Comment by p0w3n3d
7 months ago
First of all.
We must not agree that all the market will be taken by one engine (i.e. Chromium)
Sadly there's no incentive for this, of course we have Firefox (still, right?) but it may perish because of underfunding for example. We used to have opera, IE, those engines are lost.
So what I think about the EU directive is that it basically allows one company (Google) take over the whole market. Because what we have to choose between is MS Edge (Chromium), Chrome (Chromium), Vivaldi (Chromium) and other Chromium based forks. And I forgot about Firefox which is the margin atm.
I didn't want to say that Apple should allow other engines. What I wanted to say is that I'm scared that once iOS allows installation of chrome, there will become only one engine in the world and THIS will be THE MONOPOLY we don't want to have.
> Firefox [...] may perish because of underfunding
Hindsight is 20/20, but remember that Google has paid Mozilla 3.8 BILLION DOLLARS in the past 10 years alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
You could do a lot with 3.8 billion dollars, if you spent it on your core mission and not chasing Bay Area trendy shit. Mitchell Baker is still there, making phat bank, she's just the chair of the Mozilla Foundation instead of being the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
I'm not getting into details. Open Source is getting quickly beyond the "I'll do it in my garage in my free time" phase. It has a lot of illnesses (kernel patching acceptance problem etc), but if we want to have some neutrality, it should be funded. We've seen world with only proprietary software. And we don't want to come back there
i think it's unlikely firefox would perish. there are endless open source forks of major browsers, including FF, and even of mozilla themselves fell apart over night, people would continue to maintain.
FF's real threat, as open source software, is either:
1. further capture of mozilla and intentional degradation by google to the point of obscurity
2. organizational implosion followed by google deliberating requiring changes to web standards that break firefox in a way that open source contributions struggle to keep up with
3. a paradigm shift in how we use the internet (i.e. people transition to interacting with AI 98% of the time)
True true true
I don't understand the fear of Chromium. What benefit is it to developers to have to run through three different engines to make sure their site conforms to all three? Users will naturally collect around one option and make it the most popular anyway. If Apple can only maintain relevance by preventing users choice and freedom, why is that worth keeping?
Even though all those browsers use the blink engine they are dramatically different experiences, features and support.
> So what I think about the EU directive is that it basically allows one company (Google) take over the whole market.
Yup. It's a lose-lose situation