> Chromium is open source

> Nearly every browser is based on open source code

"We lost the war, haven't we?"

What's stopping you, or anyone else, from forking code and making it privacy focused?

Microsoft got complacent and IE lost to Mozilla.

Mozilla got bloated, lazy and they lost their focus after several missteps, several of which alienated the fuck out of the FOSS community. (Forcing several distros to fork and rebrand to something like Iceweasel? Seriously? Way to dilute your own branding.)

Chrome took over because it simply was the better browser. It brought a lot of new things to the table that made Firefox look stale in relatively short amount of time. Is it still the better browser? I don't think that's quite as clear cut these days... but unfortunately, browsers like "Brave" aren't doing anyone any favors with their misleading presentation, sketchy tactics and meme like spamming from users who don't look beyond bitelines. So when it comes down to it, every Chromium fork that currently exists still has a business, with business motives, behind it.

The source is there. Does somebody want to make an effort to fork it and let it be the true privacy focused browser or are we just going to complain about losing a war that nobody's really fighting?

The war has not ended yet. I see no point in declaring defeat.

Yes, people need to get out of the HN filter bubble and realize that this is a problem no-one in the real world actually cares about. The storm will continue in the teapot but no sites with any substantial traffic will do anything about it.

It depends on the scope I think. There's obviously nothing stopping anyone from running other browsers, blocking tracking as best they can, anonymizing as much as possible, or hell even starting their own networks to avoid it all together. The technology is still there, still open and free.

But the net now contains the general populace, and as such significant power has been amassed by controlling it. I don't believe the internet as we know it is in the hands of the netizens anymore, and I have to doubt that the majority of the netizens would even care.

Google and Amazon have both showed continued behavior showing that they'll eat, buy or smother anything that comes a little too close to them, why should we expect that it would be any different if we tried to kick their behaviors off the network?

> "I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

> "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

It looks bleak... but hey. Hobbits toppled the Eye of Sauron.