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Google Search is an illegal monopoly — what happens now?
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Technology
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this could be bad for mozilla / firefox.
if Google can't continue to try to increase / sustain their market share, they may stop paying mozilla to be thw default.
If they do and Firefox dies, they're getting ANOTHER Antitrust trial (hopefully).
On what grounds would that trial exist?
They're the only rendering engine? Oh because they stopped paying Mozilla? Due to a court order?
It's a complicated situation.
Because with the Chromium engine becoming the only engine, they can decide which features they want to support and which they don't, thus, combined with their ad business, they will have no opposition to Manifest v3 and can even do Manifest v3.1 or Manifest v4 which leaves adblockers completely powerless against Google Ads.
And can essentially deprecate all browser addons forever.
Right but you said "hopefully" and "can".
They haven't actually done that yet.
I do think the Manifest v2 situation is interesting, but keep in mind the Chromium/Blink engine is fully open source.
It's a trickier sell to say they have complete control when anyone is free to fork it.
Ain't nobody forking Chromium, and realistically speaking, everyone will just follow whatever standards Google pushes via the Blink engine. It's the truth, no matter the copium. Maybe Vivaldi and Brave will try to oppose any bad changes, but they will kneel eventually.
Mozilla already started sending your data to advertisers by default in firefox 128. If Google's money dries up, I can't even begin to imagine what fucked up shit they'll do.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Hardly qualifies as "sending your data to advertisers".
Read the Pocket and Mozilla FakeSpot privacy policies. They collect a lot if data, including browsing history, and do so via Google Analytics. They then share that data with advertisers.
Okay? What does that have to do with the new advertising API the added support for in 128?
I wish I could be that naive.
You certainly seem to lack reading comprehension.
You're seriously going to believe that an "aggregation service" isn't going to be misused? No wonder there's no privacy when people are this naive.
Very persuasive argument, definitely shows a strong grasp of the technical matters.
Because naiveté is technical. Sure buddy.
default what?
Default search engine on their browser?
If Mozilla needs Google to survive, they can go down with the ship for all I care. Mozilla are bad actors anyways.
If not Mozilla or Google, what will you use for a browser?
There's a decent selection at the moment:
If you need javascript+css: qtwebkit, gtkwebkit, qtwebengine ( blink based :( ), Ladybird (I really don't care if the dev sucks; goolag/mozilla's browser monopoly is too important for me to care about some stupid idpol takes)
If you don't need javascript but want css: netsurf (there is technically javascript support, but it's worked absolutely nowhere in my experience)
If you're an epic hackor that doesn't need either: w3m, links2, links, lynx
I mostly use w3m, but I use qutebrowser (qtwebkit and qtwebengine) when I need js. I'll probably replace qutebrowser with Ladybird once there's a port for OpenBSD (trying to write my own at the moment).
If you just want to abandon www all together, check out gemini and gopher clients.
Least quixotic lemmy user
Also
???
Thank you for teaching me a new word. I would hardly call using webkit instead of gecko idealistic, but normies gonna normie, I guess.
If you don't know how to differentiate between a dev having stupid idpol takes and an ad-company feigning to be a privacy organization mass-distributing spyware and adware inside privacy conscious communities then I can't help you.
These are not alternatives to modern browsers.
I'm going to conclude you're lying and haven't actually used a webkit browser, because in terms of feature parity with blink and gecko, webkit is pretty good. Maybe some stuff breaks with RTC WASM and other questionable browser capabilities, but for 99% of the web they're fine. All of the browsers I've recommended are regularly updated (except links, superceded by links2), all of them are "modern". If I wanted to recommend old dead browsers, I would recommend retawq, dillo, elinks or xombrero. Even textmode only browsers are very usable for documentation and reading news and blogs.
You can easily change the default.
That's not the point. The point is Google is paying Mozilla to be the default. Google pays them 500M per year to be the default. If at some point Google legally isn't allowed to do so, Mozilla can say bye bye to 500M/year.