[selfhoster11]

What makes you think so?

The DRM industry's answer to the previous waves of DRM and DRM-breaking was Denuvo.

The copyright cartel's answer to copying via digital bypassing and the analogue hole was to make it all but mandatory to cryptographically secure every single element in the chain between their own servers and the pixels on our displays, and refuse to serve HD content if your hardware and software won't implement that. Not to mention, DMCA.

Just because Firefox was the liberation from IE6, doesn't mean it will be proportionally as easy to liberate ourselves from Chromium if it does become the only browser engine.

[dontblink]

But there is no forcible capture of an audience. Users can download and use a browser pretty easily.

Even in the Denuvo case, there is still pirate activity on games that employ it (albeit no 0 days).

[emn13]

I mean, we don't need competition, sure. But we also have a social structure that utterly depends on competition for economic efficiency. I'm not seeing the popular up-swell for communism quite yet, so until that happens, having privately owned monopolists act not just as single providers of critical goods and services, but also control access to information about those goods and services, and the publications reporting about those goods and services, and getting to pick which shops get to even open their doors, and the roads to those goods and services, and the banking system you need to pay for em... you know, that might just weaken your negotiating position. You just might get shafted.

These aren't the weak little monopolies of times past, stuff like standard oil - these new setups are much more clever, and much more pervasive, and much more powerful.

Oh hey, as it turns out tech companies are making obscene profits (so much for economic efficiency!), and we've given them little legal monopolies by implementing copyrights, patents and contract law in just the right way to make competition almost impossible. Startups competing with them need great luck, huge pockets, a brilliantly found niche - and even then they'll probably just get bought or simply fail.

I mean I get that browsers are just one small element of the whole puzzle. But on the other hand, it's also one of the few where avoiding lock-in might still be fairly easy. I don't blame anybody for using chrome - use it myself on occasion - but I'll avoid it as long as it's at least easy to do so.