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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

See. It is frankly pointless. Chrome already has a significant amount of mindshare and will grow even more after this.

The users have already chosen Chrome (and its derivatives). Mozilla has done absolutely nothing to stop it as Firefox has become totally irrelevant today. The EU is about to allow the world domination of Chrome and its derivatives to takeover entirely.

Just like the many choices of a Linux distro, you will have the many choices of Chromium based browsers! All thanks to 'oPEn SoUrcE'.

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As a Chrome user I feel obligated to defend my use as: "I like it the most." As long as Google continues to offer a better experience, I don't mind them dominating the market. *As long as they don't use anticompetitive practises to prevent competition.* IE, backed by the most powerful tech company on the planet (at the time), used to be 95% of the internet. If IE can fall, so can Chrome.

This means, if blink/chromium does come to dominate, means an end to the open web. Be very careful what you wish for.

IE was replaced because it was a hole-riddled nonstandard mess, and Google used their position to shove Chrome into everyone's mindshare (something this regulation appears to forbid, incidentally). Chrome isn't nonstandard because Google are very careful to comply with standards - which is easy enough when they have many employees involved with designing them and tend to manipulate those committees in their favor, and even if they fail they can just release whatever they want and use the technology's widespread adoption to justify its eventual standardization. Also, as a modern browser, Chrome is patched frequently, so the security angle is also a nonstarter.

Mozilla self-sabotages so frequently and severely, I think you need to be very naive to not suspect the massive amount of funding they get from Google has something to do with it.

I'd believe this if that same money wasn't required to keep the lights on. Easier to just stop paying it and wait for them to run out of runway.

Two possible outcomes of Mozilla losing Google's funding: Maybe Firefox evaporates away to nothing, 0% market share, and now Google loses the fig-leaf covering their browser monopoly. Or maybe Mozilla loses their ineffectual but greedy leadership, allowing people who believe in the mission to step into those roles.

I think Google prefers the status quo to either of those scenarios. They prefer it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, for that is how much they pay to perpetuate it.

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