From Michael Crider at PCWorld.
I have hated Chrome for a while, preferring the customizability of Firefox, though Firefox now uses Chrome extensions but hopefully never does this with adblockers.
Since a Federal Judge has declared that Google is a monopoly and specifically that it paying other companies for the top search spot in browsers like Safari and Firefox is monopolistic, I see a serious unintended consequence. People are wondering what will happen to Google, but I wonder what will happen to Mozilla and specifically Firefox, which I have long considered the best desktop browser around (I specify desktop as I am forced to use Safari on my iPhone and iPad, or at least a WebKit browser).
Mozilla releases Firefox for free and the company has long struggled to make money in any way besides selling Google its prime search engine spot. And since it is likely that the Judge will stop Google from making such payments, I wonder how long Mozilla will survive.
And ironically this will also benefit Google’s chrome browser, as without Mozilla there will be so few alternatives to Chrome, especially that run their own separate engine as Microsoft’s Edge, Vivaldi, Opera and Brave are all already based on Chromium. And sure these other chromium browsers don’t all share your data with Google as Chrome does, but the internet should not all be controlled by one company! And right now there is basically chromium, Gecko from Mozilla and WebKit for Safari, so breaking this monopoly could actually leave only Chromium and WebKit left.
And I prefer Mozilla because of its customization. Unfortunately they now have the same plugin architecture, but I can still customize Mozilla much more and am not having more of my data used by Google to make money off it.
And the less competition, the less chance of google improving Chomium.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-rules-google-broke-antitrust-law-search-case-2024-08-05
From Amber Neeley at AppleInsider.
Yes yes yes! We need to save Firefox which I still find the best and most customizeable browser. And Apple, Google and Microsoft all push their in house browsers over it, which has decimated it’s market share.
ArsTechnica has the report on this. As if I didn’t hate Google and it’s behavior, but this is just gross. Google already started by messing with ad blocker users with YouTube, but to basically emaciate ad blockers in Google Chrome is disgusting behavior, especially as the dominant web browser in the world.
If we had a working government I would say they should do something about this, but they are so bad when it comes to understanding tech at all that they would never do anything in time or correctly.
Google’s Manifest V3 is utter garbage and won’t do any of the things they claim with privacy benefits, it is literally only to help their bottom line by stopping ad blockers.
One can only hope that this will push more people back to the vastly superior Firefox, but since they already switched to Google’s Manifest V2, and are also supposed to support Manifest V3, which means they should never have switched to Web Extensions, but at least they claim they will continue to support webrequests in MV3.
Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3. To maximize compatibility with other browsers, we will also ship support for declarativeNetRequest. We will continue to work with content blockers and other key consumers of this API to identify current and future alternatives where appropriate. Content blocking is one of the most important use cases for extensions, and we are committed to ensuring that Firefox users have access to the best privacy tools available.
Manifest v3 in Firefox: Recap & Next Steps