zlacker

> That would accomplish nothing.

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.

>>paulry+(OP)
>Firefox came into the mainstream because of power-user recommendations and the browser ballots.

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.

>>Square+un
Browsers are increasing in importance even today, not decreasing.

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.

>>paulry+(OP)
You're describing the old Firefox before they became Google's controlled opposition. Since 2011 all they have done is continuously stripped out every useful power user feature in a bid to turn into a shitty copy of Chrome; the last straw was gutting their powerful XUL/XPCOM extension system in favor of Chrome's far limited web extensions because muh security (and since then there's been more, not less cross browser malware). Today you can't even write your own extension for use on the main build thanks to forced extension signing (which ended up disabling everyone's extensions a few years ago due to an invalid certificate). And that's before all their unethical tracking, in browser advertising and privacy violation over the years, that requires various 'hardening' about:config changes out of the box, or the erosion of configurable features with almost every release. Mozilla are woke hypocrites today, financially dependent on Google while claiming to be privacy champions and squandering their money on multiple other projects instead of focusing on Firefox. The only browser that continues to be the old Firefox in spirit - the one that upended Microsoft's IE monopoly - is its hard fork, Pale Moon (which gets derided as oLd aNd iNSeCuRe by Mozilla fanboys). Doesn't need any 'hardening' because it doesn't snoop on you to begin with, and the latest versions have massively improved web compatibility while retaining support for the original powerful XUL extension system.

>>willyw+aa3
My point wasn't to gush praise on Firefox here, rather to point out that we need browser ballots again -- and permanently.

Otherwise Palemoon is as doomed to obscurity as Firefox, if not moreso.

>>paulry+uH4
It may well be too late, given Google has absolute control over web standards and their policy of introducing draft features in Chrome and then making them part of the standard. Unless an anti-trust case is brought against them which explicitly mentions their browser engine and standards monopoly, and correctly points out that every other browser today is just a skin around Chrome while Firefox is controlled opposition. Every case against them seems to obsess on the search engine monopoly.