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Mozilla: DOJ's Plan for Chrome Risks Hurting Smaller Browsers (uk.pcmag.com)

submitted 4 days ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

67 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

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[–] lung@lemmy.world 26 points 4 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] e0qdk@reddthat.com 29 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not likely. Mozilla had $1,321,539,000 in total assets -- roughly half a billion dollars of which was in "cash and cash equivalents" -- in their last (2022) audited financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf

[–] lung@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days 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

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not Mozilla. The software is open source and will persist.

[–] tb_@lemmy.world 22 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 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

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Perhaps.

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

[–] lung@lemmy.world 19 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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)

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 3 days 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.

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Bigger scope than a kernel? That’s a bold statement.

[–] lung@lemmy.world 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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 -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The comment that was here was a bit rude, and I don’t like that. Well others didn’t either, but that just reminds me that being kind is possible while disagreeing. So I abridge to this.

I’m surprised by this take and personally feel the algorithmic density of the kernel and scope of work with hardware abstractions make it much more complex than a browser with access to system calls. But maybe that is just a crazy old man that isn’t thinking straight.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 19 points 4 days ago

Not sure it's that bold even. Chrome has approx. 10% more lines of code than Linux, and even for Linux 60% is just drivers.

Flawed metric, sure, but it at least shows that they're probably similar in complexity.

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 0 points 3 days ago

Hopefully, yes.