Comment on Google's trying to DRM the internet, and we have to make sure they fail
SankaraStone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s time for Firefox and others to sue Google for antitrust. When you’re using your monopoly to force web “standards” (instead of having an independent third party set standards) that cause developers to stop supporting your rival browser is clearly illegal monopoly actions.
nomadjoanne@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Puh. Mozilla is Google’s pet that keeps them out of anti-trust court.
SankaraStone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Look, if Lemmy, NPR, and PBS can happen, then it’s always possible to fork Firefox (or throw more weight behind the Servo folk who are moving towards developing the Rust web engine towards embedded applications to get it up to speed faster for general web browsing) if Mitchell Baker and search revenue approach to funding Firefox is getting in the way of having a fast, private, and secure browser for everybody.
But enough woah is me and our obstacles are overwhelming on here. In this case, if we do nothing, we get nothing. Especially if you’re right that the Mitchell Bakers of the world are not behind us. I know we at least have an ally in the EFF.
Yearly1845@reddthat.com 1 year ago
SankaraStone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
God damn it. *crumbles in embarrassment.
nomadjoanne@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The Servo fork? Oh I’ve never heard of that. I’ll have to look into it.
SankaraStone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Servo Folk. It’s one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That’s where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn’t be Mozilla’s problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla’s market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.
Have you heard of Electron? It’s the use of Chromium’s Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn’t there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko’s way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It’s a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink’s based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.
SankaraStone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
P.S. I thought I made my reply to your commment in another thread that I made instead of both yours and my comment being this one. Here’s what I was referring to. The post you were replying to inspired me to look up how to file an antitrust complaint with the US government.
old.lemmy.world/post/2060683
darthfabulous42069@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Let’s just make our own open-source browser then