Since Apple implemented a browser choice screen for iPhones earlier this month to comply with Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Brave Software, Mozilla, and Vivaldi have seen a surge in the number of people installing their web browsers.
It’s an early sign that Europe’s competition rules may actually … get this … enhance competition – an outcome that skeptics deemed unlikely.
Yeah, it’s just because it’s Chromium. I don’t know anything about the company so I don’t have any opinion there.
I used to be of the opinion that it’d be nice if the web unified under one platform. Honestly, I still hold that opinion, but the caveat there would obviously be that no single company should control that platform. Google does control Chromium. All Chromium based browsers will see Manifest V3, and that’s just one thing. Google can do more or less what they wish, and the rest of the web will just kind of have to take it.
They’re in a similar position that Microsoft was in back when Internet Explorer was an actually good browser, but unlike Microsoft I don’t think Google will rest on their laurels. It’s really worrying to me that Google essentially owns the internet.
2021: “The rendering engine doesn’t matter that much because everyone ends up seeing the same internet”
2022: “How much can google really do with a monopoly on the back end?”
2023: “They still don’t control the underlying structure of the internet.”
2024: “well shit.”
I was foolishly hoping that there’d be some sort of regulation where Chromium ended up being democratised. Fools hope, pipe dream, whatever. It obviously won’t happen because I don’t think the powers that be quite realise how dangerous it is; it’s too technical for them to grasp.
Lemmings, please Get Firefox (.com) if you haven’t already!
I was asking because they’re generally fairly anti Google in terms of all the tracking changes and such, and while manifest v3 can’t be blocked by them the built in ad blocker shouldn’t be affected.
That’s fair, and you should absolutely not feel bad for asking.
Like you say, they can’t really block Manifest V3, which in this case sure, their built-in adblocker will still work, but what about the next unblockable change? I’ve no idea what that might be, but Google isn’t our friend, they’re a massive, hungering corporation.
I’d honestly be all for these alternative browsers if they decided to adopt Gecko instead, honestly. Until then they’re just “Google Chrome But…”