[acdha]

Mozilla is one of the parties most damaged by Google’s anti-competitive efforts, though. If Chrome had to be self-sufficient and couldn’t rely on paid promotion on Google sites, not to mention other Google apps “accidentally” having bugs or performance issues in Firefox, the browser market would be a lot more competitive. Mozilla has already been in a bad place since Google decided to keep them just viable enough to serve as an antitrust defense, breaking the stranglehold would be tumultuous but also the first chance of getting into a better position for the first time in years.

I also wouldn’t read too much into Bing’s first AI round. It’s better than Google Bard but neither is trustworthy and the search market isn’t going shift to treacherous chat bots. The general quality of the regular search has been improving, however, and they seem to be getting better at least as quickly as Google is making their service worse. When I’ve done side-by-side comparisons they’re a lot closer than used to be the case - Google updates their index notably faster, but has less spam control and neither is as good as Google was half a decade ago.

[fallingknife]

How can you ban cross promotion, though? It's such a common practice across most industries. Chains like CVS put their generic versions right next to the name brands on the shelf, and even have signs that say "compare to <product being copied>." And it would actually be terrible for consumers if that were banned.

> Google apps “accidentally” having bugs or performance issues in Firefox

I would bet everything I own that this isn't happening. Would not be remotely worth the risk to Google. Besides, these bugs are rare enough and small enough impact that I don't even really notice them, and have never considered switching off of Firefox because of them, and I am a software engineer who is much more likely to notice this stuff than 99% of users.

[acdha]

Re:cross promotion, I think the big thing would requiring it to be open to anyone and/or paid. When CVS says “compare to Tylenol” they still have the name brand right there and don’t pretend their generic is somehow better. The web is different but I think it’d be useful to have a rule that, say, they can’t put Chrome ads in Gmail unless Microsoft can buy the same spot at the same price for Edge ads.

> I would bet everything I own that this isn't happening

As a daily Firefox user they’re pretty common - there was a long period where Meet, and only Meet, dropped Firefox calls frequently, GCP would get stuck in a redirect loop at login if you used a browser other than Chrome, etc.

I would be surprised if there was a smoking gun “break Firefox” instruction - more that it’s not a testing priority, they jump use Chrome proprietary APIs as quickly as possible and delay switching to the standard versions (like they did with YouTube with that slow web component polyfill), etc.