The moment a lot of us has been fearing may be soon upon us. Among the various remedies proposed by the United States Department of Justice to address Google’s monopoly abuse, there’s also banning Google from spending money to become the default search engine on other devices, platforms, or applications.
“We strongly urge the Court to consider remedies that improve search competition without harming independent browsers and browser engines,” a Mozilla spokesperson tells PCMag.
Mozilla points to a key but less eye-catching proposal from the DOJ to regulate Google’s search business, which a judge ruled as a monopoly in August. 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.
↫ Michael Kan at PC Mag
Obviously Mozilla is urging the courts to reconsider this remedy, because it would instantly cut more than 80% of Mozilla’s revenue. As I’ve been saying for years now, the reason Firefox seems to be getting worse is because of Mozilla is desperately trying to find other sources of revenue, and they seem to think advertising is their best bet – even going so far as working together with Facebook. Imagine how much more invasive and user-hostile these attempts are going to get if Mozilla suddenly loses 80% of its revenue?
For so, so many years now I’ve been warning everyone about just how fragile the future of Firefox was, and every one of my worries and predictions have become reality. If Mozilla now loses 80% of its funding, which platform Firefox officially supports do you think will feel the sting of inevitable budget cuts, scope reductions, and even more layoffs first? The future of especially Firefox on Linux is hanging by a thread, and with everyone lulled into a false sense of complacency by Chrome and its many shady skins, nobody in the Linux community seems to have done anything to prepare for this near inevitability.
With no proper, fully-featured replacements in the works, Linux distributions, especially ones with strict open source requirements, will most likely be forced to ship with de-Googled Chromium variants by default once Firefox becomes incompatible with such requirements. And no matter how much you take Google out of Chromium, it’s still effectively a Google product, leaving most Linux users entirely at the whim of big tech for the most important application they have.
We’re about to enter a very, very messy time for browsing on Linux.
I have said many times, the pure numbers Mozilla bring in mask the reality.
One year of revenue would fund their current development teams for 20 years.
Instead, they Choose to spend that on buying up companies and attempting other buisness sectors.
Mozilla are not a browser company. Let them fall, open source can pick up the carcass or move it’s attention to Ladybird / Servo.
Who knows, Vivaldi might have a crack at their own rendering engine having learnt the lessons from Opera.
I agree, let them fail. They’re not investing in the right things, they don’t deserve to survive just like any other business. It’s a bummer, but it’s the reality. First the US election, then Tyson loses a fight he should’ve won, Mozilla and Intel are on the verge of death. We can’t have anything nice anymore. I want off this timeline.
Tyson is 58 years old man. An age where bruises will take a month to fully recover from, and dying from internal bleeding from the fight would be a serious concern.
>”58 years old man. An age where bruises will take a month to fully recover from”
Not sure where you are getting this data from, but I can tell you from personal experience that bruises heal in just about the same amount of time as earlier in life. What tends to stick around more the older you get is inflammation, but that can usually be managed.
>”and dying from internal bleeding from the fight would be a serious concern”
Boxers aren’t supposed to be throwing kidney punches at any age, those are illegal in the sport, so unless you had a rare occurrence of a broken rib puncturing a lung I doubt that internal bleeding would be the main concern. I would assume that the biggest risks for boxers at age 58 are the same as at any other age – broken facial bones, facial lacerations, and concussions. People box and spar and engage in violent martial arts competitions at age 58 and older (much older) all the time. Death is an exceedingly rare outcome at any age. Despite what Hollywood has led you to believe, killing a person with punches while wearing padded gloves is quite difficult.
Sad, but I have to agree. Firefox is our last hope (until Ladybird/Servo become viable), but Mozilla is squandering it. I don’t see them doing a massive reorganization to return focus to the browser either. Moving on will become inevitable.
Adurbe,
I’m skeptical that any of these can make up for the loss of firefox. Remember it’s not just building the browser, but having enough critical mass to actually be relevant and well supported. Otherwise consumers may be facing a future where chrome/chromium are mandatory like it was when IE was dominant. All eyes will be on the government to see if they will actually allow this to happen.
“enough critical mass to actually be relevant and well supported.”
That is exactly why they need to get out of the way. They have miss managed the chunk of market they have for far too long.
cb88,
Everyone has an opinion and is keen to criticize mozilla (sometimes with reason), But it’s much more difficult to find a solution that would overcome market powers in reality and not just as an armchair exercise. I honestly don’t think any of us would be able to turn the ship around in mozilla’s shoes without selling out to corporate interests. And if they do that, then uses will inevitably criticize them for that too (all while hypocritically supporting google’s browser at the same time).
I can agree the company is bloated and it seems likely they could be forced to do a lot more belt tightening soon, but even when they do that, it’s not going to curb FF’s market losses to the much larger tech giants. This is a sad outcome for alternatives, but it’s something we see over and over again in consolidating markets. For better or worse this is what late stage capitalism turns into.
Also it’s worth mentioning that users CANNOT donate to Firefox. Nope, just to the Mozilla Foundation which does activism, but not to the Firefox developers.
Agreed as well 100%.
The CEO of Mozilla get $7 million a year and then fired 250+ people because “COVID”. Let them fail and claw back every penny. They only exist to stop anti-trust against Google Chrome. Package FF as an app and let me subscribe. Perfect.
Nice. Another subscription.
Indeed. Tedious eh? OTOH if they back off (completely) from all this advertising BS and give me a browser with as much anti-tracking as possible I’ll happily sub it.
Agreed. I’d happily pay a few bucks per month for a lightweight, cross-platform, perversely anti-tracking browser.
Me too!!
Thom, when you say that there are no “fully-featured replacements in the works”, that is not true. Ladybird is one. It is just a big job. Servo is on track to be an alternative engine, though perhaps not a fully-featured browser. Of course, there are multiple browsers that just need an engine as most fall back on Chromium though some do use Gecko ( like the Zen browser I am typing in ).
Most importantly though what this situation lays bare for us all the witness is that Mozilla is absolutely “entirely at the whim of big tech”. It is difficult to know in advance if Mozilla failing would be better or worse for the Open Source Firefox code base. Remember, before it was called Firefox, Firefox was named Phoenix as it was an Open Source project that rose from the ashes of its failed corporate sponsor. Perhaps it is time for it to return to its roots.
And if Google is not spending billions on Chrome, it may not be so hard for alternatives to compete. This could actually be a level playing field. That said, I have no idea what “selling” Chrome means.
In the short-term, we have other Open Source browser choices. I agree that, other than Ladybird, Google has its fingers in pretty much all of them. However, that is also true of Firefox today.
I still don’t see how this is a particular *linux* problem, as opposed to a more general browser market problem.
Linux users will find a way; we should be orders of magnitude more worried about leaving users of other os’s “at the whim of big tech”.
The web x.0 is too complex, the w3c failed us. This was an arms race all along that we are now losing.
We need a subset of web technologies and privacy licenses like creative commons did with a focus on accessibility, content and privacy.
Tim Berners Lee could do it, call it webcommons.
This is what the DOJ should actually do. Require compliance with the W3C.
It would create a stable target for rendering engines to go for and stop Google/others from breaking compatibility.
I fully appreciate W3C would need a bit of an overhaul and scope expansion to facilitate this. But a standards based Web should be the end goal.
Chrome complies with the web standards. It’s just that they do other things on the side and developers depend on those.
The W3C is just a rubber stamp for the WHATWC.
If market regulator is serious then by the end of it Chrome will need to compete in the market too, just as Firefox will, Brave, Ladybird … all will have to. They all should hence continue to have and some to gain access to Google money on where it comes to selling their user privacy. Hopefully that to spark another era of browser wars, on where some politically incorrect but brilliant people to finally again be in the position to move things into the right direction. Compared to Google and Mozilla that have cut such people off and tried to maintain the current position indefinitely.
Google cares about Linux. Other than Pale Moon, Firefox is the only viable browser for Solaris, NetBSD, ArcaOS, etc…
All of those are community ports AFAIK… mozilla themselves often mucks up and makes a ton of work for the community to keep them going.
Mozilla slepwalked its way through the better part of the decade, just like Microsoft with IE. The fact that the Google Gravy Train isn’t going to last forever should be consideration #1. Maybe they’ll get away with it this time, maybe there will be an exception… But seriously, it doesn’t change that Chrome is embedded into literally everything, and it’s entirely the fault of Mozilla. Everybody wants an alternative to Chrome, but Mozilla refuses to separate the engine from their own browser.
Here’s what they need to do to turn this boat around; Announce that Gecko is going to be separated from Firefox. Announce work on an alternative CEF layer. Get other browser makers experimenting with Gecko bases and advertise that a slew of browsers (with full ad-block support and user tracking prevention) are stepping in. Work towards replacing Chrome as the sole electron-compatible engine and get developers using Gecko. Mozilla needs to move away from this 90’s “Product thinking” and get into 2020’s “Platform thinking,” because Mozilla isn’t competing with Chrome or IE or Safari, it’s competing with a thriving ecosystem.
Kver,
On the one hand, new ideas couldn’t hurt, but on the other hand it still seems extremely unlikely they’d be able to curb the tide and push back against force of google’s monopoly anyway. It’s not like they haven’t genuinely tried getting into new markets before.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/why-the-death-of-the-firefox-phone-matters/
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-mozilla-vpn-and-how-does-it-work
After market share consolidates to the point of being monopolized, it rarely returns to being competitive without external forces. Even though mozilla have made mistakes, the odds were always going to be stacked against them competing against the tech giants. There’s also another problem: when the mission is to have privacy respecting products AND the market is mostly comprised of users who expect said product to be free, then you need some sort of cash cow to subsidize everything. Had they convinced a tech giant like MS to go with them instead of chromium, it could have given FF a big boost, but of course mozilla’s ideological differences probably made that impossible.
There’s just no easy answer and I’d say it’s probably inevitable that mozilla’s user base are going to be disappointed in one way or another.
Alfman,
I agree with you about the difficulty of fighting the big tech giants ‘now’. They were the big browser on the block 15 years ago and could have leveraged it differently ‘then’. Of course that is all in hindsight and is nothing more than what Americans call armchair quarterbacking.
If all Mozilla wants to do is develop a browser, they can obviously do it for a lot less. I do remember contributing artwork and some various hacks over twenty years ago before Phoenix had become Firefox and the lead developer was a young kid named Blake Ross.
Having a browser does not magically create significant market share (it’s mere existence does create some as I frequently use Ladybird). Apple and Google controlling the major platforms places Safari and Chrome in front of everyone. Few of us our trying to run alternate platforms like the Pinephone, which also has infighting — Manjaro vs everything else.
Unless major governments force browser choices in the OS during set-up, or people get so disgusted with the installed option (like what happened to IE), market share will not significantly shift. The slow plodding enshitification of Firefox isn’t helping it which is why I will likely bail to another alternative completely as they mature.
Pale Moon already works great on about 99%+ of websites, I don’t view this as being as much of a problem as stated.
Also, I don’t view the lack of Firefox funding as a particular GNU/Linux problem – you already have a large number of teams of volunteer maintainers of Firefox packages for various distros pouring over the Firefox source code constantly. Where Firefox would be more likely to fall down would be with Microsoft or Google yanking the rug out from under it by changing the proprietary internals on Windows or Android. But that’s always been the bigger risk, much bigger than a loss of funding for Mozilla’s pet projects and executive bonuses.
I`m not sure if you realize situation here. Pale Moon is just Firefox. And packaging Firefox for Linux distros doesn`t mean, that they are developing it. Fall of Mozilla Foundation would mean slow progressing or even die of project. You need financial stable team not only to making new features or getting new functions to engine, but also to keep it secure, searching vaulneribilties and patching them. You need high class specialist to do that. Changing icons or creating package is not the same. I don`t think that Pale Moon team or guy that do rpm package will be able to handle FF secure in long term.
>”Pale Moon is just Firefox.”
Pale Moon was forked off of Firefox years ago, and has been independently developed ever since. They are on incompatible development paths at this time.
>”Fall of Mozilla Foundation would mean slow progressing or even die of project.”
From what I’ve read, Mozilla puts very little money into browser development. There are probably more than enough volunteer developers in the world to easily keep Firefox running. We got these same arguments when Oracle was trying to shut down OpenOffice, but LibreOffice was immediately forked off and was developed faster and better by the community without Oracle’s money and direction.
andyprough,
I hope not. I am very thankful for LO, but the hard truth is that it still needs more work. Not only in terms of feature improvements, but there are many bugs too. Here’s one that affects me very frequently…
ask.libreoffice.org/t/copy-paste-doesnt-work-always/53748
ask.libreoffice.org/t/copy-paste-function-in-writer-does-not-work/4940
ask.libreoffice.org/t/how-to-resolve-copy-paste-problem/20635
bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136762
People just assume there will always be devs willing to dedicate themselves to FOSS projects without needing to feed themselves. But passion projects can burn developers out – especially when it stops being fun and becomes more and more work. The loss of paid developers can be significant and many projects stop evolving and enter a state of minimal maintenance, that’s probably what’s going to happen. It will be what it will be.
As I said, LO development has improved greatly since it was taken over by the community from Oracle, so the chances that your bugs would have been addressed by Oracle if it had retained the project are slim and none. I think that Firefox will also flourish once it is unmoored from Mozilla’s stewardship.
Those copy/paste bugs are all reported by Windows users. I’ve never experienced any of that with LO after 14 years of use with GNU/Linux distros. There are some things that Windows just does not do well, sounds like copy/paste is one of them. If the problem persists, I would recommend trying OnlyOffice – it works very well for me.
andyprough,
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with this. Oracle’s stewardship of FOSS projects is objectively bad. But to me it’s just an ironic choice to cite LO as a model of success given some of the issues.
You’re entitled to this opinion of course, but personally I hope FF’s future is much better than LO because I find LO needs a lot of work and I wouldn’t want FF to end up in the same state of not having enough resources for maintaining and improving the aging code base.
Hopefully things work out, but I’m skeptical is all.
I’m glad it works for you, but I still experience some of these bugs regularly (yes on debian linux too). It’s not just the bugs but a lot of things are tedious to do in LO. As a developer I definitely appreciate it’s not an easy task to change features of a large pre-existing code base. Fixing something here for one user can break something there for another.. I deal with this all the time. Unless we’re being paid, maintaining old code bases isn’t particularly rewarding work for developers who’d rather be pursuing their own ideas when it’s their own time.
It’s the same when working on commercial software, but at least in those cases it puts food on the table whereas volunteering for FOSS sometimes doesn’t.
Thanks for the suggestion and trying to help. Although as a proprietary “cloud based” subscription it gets a strong nope from me. While they offer an “on-premise version”, that starts at $6550/server to avoid being dependent on their services. Perhaps I’m just old-school, but I have a dislike for the loss of control we get with cloud services.
Out of curiosity: did version 24.8.0.2 actually fix it?
Devs are asking for feedback on the issue over at: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148647
LibreOffice has many companies behind it.
What the hell is available RIGHT NOW for a decent browser that is not based on the same engine as chromium, is not a firefox spinoff, won’t choke when I pop fifty tabs open at once, and can use (or provide near perfectly similar results compared to) uBlock Origin? If I knew of such a beast, would be trialing it already.
>”Thanks for the suggestion and trying to help. Although as a proprietary “cloud based” subscription it gets a strong nope from me. While they offer an “on-premise version”, that starts at $6550/server to avoid being dependent on their services. Perhaps I’m just old-school, but I have a dislike for the loss of control we get with cloud services.”
I don’t know about any of that, I’ve just used the OnlyOffice free desktop edition (not cloud) which has a libre AGPL license: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors. Recent versions have worked good on mobile too.
So people are supposed to use Firefox, or one of it’s derivatives, as it’s the only real alternative to Google Chrome. But, those people should also say `f Firefox, let it die because Mozilla deserves to be punished for bad choices along the way`. So what is it? Use Firefox in protest of the evil empire Google, or stick our middle finger up at one of the only alternatives?
friedchicken,
This really seems to be a truth of the human condition. The complaints, while not necessarily without merit, seem to be followed with a strong desire to burn it all to the ground even if weakens alternative browsers and helps solidify chrome’s dominance. Reminds me of Palestine protestors voting for Trump. Why can’t people get along :-/
> So what is it?
Ideally, fork firefox/chrome and/or develop another alternative.
This will be akin to throwing baby with the bath water.
Not only they want to kill Chrome, they will have Firefox gone as collateral damage.
At this point, maybe breaking Google could be beneficial. But there are much more natural lines, like YouTube, that does not contribute to the core, instead of making a move that would actually harm the public.
Once again, browsers as a business category is over. That is like bringing back window knockers instead of alarms, or horse buggies instead of cars.
While it is impossible to predict what exactly will happen, one of these is likely:
1. Microsoft or another mega company will pick up Chromium, and we will now have an Edge / Bing monopoly.
2. With top contributors to Chrome, and top finance to Firefox gone, both browsers will slowly but surely wither away
3. An external entity, like Blackrock will take over, and replace it with an ad injection machine and start selling private data.
4. An external country, like China, will take over, using private personal information for their own benefits.
5. A miracle happens, and people start paying $20 per year to use an open source browser.
I’m really pessimistic, and sad at this point seeing a slow moving train crash.
Justified pessimism is better than blind optimism. I feel there’s every reason to be pessimistic about this, and no reason to the contrary.