Technology

59582 readers

2591 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

142

Mozilla: DOJ's Plan for Chrome Risks Hurting Smaller Browsers (uk.pcmag.com)

submitted 14 hours ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The Justice Department's proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.

In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering "something of value" to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.

The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.

"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] lung@lemmy.world 16 points 9 hours ago (4 children)

Yeah but in the short term the company will literally go out of business

[–] e0qdk@reddthat.com 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Not likely. Mozilla had $1,321,539,000 in total assets -- roughly half a billion dollars of which was in "cash and cash equivalents" -- in their last (2022) audited financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf

[–] lung@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

Y'know, you're right & that's wild. I guess I should have known, but didn't assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not Mozilla. The software is open source and will persist.

[–] tb_@lemmy.world 7 points 3 hours ago

The way Mozilla can advocate for web standards will be sorely missed.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Perhaps.

Worst hypothesis the company gets completely bankrupt, but someone takes up the torch.

[–] lung@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

The thing is it's never been more expensive and time consuming to write a browser, it's bigger scope than a kernel in many ways. Stuff like Epiphany isn't even close, despite relying on Apple's webkit. Most distros just push people to Firefox now, despite a history of KHTML and all that. We would need something like the Linux Foundation to pick it up (which runs on corporate sponsorship for a shared resource)

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 hours ago

If Google is the only thing holding up the non-Apple web browsers, maybe then this will lead to scaling down the insane scope of the web standards so it becomes reasonable to implement and maintain a browser for non-megacorps.

Wishful thinking, but hey.

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Bigger scope than a kernel? That’s a bold statement.

[–] lung@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Not only does it need to do everything from memory management to job scheduling, it also has all of the UI and graphics driver complexity blended in. Usually that's a different layer that the kernel historically didn't worry about, it would be as if GTK is part of Linux, along with the programming language. Then there's shit like WebAssembly and WebGL, databases, sandboxing, permissions, user management... A Brower is like a cross platform OS built to run on another OS

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 5 points 7 hours ago

Not sure it's that bold even. Chrome has approx. 10% more lines of code than Linux, and even for Linux 60% is just drivers.

Flawed metric, sure, but it at least shows that they're probably similar in complexity.

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 0 points 4 hours ago

Hopefully, yes.