The Justice Department’s proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.
In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.
The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.
"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”
I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not Mozilla. The software is open source and will persist.
The way Mozilla can advocate for web standards will be sorely missed.
To my knowledge they don’t though, Chrome has had the overall market share for years. Most of the time the mozilla project is tailing behind Chrome, because anything that they add to Chrome if the other browsers didn’t follow suit they were left in the dust. I haven’t seen the Mozilla project as a Trailblazer in years