this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Google is not funding Firefox only for the search engine being default. Google needs to keep Firefox alive because it is their sole competitor. If Firefox (Mozilla) goes down, Google can be accused for monopoly practices which is something they want to avoid.
I mean, they could also argue that all the Chromium based browsers are not Chrome, and so there is competition (we know how it really is, of course, but they have good lawyers...).
But I'm sure that's at least part of the reason why they keep funding it.
Chromium comes straight out of Google though. It is not another browser. It is the same engine. They give their engine for free and different companies use it to make their own flavors of the engine of the "Google browser".
They're actually increasing the market share of their browser engine by having chromium open source.This is not competition.
Mozilla has good lawyers too.
Yes of course, but I guess they could argue that legally they don't count as the same browser, because each company using chromium as a base for their browser is adding or changing it as they like.
Someone could, in fact, fork Chromium and bring back support for Manifest V2 extensions, or disable whatever things Google does to block ad blockers (and in fact, I bet someone will).
Nah they don't. If they had, the whole IE2 debacle would have been over in a court of law.