That's hardly fighting Chrome's dominance. The people who Google hired to write Chrome came from Mozilla. Also Mozilla pays its own developers with money that comes from a deal with Google. The online advertising industry, Google's customer base, is supporting and indirectly controlling both of these browsers. Those "evil" things that Googles does are done to offer services to that customer base. Whatever "fight" you might imagine between browsers is, with respect to end users, illusory. Neither browser can pull the plug on the online ad business, they both depend on it. That is the source of the "evil".
I don't agree. While mozilla is taking money from Google, their products don't have tracking built in to them the way that Google products do. They make users aware of the choices they are making and the implications of them. They make plenty of functions available that protect users online from Google, Facebook and other bad actors in this area.
The fight is not illusory, and while Firefox may depend on advertising for financial reasons (although I'm not sure how much it currently is), it is not fundamental to its existence. If someone came along and replaced that money, they would leave it behind. Google on the other hand, is built solely on its ability to gather information about its users and exploit that as much as possible. The two are not the equivalent that your argument claims.
Yes, their products do. Run FF through mitmproxy and look at all of Mozilla's privacy policies and tell me they're not collecting far more data than they should be, at least by default cause 90℅ of users aren't gonna disable most of it. I'm solidly convinced Mozilla is just Google's astroturf.
Google’s Safebrowsing feature alone (that is used in Firefox, too) is a privacy nightmare. They literally have all cookies and all user secrets of all websites that seem “untrustworthy”, which is basically all domains that are not cert pinned in chromium or firefox.
I know this because I initially wanted to implement safebrowsing support for my own browser stealth, but decided against it.
Also, the google PREF (due to safebrowsing background service) cookie isn’t deleteable without physically removing the firefox profile or at least the sqlite databases, just as a hint on whether you are trackable or not.
> The fight is not illusory, and while Firefox may depend on advertising for financial reasons (although I'm not sure how much it currently is), it is not fundamental to its existence
95% of Mozilla's 2018 revenue were generated by Royalties [0], of which 91% are generated by search engine providers. That's a whopping $391 million USD - it will be pretty difficult to fill this gap if Google pulls the plug.
It might be difficult but how is that in any way relevant?
Mozilla's behavior is consistent. Except for a few mistakes that were in my opinion minor, they proved trustworthy repeatedly.
Also let's get the facts straight... all major browsers today are financed from ads, all of them, including Edge, including Safari, including Brave discussed here, all of them.
The ones that aren't financed by ads are simply leaching off the work of others. Of course Brave is a leech while generating revenue from ads too.
Factually untrue. Google is paying Apple billions of dollars ($9 billion in 2018, $12 billion in 2019) to remain the default search engine in Safari.
AFAIK Apple is getting more money from Google than Mozilla does :)
You could say that if this deal went south, then Apple would keep funding Safari, however given they receive a ton of money right now, yes Safari is funded by ads and it goes without saying that they won't do anything to jeopardize those billions of dollars they are getting.
There isn't a single browser right now whose development isn't funded by ads.
Some organizational and individual users have paid for features.
The source code is relatively small, compile time is relatively small. Making small, privacy-focused changes is easy if one is comfortable with C.
One does not use a browser like this for financial or other important transactions. It can be used to do recreational, non-commercial web reading, such as news or other sites one finds posted on HN. One uses major ad-funded browsers like Chrome or Safari for internet banking or e-commerce.
I suppose, but by that logic any web browser is funded by ads unless it either:
1) Doesn't set any default search engine
2) Leaves a great deal of money on the table for no reason whatsoever
Option 2 is stupid, so it's no surprise none of the browsers do this.
Option 1 is a bad user experience regardless of finances. When users type stuff into the search bar, they expect results to come up. You could have a search engine ballot on first startup, but a subset of very-non-technical users is going to be confused by the dialog; there's no good reason to not set a default.
Option 2 isn't stupid, because once you take that money you are beholden to a contract, which comes with both explicit and implicit clauses.
For example Apple would never implement ad blocking by default in Google's Search, not as long as they keep getting payed with _billions of dollars_.
And would Apple even bother to keep improving Safari if they weren't earning so much money from it? Given what happened to IExplorer back in the day, when Microsoft dropped the ball on its development after version 5, I'm not so sure.
Also Safari's content blockers are really easy to circumvent by anti-ad-blocking tech. Doesn't hold a candle to uBlock Origin, which isn't possible to implement on top of Safari. And the available content blockers are so bad many people don't even bother. Fact is Safari is a favorite for ads companies and publishers.
Yes, all browsers are funded by ads, that was the point.
"If someone came along and replaced that money, they would leave it behind."
Who could "replace that money" and why has this not happened?
Mozilla is a bit like Facebook/Google. Users are not paying for Firefox. Advertisers are paying (via Google). It is a service to advertisers. Users need only be enticed to keep using. Data is collected. The primary value of the data is not to usere but to the organisation that collects it and their customers. Mozilla sends data to Google (search queries) and gets paid for it.
tl;dr - Firefox has some telemtry installed by default, including to GA. They have a deal with Google that allegedly prevents Google from seeing the data being collected.
Even so, their products don't do tracking the way Chrome does (which sends a unique identifier per device [0], which can be identified with the user and tracks you on all sites, and which does even more stuff when a site has GA).
I think comparing the two is ridiculous, and is more an excuse to justify using spyware as your daily driver.
[0] There is a unique ID on install, which is allegedly deleted by the browser, but may be stored in the updater. There is a "semi unique" ID set in its place which has high enough entropy (together with the location etc) to be a used as a unique ID. Aside for lots of other phoning home, logging you in to Google, etc.
They are very different, it's been seven years of heavy development since forking. For comparison that's longer than the time between apple forking kHTML to make webkit and the the first release of chrome.
The question was "How different are Blink and WebKit these days?" and "But perhaps that has changed?".
My answer was "they are different" and implicitly "yes", partially because of the heavy development work that has been done since the fork seven years ago.
If you look at the featuresets and when they introduce features I think it's reasonable to conclude they have diverged enough that they can't just pull patches from each other.
Also, there was a webkit mailing thread back when they introduced their cut-down version of service-worker that said that most of the code from blink was basically unusable for them because of the differences.
That’s just a thing that some people say... but it’s actually not true. There is only one of many things in technology and everybody gets along just fine in those situations.
From a user privacy perspective there is not much difference between FAANG. They are all competing for user data. They all want to collect and store it in their data centers. The "significant differences" that some users might think they see are likely a reaction to the lack of viable alternatives.
There is no FAANG which is not competing for user data. Similarly, there is no major browser that deliberately lacks the feature set necessary to facilitate that data gathering. From a user privacy perspective, the difference between "major browsers", or FAANG, is not as significant as it is portrayed by many commentators.
The major similarities far outweigh the minor differences, and I think Mozilla would agree they are not looking to go in a profoundly different direction than Chrome or other major browser. They seek market share and so they will always match the others' feature set. As other comments in this thread elucidate, all these browsers are funded by advertising. As such, we cannot expect the differences to be significant.
If the majority of users are not concerned with things like telemetry, search box queries forwarded to Google, auto-loading resources, complexity, etc., then that is the user base to which Mozilla will cater. The small minority of users who find the status quo unacceptable are not important to Mozilla. Mozilla has enough cash they could prepare a separate, stripped-down bare bones browser in addition to Firefox for those few users who really take privacy seriously who want zero data collection by default.
They won't. That is why we see a user going through all this effort to "un-Google" Chromium. It would similarly take substantial effort to "un-Mozilla" Firefox. Both Google and Mozilla gather user data by default. They each phone home early and often.
The question is how many users would actually be interested in a radically different browser that, by design, made data collection and serving ads much more difficult. Perhaps that number would grow over time as word spread. We will never know. While this could be an experiment of great interest to some privacy-conscious users it is not an experiment of interest to Mozilla, chasing advert-funded "major browser" market share.
