Mozilla Slams Microsoft, Google, and Apple

Does it seem that Mozilla waited a bit long to voice this complaint? (Although I agree 100%, and support it, of course.)

P.S. I’m posting this in the General Security & Privacy category, because I think browser choice is closely related to that.

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Déjà vu, for me.

I worked for Netscape in the 1990s…

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The response is going to be, probably from Microsoft and Google, that “we need a unified engine so website builders only have one to worry about” and there won’t be much disagreement to that.

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Maybe if Mozilla worried about the tech more and the political agendas less they wouldn’t have such sucky browser tech to begin with. (comparatively speaking)

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I don’t find Firefox to be sucky tech…once I’ve “corrected” all the BS user interface changes they implement. It works well for me.

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I’d counter we need one set of standards and the standards body needs incentivised to keep up with changes so there isn’t an incentive to create non-standards based solutions thus fracturing the web.

The big reason that the web behaves differently between the different engines is that there are non standard solutions in the engines to try to add functionality and then use that functionality to make a standard around it in a way that is advantageous to themselves over the others.

As there’s no centralized governing body, I don’t see any meaningful way to enforce “hey go through the standards body first so that everyone works together” especially when there’s the financial incentive to create solutions for businesses that start off as intended internal use…

I like your counter. One could slip the “security” angle in there pretty easily as well.

While standards is one way of looking at it, the article and governments look at it from a competition point of view. Given that Chrome (Google) has “67%” of the desktop browser market, that is “substantial market power” and therefore will give government authority to act in some jurisdictions. Governments need to act … and they need to act before it’s too late.

No wonder Google wants to phase out the User-Agent header. That is a good idea for many reasons that are unrelated to this topic but it will have the pleasant side-effect (for them) of concealing the extent of Google’s market dominance.

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Isn’t the W3C a standardizing body? And WHATWG nowadays? Except it’s captured by Google, and Google does what Google wants,

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