Mozilla is ~83% funded by Google. That’s right- the maker of the dominant Chrome browser is mostly behind its own noteworthy “competitor”. When Google holds that much influence over Mozilla, I call it a false duopoly because consumers are duped into thinking the two are strongly competing with each other. In Mozilla’s effort to please Google and to a lesser extent the end users, it often gets caught pulling anti-user shenanigans. Users accept it because they see Firefox as the lesser of evils.

Even if it were a true duopoly, it would be insufficient anyway. For a tool that is so central to the UX of billions of people, there should be many more competitors.

public option

Every notable government has an online presence where they distribute information to the public. Yet they leave it to the public to come up with their own browser which may or may not be compatible with the public web service. In principle, if a government is going to distribute content to the public, they also have a duty to equip the public to be able to consume the content. Telling people to come up with their own private sector tools to reach the public sector is a bit off. It would be like telling citizens they can receive information about legislation that passes if they buy a private subscription to the Washington Post. The government should produce their own open source browser which adheres to open public standards and which all the gov websites are tested with.

I propose Italy

Italy is perhaps the only country in the world to have a “public money → public code” law, whereby any software development effort that is financed by the gov must be open source. So IMO Italy should develop a browser to be used to access websites of the Italian gov. Italy can save us from the false duopoly from Google.

  • lud@lemm.ee
    11·
    8 months ago

    I don’t really agree with anything you just said but I will just talk about JPEG XL

    Google killed the free world JPEG XL format. When a browser as dominant as Chrome withholds support JPEG XL, there is then no reason for web devs to use that format. Google did this because JPEG XL competes with a proprietary Google format. Firefox does not support it out of the box either, likely because of Google’s influence. Firefox users can enable it by going through some config hoops, so if Chrome alone did not kill it, that certainly would.

    Firefox never supported it because it’s still experimental. Until september 2023 not a single browser supported it. Now that Safari supports it, the chances for Mozilla to spend time and resources to implement JPEG XL properly increases substantially.

    And of course it matters what chrome supports since it’s the dominant browser by far. It’s maybe not worth while to do something if no one will use it because chromium is extremely dominant while Firefox is very small in comparison

    Web standards usually takes a while to get supported and especially to be on by default.

    Btw webp isn’t proprietary.