The result: there is now effectively one dominating web browser run by an ad company who nigh unto controls the spec for the web itself and who is finally putting its foot down to decide that we are all going to be forced to either used fully-locked down devices or to prove that we are using some locked-down component of our otherwise unlocked device to see anyone's content, and they get to frame it as fighting for the user in the spec draft as users have a "need" to prove their authenticity to websites to get their free stuff.
(BTW, Brave is in the same boat: they are also an ad company--despite building ad blocking stuff themselves--and their product managers routinely discuss and even quote Brendan Eich talking about this same kind of "run the browser inside of trusted computing" as their long-term solution for preventing people blocking their ads. The vicious irony: the very tech they want to use to protect them is what will be used to protect the status quo from them! The entire premise of monetizing with ads is eventually either self-defeating or the problem itself.)
The person who wrote the proposal[0] is from Google. All the authors of the proposal are from Google[1].
I've been thinking carefully about this comment, but I really don't know what to say. It's absolutely heartbreaking watching something I really care about die by a thousand cuts; how do we protest this? Google will just strong-arm their implementation through Chromium and, when banks, Netflix & co. start using it, they've effectively cornered other engines into implementing it.
This isn't new to them. They did it with FLoC, which most people were opposed to[2]. The most they did was FLoC was deprecate it and re-release it under a different name.
The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal.
[0]: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser [1]: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/... [2]: >>26344013
As others have said, FF doesn't have a lot of leverage left to influence those type of decisions, but Safari might. Not sure what their position is on this proposal.
The one pager has a section on stakeholder feedback [0], but doesn't name them for some reason.
[0] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
FF didn't have leverage in 2005 but we're still somehow living in a post-IE world. Leverage and market share aren't a concern, community support is all that's needed. The issue is that Mozilla Corp have been rapidly burning community bridges at pace of late, topped off by the fact that 2005 Mozilla wasn't dependent on Microsoft for their income.