The Justice Department’s proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.

In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.

The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.

"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”

  • Lung@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 month ago

    Yeah but in the short term the company will literally go out of business

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 month ago

      Perhaps.

      Worst hypothesis the company gets completely bankrupt, but someone takes up the torch.

      • Lung@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 month ago

        The thing is it’s never been more expensive and time consuming to write a browser, it’s bigger scope than a kernel in many ways. Stuff like Epiphany isn’t even close, despite relying on Apple’s webkit. Most distros just push people to Firefox now, despite a history of KHTML and all that. We would need something like the Linux Foundation to pick it up (which runs on corporate sponsorship for a shared resource)

          • Lung@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 month ago

            Not only does it need to do everything from memory management to job scheduling, it also has all of the UI and graphics driver complexity blended in. Usually that’s a different layer that the kernel historically didn’t worry about, it would be as if GTK is part of Linux, along with the programming language. Then there’s shit like WebAssembly and WebGL, databases, sandboxing, permissions, user management… A Brower is like a cross platform OS built to run on another OS

            • theherk@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 month ago

              I am absolutely baffled that anybody could think a browser, though absolutely a complex piece of software is even in the same league as a monolithic kernel when it comes to scope and complexity.

              Memory management? If you think memory management in browsers is even remotely close the algorithmic density of memory management code by a kernel then your statement makes sense. But that is such a crazy statement that it feels a bit like flat earth.

              Graphics complexity? You don’t think the actual writing of the system API’s, that the browsers simply use, to instruct the hardware how to run varying display types is more complex than calling those API’s? I remind that hardware abstraction via drivers is part of the kernel’s scope.

              Sandboxing, permissions, and user management? I’m resisting the urge to feel incredulous but this is just beyond the pale.

              Yes browsers are huge, powerful, complex beasts, but they aren’t close in scope, complexity, or density to monolithic kernels, and it borders on comical to say they do. There is a reason very very few kernel projects see the light of day; it is about the most complex and high stakes piece of software than can be written.

        • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 month ago

          If Google is the only thing holding up the non-Apple web browsers, maybe then this will lead to scaling down the insane scope of the web standards so it becomes reasonable to implement and maintain a browser for non-megacorps.

          Wishful thinking, but hey.

      • tb_@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 month ago

        The way Mozilla can advocate for web standards will be sorely missed.

        • Pika@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          30 days ago

          To my knowledge they don’t though, Chrome has had the overall market share for years. Most of the time them is a little project is tailing behind Chrome, because anything that they add to Chrome if the other browsers didn’t follow suit they were left in the dust. I haven’t seen the Mozilla project as a Trailblazer in years

      • Lung@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 month ago

        Y’know, you’re right & that’s wild. I guess I should have known, but didn’t assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org