Comment by dralley
3 months ago
>I have long suspected that Google gives so much money to Mozilla both for the default search option, but also for massive indirect control to deliberately cripple Mozilla in insidious ways to massively reduce Firefox's marketshare.
This has never ever made sense because Mozilla is not at all afraid to piss in Google's cheerios at the standards meetings. How many different variations of Flock and similar adtech oriented features did they shoot down? It's gotta be at least 3. Not to mention the anti-fingerprinting tech that's available in Firefox (not by default because it breaks several websites) and opposition to several Google-proposed APIs on grounds of fingerprinting. And keeping Manifest V2 around indefinitely for the adblockers.
People just want a conspiracy, even when no observed evidence actually supports it.
>And I have long predicted that Google is going to make the rate of change needed in web standards so high that orgs like Mozilla can't keep up and then implode/become unusable.
That's basically true whether incidentally or on purpose.
Controlled opposition is absolutely a thing, and to think that people at trillion dollar companies wouldn't do this is naive. I'm not claiming for a fact that mozilla is controlled opposition, i'm just saying it's very feasible that it could be, and i look for signs of it.
You give examples of things they disagree on, and i wouldn't refute that. However i would say that google is going to pick and choose their battles, because ultimately things they appear to "lose on" sort of don't matter. fingerprinting is a great example - yes, firefox provides it, but it's still largely pretty useless, and its impact is even more meaningless because so few people use it. if you have javascript on and arent using a VPN, chances are your anti-fingerprinting isn't actually doing much other than annoying you and breaking sites.
the only real thing to be used for near-complete-anonymity is Tor, but only when it's also used in the right way, and when JavaScript is also turned off. And even then there are ways it could and probably has failed.