"If one product like #Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium. That’s what happened when #Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before #Firefox was released. And it could happen again.
If you care about what’s happening with online life today, take another look at Firefox." https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/12/06/goodbye-edge/ #edge
... Or a WebKit based browser. Diversity matters in order to maintain a free and open web!
@bjoern I'm more and more unsure about that, to be honest. At one side, yes, Firefox has a different engine, whic is good, but at the end, there's "Google money" in Mozilla too, which makes me wonder. Plus: At some point, why not make sure we have *one* robust, solid, maintained #FLOSS browser engine to build upon? My take on that is here, especially looking at Chromium and Microsoft: https://dm.zimmer428.net/2018/12/edge-chromium-and-web-monoculture/
Because corporate forces will always strive to make the web more closed (more DRM, more obfuscation, more tracking, more monetization); if de facto standardization (through the implementation) has to happen in a space that is dominated by corporate players like Google and Microsoft, their interests will always prevail, even if the implementation is nominally open source.
Mozilla/Firefox is a deeply imperfect alternative - but the best one we have.
@eloquence I see these issues, but I wonder whether we really solve them by building different browser *engines*. Just looking at, in example, #brave and what they do on top of the #chromium engine. They actually come up with a new (and IMHO rather interesting) approach to balancing interests in online ads without ditching users privacy. I wonder whether talking about different browser *engines* leaves us forever working on a level way too low to solve the actual problems..
The best things I can say about Brave is that it's well-marketed and has good usability.
The anti-tracking/anti-ads functionality appears well-replicable within Firefox using built-in anti-tracking tools & uBlock origin -- albeit with worse usability.
BAT is uninteresting to me as it seems like a conventional token play (conflating currency with speculative asset in unhelpful ways), though the problem it attempts to solve is worth solving.
@eloquence I mostly agree with you, but that last piece you wrote is what is of utter importance to me: It's a problem worth solving. And it's that they actually *tried* solving that problem, no matter how imperfect that solution, so far might be. I'd really very much rather use a web that doesn't have tracking that much because it's not required anymore than using a web where we increase effort and amount of tools required to keep this mess somewhat contained.
I, too, would prefer a web that doesn't have tracking, but I don't think that it's in Brave's selfish business interest to fully deliver this reality, nor do I think that even if they delivered it, the negative tradeoffs of conferring massive market power upon yet another $40M -funded San Francisco startup in exchange for such perceived liberation are negligible.
Facebook, too, partially works on problems "worth solving"; this is never by itself sufficient.
@eloquence By the way, talking about business and money, we haven't been talking about the #Mozilla funding yet - is this less of a problem than the #Brave funding? No blaming or bashing, I really would like comments here...
@eloquence Maybe you're right, I am a bit undecided about #brave as a company, but the question is: Why doesn't anyone else work on that? Why do people come up with new tracking blockers, but no one really puts effort behind solving the actual problem cause by a load of publishers relying upon ads and trackings as primary (maybe only) source of funding for their doings? Browser *engines* are irrelevant for that, they just "help" us focus on technology rather than solving these other problems. 😐