Firefox wants to level the browser playing field with Microsoft, Google, and Apple
Amber NeelyMozilla alleges tech giants' bias against Firefox
Mozilla has published a list of ways big tech gatekeepers prevent independent browsers — such as its browser, Firefox — from flourishing on their platforms.
In a recent blog post, Mozilla expressed concerns about how tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft use tactics to ensure users pick their browsers instead of independent options like Firefox.
It goes on to state that companies do this in several ways, such as "making it harder for a user to download and use a different browser, ignoring or resetting a user's default browser preference, restricting capabilities to the first-party browser, or requiring the use of the first-party browser engine for third-party browsers."
To shed light on the issue, the company has published a new issue tracker documenting how it views Firefox as being disadvantaged.
Apple has, by far, the most issues as Mozilla sees it, with ten individual complaints being listed, compared to Microsoft and Google's three each. Included in its list of issues, Mozilla cites Firefox's inability to "programmatically set itself as the default [browser]", import browsing information like history, bookmarked sites, and cookies, and read Messages data as major concerns.
Mozilla may claim the most individual issues against Apple, but Google's Chrome has the largest worldwide share by far. Chrome holds more than three times the marker share that Safari has, across Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
Mozilla also calls on other browser vendors and non-browser groups to publish their concerns similarly.
The browser developer's indexing comes at a time when big tech faces increased scrutiny over alleged gatekeeping practices. Recently, European media and technology companies have signed a letter stating that tech giants have neglected their obligations to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act.
After more than four years of investigations, the Department of Justice is preparing to sue Apple for alleged anticompetitive behavior, potentially in the next few months.
Charles Martin
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18 Comments
Firefox is a has-been browser that has failed due to its own incompetence.
Its own code is hugely buggy, insecure, and resource intensive which is why Apple forced WebKit engines only on iOS devices.
Firefox had its time years ago.
Hell, even Opera ditched its own engine for Chromium as did Microsoft. Not that I think Chromium is better. I refuse to use Chrome and Google is not making me desire it with the stupid systems being implemented. But I’d prefer a Chromium browser to a Mozilla engined browser any day.
Sigh. If the government wants to regulate something, they should regulate the open standards that businesses should use. Since it is a "standard" any browser maker can implement them.
As it stands, Google is doing the typical network effect of getting website developers to design their websites for Chrome, not a standard. Since websites work best with Chrome, Chrome will be used more, thereby giving Google a rather huge hand in how the web works.
By website developers to design to a an open published standard, it levels the playing field and all web browsers should be able to render websites identically.
There's a lot of turtles on top of each other here too. Web data brokers, ad APIs, tracker APIs, who knows what else, are all designed to work best with this or that browser. It's all part of the network effect. This stuff has to be open and standardized so any web browser can implement. Websites surely will have preference with Google as search result placements and ad space money is on the line, and will do a lot to optimize the solution that makes the most money, which is probably Chrome since Google has so much control over the ad placement money.
If someone is penalised, it should be the entities who are trying to break the government approved web standards.