forgotmylastusername comments on What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?

[–] forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml 60 points 2 years ago (10 children)

We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It's become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.

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[–] errer@lemmy.world 23 points 2 years ago (6 children)

And Mozilla is largely funded by Google. We all just hope they don’t pull the rug from them but I have no faith that our inept, slow government would stop that from happening before it’s too late.

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[–] Liz@midwest.social 31 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Almost certainly the entire reason Google is funding Mozilla is to try and stave off antitrust lawsuits.

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[–] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago

The official reason is so that Big G is the default search engine on every install.

But that may very well just be a smokescreen.

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[–] 50MYT@aussie.zone 6 points 2 years ago

Yep.

Google will spend more on a legal team working out how to prevent the lawsuits in the first place than they would be giving to Mozilla

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[–] Waffelson@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

I think this reason is stupid. Why can't there be a duopoly in the browser market like in the phone market? Even if there is no firefox, there will still be safari on its own engine

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[–] Liz@midwest.social 4 points 2 years ago

I think the phone market should also be broken up.

The reason a doupoly is bad in any market is that it's essentially next to no choice for the consumer, and the businesses can force changes to the market that are anti-consumer with little reprocussion. In any given market the minimum number of legitimate competitors necessary for meaningful competition will be different, but even three is too few in the web browser game, especially when the market shares look like this.

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