zlacker

>>topshe+(OP)
This is a crisis of our own making. You don't want Google taking decisions for the web at large? Then don't let them own 85% of the browser market share. When that's the case they don't need W3C or anything to implement whatever they want, they effectively control the client-side internet.

>>pluc+46
It's proven that mass marketing works. Tell me how a minority of informed and caring users can avoid on their own that a single large scale bad actor pours millions over millions of dollars to convince the uninformed masses about whatever they want. It even happens in actual elections when some factions use misinformation campaigns to alter the average voter's perception! So not an easy task to solve without help.

>>j1elo+Ha
>Tell me how a minority of informed and caring users can avoid on their own that a single large scale bad actor pours millions over millions of dollars to convince the uninformed masses about whatever they want.

Firefox.

No, not Firefox of today; I'm talking about Firefox 20 years ago that defeated IE6 by sheer force of nerds alone.

Of course, the landscape is vastly different now and Firefox today is about the most not-nerd thing next to Chrome. If there's a a browser here to save us anywhere, I'm not seeing it.

>>Dalewy+ge
> Firefox 20 years ago that defeated IE6 by sheer force of nerds alone.

Firefox was significantly better than IE though: it was faster, had more features, and things like that. This is what made Firefox popular, not "sheer force of nerds".

Chrome, when released, also had some significant improvements to Firefox. In particular, it was loads faster. This changed with "Firefox Quantum" (59 IIRC), but "too little, too late" I guess.

>>arp242+gh
Firefox was not faster than IE. We lost on pageload, cold and warm start, new window, pretty much everything.

Firefox was better because it had tabbed browsing, integrated search, pop-up blocking, and extensions, but I was responsible for monitoring our perf back then and I can say for certain that we were not faster.