Preamble
I originally wrote Browsers, Monopolies, and Bears. Oh My! on my blog in 2020. I was reminded of it when I saw a post by TechCrunch so I thought I'd bring it forward to head up this new blog. Enjoy. 🙂
Let's begin
Google has long had an old motto of "Don't be evil", but over time we have seen that disappear to be replaced it with what amounts to "Do the right thing." As Fast Company says: "It's subtle shifts like that one that can make a huge difference." I would have thought this is a step up. (Ref: Google Code of conduct April 21 2018 and May 4 2018.
I would dearly love to believe that Google is on the up and up, as I decided some time ago to throw my weight behind Google, generally speaking. However, being a disenfranchised member of a few now dead Google products, I find it all a bit bitter.
And then there is this: Johnathan Nightingale (former Mozilla G.M.) has revealed a series of "oops after oops" that he says were Google systematically sabotaging Firefox – intentionally even – to boost the adoption of Chrome. (Ref: https://archive.is/tgIH9)
Nightingale said, "When Chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you might expect. They had a competing product now, but they didn't cut ties, break our search deal - nothing like that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, 'We're on the same side. We want the same things'."
"Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said.
"All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say, 'oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.'
Nightingale believes that there were so many of these oopses, that it could have numbered in the hundreds. And of course while they were chasing these oopses down; they lost users, and lost time on developing Firefox. "We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said.
Which leads me to where this started. Jon von Tetzchner from Vivaldi, a great browser, blogged in 2017 that he believes that Google is misusing their monopoly-based power.
Firefox is the only non Chromium-based browser that's got any noticable market share for browsers. For those not in the know, Chromium is the broad name to the core part of the project which the Crome browser is built upon. Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and Brave are all built upon the Chromium core.
Due to the above situation both Brave and Vivaldi chose to pretend to be Chrome 24/7. And this isn't new. Back in 2020 Vivaldi (which began as an offshoot of Opera) said it was in order to not be blocked from blocked from certain websites. "Vivaldi is blocked for many reasons, and often by competitors, rivals and tech companies in a position of power. Blocking Chromium-based browsers has no technical merit in 2020, nor has it ever had." (Ref: Vivaldi Release page & ZD Net article)
Fast forward to 2024
Not much has changed except perhaps how this war is fought. Tracking Cookies & data privacy is now at the forefront. Cookies have been used and abused for decades. Improper implementation of Cookies and "free" services that companies offer to website owners like: conversion tracking, analytics, comments, events, posts, embedding videos or other remote content can give these companies the ability to correlate website visits against accounts they're aware of. Or at the very least, a trend of which sites an unknown person visits.
I should point out that Cookies themselves aren't an issue. It's simply a small piece of text kept in your browsers storage. Third party Cookies are cookies that are set/used by domains that aren't the one you're on directly. Case in point, if we had Facebook comments on this site, Facebook would have a cookie or ten in your browser connected to their services, even if you don't have an account.
While touting their own platform, Apple presented it as a flock of airborne surveillance "animals". Which was nailed what they were going for. Spooky.
As TechCrunch's article states, Google was initially decrying cookies, saying they were going to ditch them in favour of another method of tracking. All the people profiting from established tracking methods weren't happy, there was enough of a din that regulatory bodies had a look. Google have now flipped on that idea, choosing instead to keep cookies.
