We can only hope normal people start using firefox again and ditch the piece of cold garbage that is chrome/ium. Though i doubt most people nowadays will even think about switching browsers (like how windows still has like 75+% of market share despite its quality freefalling since win10 and the most user hostile stuff being added)
If experience gets bad enough then people will look for alternatives. IE was something like 90% of the market share at one point and then it lost it fairly rapidly.
Unfortunately is not that simple, now Google is pushing a new standard web environment called WEI and all browsers will be affected with it. Is not just a matter of free choice.
We’ll see if sites really start forcing this standard, could just turn into a situation where you use Chrome as an app to access specific sites that force it and Firefox for everything else.
The late stage of capitalism will force sites to adopt the WEI. Trust me. Privacy will be a luxury good in near future.
At that point we might see a split between corporate and open internet.
If and only “if” this split occur. Unfortunately only few tech conscious people about the importance of free internet as a whole and privacy will adhere to it. Will not be a big movement to harm the core of the big tech.
My perspective on this is that it’s about sustainability as opposed to trying to compete with big tech in a zero sum game. For example, Mastodon or Lemmy aren’t able to compete with commercial platforms in terms of users, but that doesn’t mean they’re not viable communities. I can see a future where there’s a niche open internet that exists independently of the commercial one and I think that would be fine. As long as there are enough people to do development on platforms and browsers and to produce content, that’s all that really matters. In fact, a split might even be better because then we wouldn’t have companies interfering with how the network operates.
Is this something that will only affect Google Chrome or other chromium based browsers immediately? I’m on Firefox already but the change isn’t so appealing to friends who are on Google Chrome.
The concern with WEI proposal is that it’s going to be server enforced. Basically, the server will require browsers to be signed and will refuse to talk to ones it doesn’t recognize the signature for. This will mean that you’ll only be able to talk to such servers using a browser that’s approved by whoever distributes these certs. This is a great explanation of the whole scheme.
If I lose my ad blocker it’s like losing access to the internet for me
Pretty much, and I think this highlights just how important it is to have at least two independently developed browser engines. If Chromium becomes the only game in town that would effectively let Google, which makes most of its revenue from ads, decide how we access the internet. That would be an absolutely terrible scenario to be in.
