Google's trying to DRM the internet, and we have to make sure they fail

par1.iv.ggtyler.dev Google's trying to DRM the internet, and we have to make sure they fail

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity https://youtu.be/fAFlI4jZ4uc https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/chrome-delays-plan-to-limit-ad-blockers-new-timeline-coming-in-march/ 🔵 Cheesy mugs & t-shirts: https://bit.ly/rossmanns...

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It's time for Firefox and others to sue Google for antitrust. When you're using your monopoly to force web "standards" (instead of having an independent third party set standards) that cause developers to stop supporting your rival browser is clearly illegal monopoly actions.
- Puh. Mozilla is Google's pet that keeps them out of anti-trust court.
  
  Look, if Lemmy, NPR, and PBS can happen, then it's always possible to fork Firefox (or throw more weight behind the Servo folk who are moving towards developing the Rust web engine towards embedded applications to get it up to speed faster for general web browsing) if Mitchell Baker and search revenue approach to funding Firefox is getting in the way of having a fast, private, and secure browser for everybody.
  But enough woah is me and our obstacles are overwhelming on here. In this case, if we do nothing, we get nothing. Especially if you're right that the Mitchell Bakers of the world are not behind us. I know we at least have an ally in the EFF.
  
  The Servo fork? Oh I've never heard of that. I'll have to look into it.
  
  Servo Folk. It's one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That's where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn't be Mozilla's problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla's market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.
  Have you heard of Electron? It's the use of Chromium's Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn't there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko's way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It's a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink's based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.
  https://servo.org/
  
  Oh wow. Thanks for that explanation. It only has made me angrier at Mozilla. They have completely lost their way and forgotten their original mission.
  I wonder why Mozilla didn't want their own rendering engine to compete with Blink...
  
  I mean they already have one, Gecko. And since they also made Servo, they took a lot of the good parts and incorporated it into Gecko, which led to the speed up (they parallelized a lot of the processes and started using people's GPUs more).
  And they have made Mozilla VPN and had it integrate with this this multi-account container add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/) that lets you sandbox your internet browsing (like you can set up a google account container, a Facebook/Instagram container, a banking/finance container). So those have been privacy pluses in the years since Baker canned the Rust and Servo teams, blaming Covid-19 all while giving herself a raise. And Firefox seems to be competitive with Chrome in terms of speed of web rendering and whatnot: https://www.androidauthority.com/firefox-vs-chrome-which-web-browser-reigns-supreme-3294340/
  And there's just some simple things in Firefox by default, like clicking on a simple button to disable most of the javascript that's janking everything up on a website and making it simple and readable, that just make it so much better than Chrome.
  
  From what you've said though there seem to be benefits from cleaning up Gecko in order to make it feasible to turn it into something similar to Electron.
  
  Wouldn't need to take their money if donations were to get high enough (though it might be easier to have a collective org that all kinds of open internet groups could join and donate to). At the moment FF is the only browser that isn't relying on Google's Chromium while also being a real player that isn't OS specific like Safari is. All the FF alts may have their own very good points for making their forks, but they aren't building anything from the ground up. Which puts them in the same spot as all the Chromium based forks with regards to relying on base code needing to stay current. It is of course possible for the Chromium forks to join with FF (and any of its forks that can put their issues with Mozilla aside on this issue) to call for protections.
  IE/Microsoft was pulling the same kinds of shit before Chrome, Firefox, and Safari were able to show what could be possible with both actual demands for standards to be followed and that the internet should be open. The open standards are what allowed so many devs of all classes/nationalities/ages/etc to create so many cool things when barriers like money and copyright are removed. Now Google is the Microsoft of the internet and they only respect the rights of corps and rich fucks that don't create anything. Just digital rights versions of landlords. We wouldn't have the options we have now if we waited for those copyrights holders to stop us from just doing shit with technology.
  
  The sad part is that you can't donate to Firefox directly. Only to the Mozilla Foundation, which, I think misguidedly, is trying to become a political advocacy entity. They want to talk about "hate speech" online. They want to make their own AI thing... ugh. I would never deny that society and the internet has big problems. But it seems the organization has been overtaken by people who want to play political games rather than just making free software.
  If they focused solely on making a killer browser they might actually be able to dethrown Chromium or at least become more than a niche player.
  
  Wouldn’t need to take their money if donations were to get high enough
  You can't even donate to Firefox directly. Donation money goes to the corp., which means it goes to CEO pay raises.
  
  P.S. I thought I made my reply to your commment in another thread that I made instead of both yours and my comment being in this one. The post you were replying to inspired me to look up how to file an antitrust complaint with the US government.
  Here's what I was referring to:
  https://lemmy.world/post/2060683
  
  Let's just make our own open-source browser then

221 comments