be fundamentally non-commerical. Mozilla is not perfect, but it's the closest we have at the moment.
The reason Google backtracked is precisely because there is a viable alternative available, and if they made this change then we'd see droves of people moving to FF. In a world where Chromium is the only game in town they can push these kinds of changes through much easier.
Gecko is no more "community driven" than chromium. Mozilla has just as much control over it. You could argue that Mozilla is better company, but that's a separate argument.
Mozilla is fundamentally a non profit foundation. It's not perfect, but it's not remotely comparable to commercial companies like Google and Microsoft that have a clear conflict of interest. I would personally prefer if Firefox was a true community effort, but having it as imperfect as it may be is still vastly better than not.
But that's assuming that the changes will also be problematic for Microsoft, while their interest may align with Google's in a lot of situations
That is true, we cannot always assume Microsoft will will be opposed to it.
But they are a competitor and considering how they've been pushing edge lately, I don't think it would take too much for MS to split if they thought they could get an advantage that way.