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by marten-de-vries 3109 days ago
I agree it would be great if other browsers implemented this as well, but you lose me at:

> The best thing Mozilla could do is convince Apple and Microsoft to give up their independent lackluster browser implementations and ship Firefox as the default instead.

Multiple independent implementations are of vital importance to the web. We've seen it with IE6 before, and having two browsers is cutting it too close.

1 comments

The "independent implementations" aren't worth much if nobody uses them. Chrome already has a majority of the market share at ~60%, with Safari, its nearest competitor, trailing far behind at ~15%. Firefox is sitting at 9.3%. [0]

Combining IE/Edge, Safari, and Firefox still leaves Firefox at half of the market share of Google, and that's still a distinct disadvantage, but it's a much stronger fighting position than single-digit market share. Google and Facebook are not naive upstarts and it won't be easy to quash them, especially not when little old Mozilla is running on comparative fumes compared to a couple of the best-capitalized companies on the planet.

Google and Facebook's interests are aligned as both base their business model on profiling and reselling data derived from user behavior, so it's unlikely that Google will feel inclined to implement desired user protections against that business model.

It's very important that we have strong competition representing a diversity of interests, especially when the dominant player's business model is just "slick spyware". Without a competitor in the same league, consumers don't really have an option.

[0] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2017&month=11