Will Google's anti-monopoly lawsuit be the death knell for Mozilla and Firefox? | Hacker News Reader

Will Google's anti-monopoly lawsuit be the death knell for Mozilla and Firefox?

fortune.com

20 pointsleros29 comments

Preparing for the inevitable… How is Chromium/whatever-leading-less-Google-in-the—loop browser? Will it run ublock or is that on borrowed time with the manifest initiative they are pushing? Are they actually free of Google telemetry or is it all too deeply embedded to escape?

I'm not sure how long ungoogled-chromium could keep something like that, possibly not long. How Google changes code has to be at least partially intentional.

Mozilla could be a big loser.

Firefox doesn't have much left to lose (<3%).

More like 6-8% of non-mobile. And the only one left to support good adblockers.

I feel like lots of people are currently talking about switching from Chrome to Firefox with the uBlock origin thing.

I experience great amusement watching uBlock work its way around youtube ads. it does cause buffering issues but it works and its better than watching ads for junk I don't care about. Although since yesterday there seems to have been an escalation in anti ad blocker weaponry, not a big deal just reload the video.

While at the same time keep shipping Electron apps....

I am baffled by the success of Chrome vs others.

It is a proprietary (absolute red flag) web browser with fairly poor support for extensions (mild red flag), on Windows it insists on storing cached data where I don't want it to go (relative red flag)

I'll give them it is fast vs say firefox... but it is really what I would call a "normie's web browser"

I really hope Firefox survives, well actually it will because it is not a black box.

Basically a generation that forgot the lessons of IE 5, before IE became the dominant browser.

They wanted ChromeOS, not the Web, and so it happened.

I get the impression it's due to the dire warnings that Google present (or presented?) to users when they do a Google Search on a different browser. Google can nag users to switch more effectively that Microsoft (and others) can nag them to switch back.

> the dire warnings that Google present (or presented?) to users

I don't see any warnings when I use Google with Firefox now. Actually I don't I recall ever seeing any, but I don't use Google that often.

I don't even understand the "it's fast" argument. I'm on an 8 year old computer, and pages load "instantly" (according to the profiler, ~50 ms after getting the response, which takes a few hundred ms anyway) in Librewolf. Are people getting out high-speed cameras to measure the difference here? I expect that as malware blocking becomes less effective in Chromium, it will end up being overall slower as well.

It can take seconds for modern bloated web apps. Does Facebook load in <1 second for you too?

Attempting just now, looks like Chromium took ~9.5 seconds total and Librewolf ~11.5 seconds. Essentially all of that time in both cases was waiting for responses to `/login` and `/` though, so still any difference in browser speed seems to be imperceptible and well under the noise threshold for how long the server takes.

Exactly. There haven't been perceptible performance differences between browsers in a very, very long time. This isn't a reason to switch browsers anymore.

While I never left Firefox behind, I absolutely can relate to the "its fast", because I remember when it was true.

15 years ago, the laptops never fast enough and I watched most of my friends started to abandon Firefox for Chrome after trying it out.

> I expect that as malware blocking becomes less effective in Chromium

Why do you expect malware blocking to become less effective... ? Adblock is not antivirus.

Chrome may have been faster, but I don't really remember Firefox ever being particularly slow.

Adware, spyware, and crypto miners are all types of malware, and ublock origin can block all of them. Antivirus is probably the least useful type of anti-malware program as viruses aren't particularly common unless you're on the shady parts of the web.

Firefox was a huge memory hog. People called it bloated. Chrome was the lightweight alternative.

I switched to Firefox when Internet Explorer was really, really bad. I switched to Chrome when Firefox was really, really bloated. Things haven't become bad enough that switching again is enough of an issue for me to do it. I'm sure Opera, Firefox, or whatever has benefits that are better than Chrome, but Chrome is still getting the job done so I don't feel a pressure to make the effort to switch.

> I switched to Chrome when Firefox was really, really bloated

When was that, again?

Eons ago. Probably somewhere between 2005 and 2010.

If you have anything, you can always lose 100% of it.

According to this article, Mozilla gets 86% of its revenue from Google Search payments so this ruling could be a huge issue for them.

Suddenly it seems like all of that non-browser stuff Mozilla tried could have helped to offset the risk of Google dependence, despite the fact that many people rejected those ancillary initiatives.

In this situation Google seems like the Unjust Steward in Luke 16:1-13. Subsidizing Mozilla's business model debt was only going to last as long as regulators hadn't cracked down on Google's anti-trust behavior.

> all of that non-browser stuff Mozilla tried could have helped to offset the risk of Google dependence

None of it is revenue generating! I stopped donating to Mozilla because of all the nonsense side projects.

I hope so. Fuck 'em. Bunch of no-good feature-removing copycats.

Didn't Firefox come before Chrome?

It did. Doesn't make Mozilla less of a Chrome copycat.

Firefox, as a name, does have a history before chrome, as a name (I won't comment on their past lives) but since since version 4 firefox has done little but copy chrome. From the ui to extensions to drm.

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