If you do eventually run into a poorly crafted webpage that doesn't work on Firefox you have the wherewithal to decide if you are simply not going to use that site or hop over to chrome just this once.
But the important thing is checking in automatically as a Firefox user in the logs of every other site online. Push Firefox marketshare up and at least some places will be hesitant to write off Firefox as irrelevant.
Sadly, Chrome is substantially more secure than Firefox.
The only way in which Chrome is more secure at anything appears to be securely forcing you to view ads via this API. And a shocking amount of malware fails to work when you use a running environment that 95% of society are not using.
You are far safer on Firefox than Chrome.
That would accomplish nothing.
> But the important thing is checking in automatically as a Firefox user in the logs of every other site online.
No, that's not important. HN users are a tiny minority compared to the billions of people that use the web daily.
I'm sorry, there's no easy way to say this: Firefox is never coming back. The web of old is never coming back. It's over. Even if this particular proposal gets defeated somehow, a future similar proposal will make it through. There is nothing you or I can do about it. Google is more powerful than most governments, and they are vastly more powerful than any random group of like-minded people who get together on the Internet in the belief that they can accomplish something.
See that's where I disagree. Rich governments like the EU or the US can and do have power to push regulations if they wanted to. Pretending we the people (in a broad sense), i.e. the state, have no power whatsoever to control the terms under which these companies operate within the state, is defeatist.
(1) Understands what this is about
(2) cares about its citizens' freedom
(3) has enough coherence to actually do something about it
It's not obvious to me that any of these apply. The EU is pushing -- in fits and starts -- towards self-reliance in its computing infrastructure, but at a slow pace.
Firefox came into the mainstream because of power-user recommendations and the browser ballots.
It should be illegal for a significan platform (say 10mln users) to make its own browser, or any really, the unquestioned default. Users should be prompted on first use, giving a randomly ordered selection of any capable browser. If users can just click through it the choice should be random.
This is the only way to maintain healthy competition and ensure independent yet functional standards. Otherwise incentives will continue to centralize power.
But it was a completely different situation.
- There was a huge influx of new internet users who were all asking their techy friends which browser to use. This is not the case now. People mostly stick with what they know.
- FF was the better product for pretty much all use cases. If this proposal does go through, this will not be the case. It's nice that FF can block ads, but it's ultimately useless if the average user won't be able to access Netflix/Youtube/Facebook/their bank account. It will be an objectively worse browser.
And as I said, the sustainable solution is browser ballots back by the force of law. It's worked where it's been tried.
Anti-trust based solely on narrow definitions of consumer harm on the other hand, serve only the capital owners. And they'll leverage and co-opt any and every popular and useful innovation: open source, community contributions, open standards, patterns light or dark, etc.
Essentially this doesn’t work because every email client I tried can’t handle the specific way my work email account does authorization and the login always fails. They also blocked POP/IMAP so that’s not an option either. No one else in a team of software engineers figured out a better way to access email so for now this is the best option
Otherwise Palemoon is as doomed to obscurity as Firefox, if not moreso.
For number 2, the EU's new regulations above more easily replacable batteries, mandatory USB-C ports and such, in my eyes prove -- though not doubtlessly -- that they do care about walled gardens in tech.
Number 3 though, again, as I've alluded to before, doubtful. But possible in my eyes. Urgency is another thing you've mentioned, and -- let's say it again -- bureaucrats are not particularly known for solving a problem in the right time.
NB: don't misenterpret my use of 'bureaucrat[ic]' as a negative comment, it is just a fact, however boring.
Where I work, we treat Chrome as the malware it is: It's banned both by technical measures and security policy. We deploy Firefox, and begrudgingly deal with Edge when people insist on a Chromium-based browser. (At least Microsoft added some modicum of privacy settings here.)
Here's what I've learned over the past several years: Web developers are lazy. We're commonly told such and such app or service "only works on Chrome" or they'll "only support on Chrome". When we call for support, half the time we'll get told it's because we're not on Chrome, and I have to actually prove to them on an isolated machine that the issue occurs on Chrome so they'll shut the heck up and do their job. "Oh, I found an issue on our server" after I spent two hours trying to convince them their app works fine on Firefox.
In most cases, things "not working on Firefox" entails exempting a site from the popup blocker. In 2023, troubleshooting alternative browsers is usually... roughly that easy. But blaming your web browser is easy and lets them shift blame, so that's what they do.
But enterprise software companies have completely turned Chrome into the modern Internet Explorer: The only browser they'll even deal with. And since a lot of people buy Google's marketing that they know security and aren't completely clueless how security works (they are), people have by and large given in and installed Chrome.