- 0 Posts
- 9 Comments
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.
Sorry. I keep failing at tracking where each conversation’s happening. Here are the complaint websites
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation (Lina Khan’s the most vigorous fighter I’ve seen on these grounds in my lifetime).
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures/complaints_en
We’re having a discussion about it here: https://old.lemmy.world/post/2060683
Those complaint websites are tailored to the customers who suffer from the decline in competition. We are suffering from Google using its market position to kill our user experience and options. As I understand, it’s classic monopoly abuse.
In the 20th century, the US broke up the Hollywood model where companies owned both the studios and the theaters (how you have 20th century Fox (or just 20th century now) and Fox theaters). Google owning 75% online advertising and 75% of web browser share is a clear conflict of interest and you can see it from how they’re pushing things like Manifest V3 via their browser (especially when you consider how Chrome is the default browser on their phones), now that it’s the only browser that developers are increasingly starting to support.
If you follow that model, one thing that’s going to have to be done is to have Chrome/Chromium browser development be broken away from Google proper. Google can’t fund the developers any longer.
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 in this one. The post you were replying to inspired me to look up how to file an antitrust complaint with the US government.
Here’s what I was referring to:
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.
You wrote all this but you failed to mention that Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors. The competitors need to sue.
I mean they already have one, Gecko. And since they also made Servo, they took a lot of the good parts and incorporated it into Gecko, which led to the speed up (they parallelized a lot of the processes and started using people’s GPUs more).
And they have made Mozilla VPN and had it integrate with this this multi-account container add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/) that lets you sandbox your internet browsing (like you can set up a google account container, a Facebook/Instagram container, a banking/finance container). So those have been privacy pluses in the years since Baker canned the Rust and Servo teams, blaming Covid-19 all while giving herself a raise. And Firefox seems to be competitive with Chrome in terms of speed of web rendering and whatnot: https://www.androidauthority.com/firefox-vs-chrome-which-web-browser-reigns-supreme-3294340/
And there’s just some simple things in Firefox by default, like clicking on a simple button to disable most of the javascript that’s janking everything up on a website and making it simple and readable, that just make it so much better than Chrome.