[yjftsjthsd-h]

This feels like saying that you're not forced to be subject to the laws of your country, because you could always go find an unclaimed island and create your own country. At some point the practical impediments are such that yes, we are at their mercy. And no, Google at least does not deserve any gratitude for creating a more efficient ad delivery machine (what, you think they provide a browser out of the goodness of their hearts?).

[wombatmobile]

You're not stuck in some evil country. You have Mozilla. If you want to improve it, you can submit code to it. Or start a new browser project by rounding up a dozen friends who feel the same way you do and going for it. If you're not a software engineer, you can be an evangelist who inspires software engineers. What is stopping you from working towards your own ideals?

[dmitriid]

> Or start a new browser project by rounding up a dozen friends who feel the same way you do and going for it.

You severely underestimate how much work needs to be done to create a new web browser.

[foxfluff]

And even if you could do it, it's not a given that you can make a good one.

In fact, I believe making a good browser is impossible because the web is fundamentally broken. The standards require your browser to be crap. The browser is no longer a user agent, it's a server agent, and trying to block & work around antifeatures is akin to writing an antivirus program that somehow detects and blocks malicious code without breaking the rest of the program. You can try, but it's a ridiculous never-ending cat and mouse game and if you don't keep up, you just end up "breaking the web" without actually making any part of it good.

[wombatmobile]

I know the code that I and my team contributed to Mozilla was only some trivial part of the whole beast, but for us it was drawn from years of work.

And that’s the whole point.

Mozilla has made a browser. So has google. Why make them out to be bad actors for providing something that is too big for mortals to even contemplate?