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Comment by godshatter | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla makes $400 million a year from Google, would they really cut off this revenue stream if Google told them to only support manifest v3 or else?

Mozilla should never have gotten into a situation where 90% of their funding comes from their biggest competitor.

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Google needs Mozilla though - Firefox is the last remaining Chromium competitor Google can use as a counterargument against claims about their de facto monopoly.

That's Safari. It has way more users, and website creators actually care about providing Safari support because they want it to work on the non-technical boss's iPhone.

There's no Safari on Android.

people typically want their mobile sites to work on both major OSes

Or on Windows.

There's no significant Firefox presence on Android either. Sure there is an app, and there are 100+ million installs, corresponding to an install market share of >4%, but people almost never use Firefox. Usage wise, Firefox has a 0.5% market share.

Safari (WebKit) is the one that is the last remaining serious competitor against Chromium.

Firefox has already lost years ago and is so useless to counter Chrome that they have to be funded by Google in order to survive. Mozilla's competitiveness for Firefox is close to zero.

The EU Digital Markets Act will just further solidify Chrome's dominance.

> Safari (WebKit) is the one that is the last remaining serious competitor against Chromium.

Safari isn't available on platforms other than Apple's (which have a minority share of computing devices on the market), so it's obviously not an actual competitor to Chromium based browsers.

Even if the DMA somehow results in Blink engine dominance, at least the engine is open, so alternative freedom and privacy-respecting browsers can build on it and patch out any evil features while mostly maintaining compatibility. Not a great outcome, but it'd be worth it to stamp out closed computer operating systems that don't let their users control what software they install. The current state of iOS and iPad OS is completely unacceptable.

If Chrome were a separate business entity, it would also have to be funded by Google to survive. Browsers simply cannot make money.

Sadly, they're probably headed into a worse situation, where they lose most of that 90% of their funding since their browser marketshare is at an all time low of 3-4%. Renegotiation is this year.

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