So I was genuinely wondering, Chrome, Edge, and Safari have the highest browser shares in the market as of now. The next best browsers (each having rather small shares compared to the aforementioned ones) are Firefox (and it’s forks, TOR, Mullvad Browser, etc.) and Brave (which is just remodeled Chromium with added privacy).
What would happen if Google were to cut funding for Mozilla? What would happen if people don’t care enough about privacy, Manifest v3, and other issues with a monopoly and they just continue to use the top 3 browsers? In fact, if they do make the switch, the best option for most would be Brave because it’s based on Chromium and therefore is the easiest to adapt to out of the box.
I have been talking to my friends etc. about this and only a couple of them were genuinely concerned about the implications of all the recent developments and changes, and even fewer actively changed to Firefox or a fork. That’s not much given that only 2 or 3 others apart from myself were already using privacy-respecting software, and we all had more-than-average tech knowledge and experience.
How would you convince people to make the swap? How far would you genuinely try repeatedly before giving up? I don’t want to give in, but it’s just getting more and more hopeless by the day. And suppose one day Firefox does in fact shut down (which I genuinely hope it doesn’t for our sake) what would we have left? Brave is a half-baked privacy browser. If at all I decide to use, it’ll be an attempt for average privacy and a chance to earn crypto as a form of passive income.
Never say never, but to be frank I see this as an unlikely scenario.
Because Chrome utterly dominates the browser market, it’d be very easy to accuse them of being a monopoly. Regulatory bodies would probably like to do so, but their direct funding of Mozilla is Google’s way of defending themselves from such an accusation.
I probably wouldn’t break my back doing it. Yeah, I’d like for more people to start using Firefox, but there’s not much I can say that Firefox objectively does better than Chrome if you’re not in the privacy space in general. It still has some telemetry out of the box, it also seems to have difficulty playing Netflix in HD, which is a big deal for some people.
FWIW I happen to think Brave is a pretty good browser, I don’t love it but if they cut out the bloat, all the crypto nonsense and the VPN, it’d be pretty close to an ideal browser. But I do agree that I don’t want to live in a world where Chromium is literally the only browser engine left. I used to use Brave on mobile and Librewolf on desktop, but reading that blog post about Firefox and the competition, pushed me to download Mull and start using it as my main browser on the phone.
It is unfortunate, I think Chrome and Firefox are pretty much on-par with features, which is amazing given the size of their respective companies. Idk if the Manifest rollout has happened already, but I’d like to see if that helps Firefox. Brave does seem like they’ll still have ad blocking via their native blocker.
I really appreciate your response. Yeah unfortunately Firefox is lacking in terms of HD streaming and what-not that aren’t a part of privacy. I used to use Brave too on both desktop and mobile, but I felt a sense of responsibility to switch to Firefox, with the hope that it will at least be an example to others.
Librewolf and Mull are superb browsers. I use Mull on Android. Used to use Librewolf on desktop but I switched to Firefox ESR and applied strong hardening. I just felt that learning to rely on an official release browser would force me to become independent enough to handle browser hardening if open-source projects were to shut down later etc. (like DivestOS at the moment…hopefully they’ll be able to reach the number of donations needed).
Then we few who do care about those things, just become an even smaller minority.
Give them the facts and let them make up their own minds. Communicate it in a way centered around their own interest, and continually improve on this messaging. Techlore is very good at this. Accept the reality that most will simply ignore your good advice.
Mozilla may close down, but Firefox will be incredibly hard to kill completely. If nothing else, it will live on through forks (as you mentioned). A dominant fork could be expected to emerge, and might gain momentum. There are more than enough geeks to keep something like that going, even on a purely volunteer basis.
As mentioned above, we’ll just be in a smaller minority than we are even now. Some websites might not work in our browser, and hopefully we’ll have the resiliency to simply forego access to those sites, or hack around the limitations, as we always do. It’s not the end of the world.
Perhaps that’s what the “acceptance” stage of grief looks like for the death of privacy: being jaded enough not to expect any better from the average person, while accepting that at least you can create your own reality with a little bit of effort.
Yeah this seems like the best way to go. I always try to explain to others why their personal data can and will be exploited, and I encourage them to protect themselves. Unfortunately, most of them go the classic “I have nothing to hide” route. From the rest, most again will be interested but not do anything about it later.
Maybe it really is. Hopefully we won’t have any issues. Turns out Brave Rewards doesn’t even work in my country, so I have no benefit whatsoever in even trying to use apart from benefitting from its Chromium base. Viva Firefox hopefully.
The classic comeback to this is to ask them for their GMail credentials. Or their internet banking details. Just to have a look around. No-one has taken me up on that yet. From there you can address the root misconception: that privacy isn’t about hiding stuff, but about control over our own private information.
Google doesn’t fund Mozilla anymore than I fund my landlord or my mobile carrier. Google pays Mozilla (and many others) for digital real estate (the privilege of occupying the default search engine slot). There is a lot of confusion and misinformation about this relationship, many people mistakenly characterize it as patron/client but it is more akin to landlord/tenant or vendor/customer (where Google is the tenant/customer). I’m not saying that is how you characterized it, I just wanted to clarify a common source of confusion.
Mozilla has a thing of value (the default search provider slot, for their browser), and they lease that to the highest bidder (presumably), which is currently Google, in the past was Yahoo, in the future will be ____?
But the point I’m making is their is no benevolence, charity, patronage or anything else involved in this arrangement, Google can’t just simply “pull funding”, Mozilla has something Google and others want, and Google is willing to pay a lot of money for that thing. Google gets as much out of the relationship as Mozilla does, and if/when that relationship ends, there will be other interested parties.
That said, more diverse and distributed revenue streams should be (and is) a goal for Mozilla. Unfortunately a vocal subset of users seem to want to have their cake and eat it too, they complain about dependence on the search deal with Google, but then complain even louder whenever Firefox does attempt to introduce some alternative revenue stream that would reduce reliance on revenue from the search deal.
On this topic, I was reading this blog post from Mozilla
Most people are probably all too aware of how companies like Microsoft leverage their position as the provider of Windows to make it extremely difficult for the end user to switch to a browser besides Edge. Google is also quite bad for this, at least within their native apps.
It’s a bit of a sad read honestly, Mozilla and other browser competitors really aren’t being a fair chance. Though I believe there will be a version of Windows in the EU which alleviates this.
From there you can address the root misconception: that privacy isn’t about hiding stuff, but about control over our own private information.