Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'
7 days ago by RSS Bot to c/hackernews
Ease up on the avocado toasts and Starbucks you say?
Tldr: Google gives money to Mozilla so it can be the default search engine in Firefox. Now courts want to stop this kind of deal on the grounds that it's against antitrust laws. So Mozilla now says that without this money they might die.
Unlike many people on Lemmy, I kinda like what the Mozilla foundation does, but if they let themselves become dependent on Google's money they should have seen this coming.
Yes, unfortunately it's not an easy situation. Firefox's market share isn't nearly as big as it once was. I think it's in the single digit percentage world-wide. That means it will never be big enough again, which means it is 100% reliant on Google's money. Another weirdness is that Google is supposedly only paying this money so that they can claim they aren't a monopoly because a competitor exists (but only because Google lets them live). Mozilla did see it coming, but you can't really make money appear out of thin air if your projects aren't nearly successful enough anymore. That means stopping Google's payments will not just hurt Mozilla/Firefox (to the point of destruction), but Google/Chrome as well (in comparison, it stings them a little bit). The browser situation is just bad overall.
There seems to be no real alternative.
Most of the suggestions are based off Chrome or Firefox. They either don’t work for some edge cases or have other glaring problems. Example:
If you don’t support the theft of land from Palestinians and other occupied territories, then don’t use Vivaldi because Booking.com - who is dirty enough to advertise these properties - is on the default homepage and a partner of Vivaldi, breaking the BDS boycott.
Vivaldi is also just based off Chrome, so it's not a real alternative in the first place.
If that's all it takes for you to recommend against Vivaldi, you would also tell people to avoid Firefox, right?
https://www.theregister.com/...
Firefox users expressed displeasure here:
what is a better alternative? I moved from chrome to firefox, whats better?
If Firefox stops being developed, the only browsers left are those based on Chrome, those based on Safari and terminal webbrowsers like Lynx.
Netscape it is then
Firefox is literally the continuation of Netscape.
I still have Netscape installers and run windows 98!
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Maybe Mozilla should invest their millions of board member salaries and AI investments into more sustainable strategies, then.
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