So as I understand it, Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m a fledgling tech guy, but this sounds like abuse of a monopoly. Google which serves 75% of the world’s ads and has 75% of the browser market share seems to want to use its market power to annihilate people’s privacy and control over their web experience.
So we can file a complaint with FTC led by Lina Khan who has been the biggest warrior against abuse by big tech in the US.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
We can also file a complaint with the DOJ:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
And there have to be EU, UK, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese organizations that we can file antitrust complaints to.
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. They only made the best browser to attract users with no political foresight. 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.
You have to realise that to most people, Google is not seen as a bad company - quite the opposite in fact. They have all these “free” products that do everything you need them to, so they’ve built-up a huge amount of trust with the general population.
Google is obviously trying to take over the web, but the regular person doesn’t see this as they don’t follow any of this news, nor do they actually care. Google has good, fast, free products, that’s all people care about.
As someone deeply immersed in libre software and the Free Software Foundation, it pains me that my conversations are likely always going to be the first time people have actually seriously thought about their software freedom. It’s really difficult unwinding decades and billions of dollars of corpocratic propaganda without resorting to shock and scare tactics.
I’m still going to do it because there’s nothing else better to say. :D
You are right, maybe I tend to forget that is not obvious to everybody. But it’s not like I believe Google is inherently bad or evil, they just have an enormous amount of power that I think very few people realize. Google search alone or YouTube alone can make or break companies, can shift elections, can shift popular opinion in general. That’s to much power IMO.
Power corrupts as we know, and although Google is not worse than most, they aren’t better either, and they are using their power in subtle ways, to promote their own interests.
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.
Most people have no idea or don’t care at all about privacy on the internet. Google has a solid set of “free” services that work well and a good enough reputation to convince them.
Wow you got 2 downvotes for stating an absolutely true statement, that describes a HUGE problem.
For us to lose all our rights and freedoms, it only takes enough people not to care. And that’s the problem.
Google apps are a huge surveillance machine that absolutely threaten our freedom. Most people just don’t give a shit, because it’s convenient.
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So a bit of speed short term, is enough to sacrifice your freedom long term?
Obviously I know it was faster, what I don’t get is that people had no principles, and was ready to give everything up to a company clearly trying to control the Internet.
And that was even so shortly after we had similar problems with Microsoft, that we have now with Google.
I could understand your argument if we’re talking about the choice today but don’t act like Google 15 years ago was the same as it is today. They are vastly different companies.
And people conveniently forget: The Mozilla Foundation is a warm and fuzzy non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation, where significant portions of the foundation’s money comes from, is a company that acquires other services (like Pocket) and mostly monetizes through search engine royalties and the like.
Yes, MzF has great foundational principles and MzC has yet to be demonstrably evil. But remember when one of Google’s core principles was “Don’t be evil”?
At the end of the day: We as people want there to be variety in browsers (unless you are a web developer at which point you want to shove a fork in my eye for even saying that). If everyone had just leapt to Firefox then, odds are, we would be in a similar mess right now with people smugly accusing everyone of “sacrific(ing) your freedom long term” for not siding with Google.
i’m not sure you quite remember the leap in performance that chrome was… it was night and day, and literally ushered in the era of performance being an actual concern for browsers
as much as i hate google, you’ve gotta credit them with starting that
and at the start, many (myself included) believed that googles motivation was to make the web fast to compete with native apps (they wanted the web platform to be what everyone used on their phones), because google can serve web ads across all platforms on the web, but native they mostly only control android
that still might have been the entirety of their original intent too! but now they have that dominance, they’re being evil with it
Firefox used to be very slow, very buggy and full of memory leaks.
I was a Firefox user until they started releasing major versions every few days which broke addons. Not sure how it is today but it was a hassle for a few weeks at least. I switched to chrome because it was the next best option back then.
Yes that was stupid, I don’t deny Chrome could easily be seen as the better browser in some respects.
But it was still pretty obvious that we were on our way to the exact same problems we had with Internet Explorer, and Microsofts attempt to control the Internet, through extensions only available on IE, that were necessary to use several Microsoft technologies, when Microsoft had a monopoly.
So would you say Firefox has settled down in the last years? I don’t like where chrome is going (not only privacy, the “dumbing down” sucks too) and tempted to switch back again. But it requires a bit of work
I’d say yes, there are still frequent upgrades, but IMO add-on breakage is not common anymore in my experience.
I have to admit though, that I’m not using nearly as many add-ons as I used to. uBlock Origin is my most important add-on, and Dark reader, and bypass paywall are also always on add-ons, and they have all worked flawlessly for years.
I’m on Manjaro Linux, so I get updates very frequently and early, although most are probably security updates. So I’m probably near max exposed to breakage, and haven’t had problems with it since years ago, when an add-on for splitting windows into panels broke after being unmaintained for quite a while.
Alternatively, you might want to try Chromium, which allegedly should be like Chrome but without the Google shenanigans.
Personally I prefer to not use that either, because it’s still heavily influenced by the development of Chrome, but I guess it’s better than Chrome from a freedom perspective.
It’s easy to forget now, but IE was such absolute dogshit for years that literally anything else was better
Back in the day Firefox delivered the same look and feel with a better experience than IE did.