this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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I never left Firefox, and I will never understand, why people were so quick to adopt Chrome which was Google controlled from the start. Google was already an obvious problem at the time (2008).
Google never had an interest in building the best browser for users. They are not a browser company, they are an advertiser. What they wanted is the best browser for Google, meaning the best browser for delivering advertising. That is becoming more and more obvious. Google has been trying to kill Firefox for a while, by making parts of their services not work quite as intended. While if you changed your user agent, it would work fine!
Another place here today, we can read how Google is trying to kill Jpeg XL or JXL, which is a superior graphics format to JPG PNG and GIF wrapped into 1. https://lemmy.world/post/2059816
Firefox really helped protect the Internet and Internet users from the shenanigans of Microsoft. It should come as no surprise, that Google wants to control the Internet, just as much as Microsoft did, from a pure business perspective, that's an obvious move, and our best defense is still Mozilla and Firefox and lawmakers that aren't corrupt. So don't elect trump to get another Ajit Pai who has no bigger wish than to kill net neutrality.
Because for a long time Chrome was just much faster. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that Firefox started becoming performant enough for me to use as a daily driver. Even then, there's still issues with how slow it takes Mozilla to implement new web technologies like WebGPU, etc.
Yes because a bit faster short term, is worth sacrificing you freedom long term?
I will never get people like you.
Waaaaaaay more than "a bit". Like "imperceptible render time" vs 2s for firefox. That adds up a lot.
What freedom did I lose? I used chromium mostly.
Firefox has performance now, where it did't in the past. So I don't use chrome now.
See, I use the best tool for the job I can find, and that changes over time. For a while the was Chrome.
What freedom did I lose?
It's impossible to know which freedoms we have lost due to Chrome dominance. But from an ecosphere view point, you can see it very clearly on for instance iOS, where you can't sideload apps, and Apple for years prevented subscriptions to papers if they had any kind of nakedness. We only register those limitations when compared to options that don't have them.
On Gaming you have consoles, that are also somewhat closed ecospheres, where you cannot develop freely like on PC. Games that exist on both console and PC, often have way more options like downloadable mods often user generated. Those do not work on consoles, because the control from the owner of the platform has not allowed/facilitated it.
In the same way there are closed Google/Alphabet ecospheres like Android, Google search and YouTube, which together with Chrome browser dominance can be used to achieve competitive advantages that keep out competition.
The fact that they may not have succeeded, does not mean there was no danger. But there is evidence that they tried. For instance they tried to kill Firefox, by making services like Google maps not work 100% with Firefox. We now see Google has removed Jpeg XL support from Chrome. So your freedom to use that format has been taken away. They are preventing adblockers from working with a double sided strategy, on both Chrome AND Goggle services. So they are trying to take your freedom to use adblockers away too.
I bet there are 100s cases we don't know about, because mostly such things are done stealthily, some times they may not even be on purpose, but more for practicality. But the end result remains the same. Creating a closed ecosphere with very dominant control by one player, is almost guaranteed to limit your options long term. And limiting options is equal to taking away a bit of freedom.