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Comment by prophesi | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I didn't understand what the author was trying to get at. Every point made against Firefox, Chrome itself offends to an exponential degree.

Their conclusion of using ungoogled-chromium makes no sense, as it still suffers from at least three of the five issues outlined. At least with Firefox, you have ESR to keep using the version you're accustomed to for a few years. Or you can jump over to TOR if you really distrust Mozilla that much with their opt-out user metrics.

I agree that individual browser choices won't make any changes. But this is where we're at. At least there _is_ a choice. Legislation to break up the browser monopoly is likely our only hope.

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I think the difference between the criticism of Chrome and the criticism of Firefox lies in the marketing. Firefox is constantly telling me that they are the good guys. The last bastion of privacy and user-first on the web. But in reality they are doing a lot of questionable and shady stuff that that they need to be called out for.

Well sure, call them out on that stuff.

But don't then finish that callout by saying that nothing matters and that trying to fight against browser monoculture is pointless.

The "final thoughts" section of this article is depressing to read. There is absolutely still a difference between Mozilla and Google, and it is absolutely still worth fighting to avoid a browser monoculture, even if there's only a small chance of success.

I definitely agree that Mozilla has problems, but that's not the thrust of this article. The thrust of the article is that Mozilla has problems, and therefore everyone's efforts to improve the web are meaningless.

> There is absolutely still a difference between Mozilla and Google

General attitude of these corporations is one thing, but is there really a difference between Firefox and Chromium w.r.t. privacy?

Yes, I think so. Firefox ships with a ton of anti-fingerprinting features that can be enabled in about:config (many of them lifted directly from Tor), containers are an intuitive way for people to isolate sites from each other, Encrypted DNS is turned on by default (Chrome only upgrades to encrypted DNS by default if the current resolver supports it), and Firefox's addon API for adblocking is already slightly more capable than Chromium's, and will be much more capable once Manifest V3 ships.

Hi, I wrote the text.

> Yeah, I didn't understand what the author was trying to get at. Every point made against Firefox, Chrome itself offends to an exponential degree.

My decision to use ungoogled-chromium itsn't a recommendation, but just my way of avoiding the UI issues I have been having with Firefox.

> Legislation to break up the browser monopoly is likely our only hope.

Interesting idea, but I don't see how you can solve a technical issue by legal means.

> Interesting idea, but I don't see how you can solve a technical issue by legal means.

Why do you think that Chrome's dominance is a technical issue rather than an issue of default bundling on Google devices, advertising on Google properties, and other anti-competitive practices?

From a technical perspective, Firefox already keeps up pretty well with Chrome. It's better in some areas, and worse in others, but it's definitely competitive.

Even if you want to throw Firefox out the window and start a new browser from scratch, the existence of Web DRM is one of the biggest issues that's keeping you from building a new browser on top of V8 or Servo. If you want to license Widevine from Google, they're not going to approve it for a highly experimental browser. There isn't a technical solution to that problem at all -- it's entirely a legal problem.

Let's put it this way: A technical issue is at the core of the problem (the practical inability to "just create" a new browser), that is then exploited by companies such as Google for their own interest. I wasn't familiar with the legal issue of Web DRM, but that just represents an additonal problem.

> From a technical perspective, Firefox already keeps up pretty well with Chrome.

Yes, but Firefox has to follow Chrome at whatever they decide, because the "regular consumer" just wants a working browser. So Google ends up making all the decisions, either way.

> A technical issue is at the core of the problem (the practical inability to "just create" a new browser)

What I'm saying is that the technical difficulty in creating a new browser is less of a concern than the legal and monopolistic barriers to creating a new browser.

See your next point:

> Yes, but Firefox has to follow Chrome at whatever they decide, because the "regular consumer" just wants a working browser.

Which is a legal/monopoly problem, not a technical problem. Firefox has passed the technical hurdles it needs to pass to be competitive with Chrome. The monopolistic barriers (default bundling in Android, hobbling Google properties like Youtube on Firefox, etc) are some of the biggest things holding Mozilla back.

You can make it as easy to build a new browser as you want. But if Chrome is bundled in Android by default, and if Youtube works better on Chrome than your browser, and if your browser can't play Netflix videos because Google won't license Widevine, than all of the technical solutions you've come up with stop mattering.

The practical inability to "just create" a new browser exists, but you're not going to be able to solve that problem purely with technology.

Microsoft made a competing browser engine, from scratch, and in terms of pure performance and support for web standards it was doing really well in matchups against V8. They gave that engine up not because they didn't have the engineering chops to compete with Chrome, but because they couldn't break into the market. That's not a technical problem.

Minor gripe, but especially in a time when people should know about exponential growth and stuff it kind of bothers me when it's used like this.

'Exponentially' refers specifically to a change in rate of growth. You could say 'profits are growing exponentially' or 'things are getting exponentially worse', but it doesn't quite make sense for this case. I would say 'Chrome is orders of magnitude worse' or something.

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