In what ways? I'd say it was less free and open when Microsoft controlled almost everyone's browsers, when user data was sent in the open (https wasn't standard), .... It was less free and open in early days when users was restricted to specific types of work; for example, I think conducting business wasn't allowed.
> Their advocacy has utterly failed.
What have they advocated for that has 'utterly failed'?
DRM is rampant.
Network neutrality is moribund at best.
Power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few megacorps so you and I can't, for example, run our own email servers if we expect to actually be able to communicate with users of Google or Microsoft.
AI companies get rich doing things that would be illegal for you and me, such as hoovering up copyrighted works without paying for them.
Surveillance is pervasive.
That's just off the top of my head.
> We're back to a browser monoculture, Chrome, and Google controls browsers
Don't forget Apple's browsers, including all the iPhone users.
This is a deeply flawed analogy, and the two situations are superficially similar at best.
The UI is just poorly suited for protracted discussions, to the point that I'm not interested in continuing this comment chain.
I agree, although I'd say that we need a mozilla-like effort that is effective.
> Don't forget Apple's browsers, including all the iPhone users.
Sure, but Apple's world is effectively a monoculture itself. If you don't buy into Apple and their ecosystem, the existence of those things is irrelevant.
Not in this context: Someone claimed above that the web browser market was a monoculture of only Google Chrome. Apple browsers has a large market share, so it's not a monoculture.
> In what ways?
In the past the internet was a collection of a multitude of relatively open and decentralized sites. Now, it's utterly dominated by a few large platforms, frequently focused on exploiting user data to the fullest. Everything else is pretty marginal.
I don't see how Mozilla could have shifted the needle on the rise of big web properties. In fact, I want a browser to be completely agnostic, so if Mozilla had, e.g., prevented the rise of Facebook, then I'd probably conclude that they were anti-open.
What I do want is web standards. IE built its moat, partly, by breaking standards. To be charitable, perhaps standards were moving too slowly.
The sane thing is ming again with chrome. Now, by my choice not to use a chrome engine, i have patches of nonfunctionality. I feel like we've been trojan'd.
The word 'easily' does a lot of work there. How easy? Many standards work well. The Internet, an incredibly successful engineering project, is built on standards.
Apparently centralization is what most regular folks rather adopt.
also internet has become more and more centralized compared to it's heyday. even that alone makes it less free and open.
Apple has a large market share, unless we exclude mobile users.
Now it's Google, so that situation hasn't changed any.
> What have they advocated for that has 'utterly failed'?
Privacy and keeping the web open, mostly. The privacy situation is worse now than ever, and the open web is continuing to shrink.
> It was less free and open in early days when users was restricted to specific types of work; for example, I think conducting business wasn't allowed.
When was this? I've been on the internet since before it was open to the general public, and I don't remember a time when users were restricted to specific types of work, nor a time when conducting business was not allowed.