Firefox - An Illusion of Choice
Why are we still deluding ourselves that Firefox is a competitor to Chrome, when it's really Google's weapon against competition itself?
Mozilla is not a rights activist. It's a Surveillance Valley theatre group renting its brand names, spyware and lobbying capacity to Google on pain of death. The whole idea that Firefox is a last bastion of light in the fight against monopoly is a joke. But we're so neck-deep in monopoly that all we have left is that delusional fantasy.
Have you ever considered that once monopoly hits a certain threshold, monopolists might get pretty desperate to maintain an illusion of choice? Although that's not something we generally think about, it's an essential part of the monopoly process.
MONOPOLY VIA THE BACK DOOR
The problem with being a monopolist is that openly swallowing up all of your competitors attracts the attention of all the wrong people, often in cataclysmic measure.
But what if, instead, you only capture your competitors? Invest in them. Then invest more. And then, as they become reliant on your perpetual-motion funding and other "kindly gestures", you slowly gain complete control over their activity. They keep their brand name, but effectively rent it out to you on pain of death. It's their face that greets the public, but it's your hands that pull the strings.
This is a classic Google trait, and has been for a very long time. When Google was bidding for YouTube in the mid 2000s, its then CEO Eric Schmidt initially declined to pursue the purchase because the asking price was too high. But there's a revealing internal email exchange that shows what Google does when it can't buy out a brand. What it does instead, is buy into the brand...
If you read the email discussion, dated February 2006, you see that with the acquisition door closing, Google was instead angling to, quote: "work together commercially" with YouTube. Whaddoes that mean? How many other brands that Google didn't buy, did it invite to "work together commercially"?… In YouTube's case, Schmidt himself authorised Sean Dempsey to chase that prospect, with the line:
"Please do figure out a way for us to help them achieve their vision."
Sounds wonderfully charitable, doesn't it? The glaring catch? Google is not a charity!
So the line is really a euphemism. What it means is: the purchase is too expensive, so let's instead buy our way into the back seat. This is a default Google practice. Google is a master of incentive. It invests just enough in third parties to keep them toeing its line.
Ultimately, as we now know, Schmidt changed course, and bought YouTube anyway. Even though he was deeply unhappy with the price, it was sharply escalating, and that suggested a seemingly bad deal would soon end up looking like a bargain. Which it did. But the dynamics of Google's interest in controlling various other big online players have followed the "if you can't buy out, buy in" strategy to the letter. Mozilla is a definitive example of a brand that made sense for Google to buy into, rather than buy out.
WHY COULDN'T GOOGLE BUY OUT MOZILLA?
When Google began to bankroll what was, at the time, its literal next-door neighbour, Mozilla had no real acquisition value, and the community zeitgeist of its nonprofit, open-source independence was worth more to Google than its revenue potential. So the goal was not to purchase the right to a revenue stream (which is what acquisitions are all about). It was, instead, to derail Microsoft's effective monopoly of the browser market, which was a huge threat to Google's own monopolistic intentions.
GOOGLE AS MOZILLA'S SUGARDADDY
Although we're aware that Google pumps hundreds of millions of dollars a year into Mozilla, we tend not to fill in the blanks. The blanks being:
- Google is the overwhelming source of Mozilla's income.
- Mozilla could not survive without Google's money, which means Google is knowingly keeping a supposed competitor on life-support. Why?
- We're told that Google's funding of Mozilla is an ongoing purchase of Firefox's default search slot. And yet Google's funding of Mozilla has not changed in proportion to the value of being Firefox's default search engine. Clearly, being the default search engine in a browser with 3% market share is worth at least ten times less than being the default search engine in a browser with over 30% market share. This has not in any way been reflected in what Google pays Mozilla, as Firefox's market share has plummeted from the latter to the former. Which means that Google's payments to Mozilla are made for other reasons.
That the initial build of Google Chrome was created by Mozilla developers, is all you need to hear in the open and shut case of Google's subsidiary ownership of Firefox.
If Mozilla had been a truly independent company, itself rapidly heading toward market dominance in the browser wars, why in the name of Satan's half-brother would it hire out its dev team to build a product BETTER THAN ITS OWN, for a competitor who was certain to batter the living crap out of its market share? That is conclusively not how competitive business works. It can only be explained by Mozilla effectively functioning as a wing of Google.
Google began "helping Mozilla to achieve its vision" long before establishing market dominance with Chrome. Firefox was initially Google's only weapon against Microsoft's intention of owning the Web through an Internet Explorer monopoly.
Although Firefox was a better browser than Internet Explorer, that alone was not going to topple a renowned monopolist whose "Internet Explorer" was deeply integrated into the monopoly PC operating system. As every tech company will tell you, the public's default behaviour when provided with a pre-installed option is to do nothing. Just use what's there. That inevitability had to be disrupted. And at its low point after being ditched by AOL, Mozilla did not have the power, resources or money to disrupt Microsoft's entrenched monopoly. But Google did.
GOOGLE AND THE "GRASSROOTS" SCHEME
There's a characteristic publicity style that gives away Google's now familiar back-seat driving. A detached and fragmented, yet almighty promotional push. Organised linking across the popular platforms and products of the day. Organised propaganda. Slick use of the "tech news" network. Shilling via NGOs. A distinct "grassroots" feel, with Google itself invisible, providing only the incentives and discovery channels, as third parties do its shouting for pocket money.
Google is also able to skew its search results to prioritise its agenda, and use the predominance of its online estate to throttle or trip competitors' products.
So whilst each Google campaign is deliberately designed to look like a grassroots uprising, it's really a spectacularly expensive, multi-level commercial assault. It's convincing precisely because it doesn't appear to be coming from Google.
And that's exactly what we saw during the rise of Firefox.
Do you not wonder why the current clamour for Firefox's survival is confined to the FOSS communities? If so, the answer is: that's where Google puts it. The promo won't go into the mainstream like it did in the mid 2000s, because Chrome now occupies the mainstream, and Firefox's role is very rigidly NOT to compete with Chrome.
In 2004 when Firefox meaningfully launched with Google now resident in the back seat, Microsoft's Internet Explorer had a seemingly unassailable 95% market share. It would take just five years for Firefox to snatch away 32% of that share. Miraculous, given Microsoft's power and Mozilla's almost bohemian indie niche status at that time.
In fact, it subsequently took Google Chrome roughly the same amount of time to rob IE of the same percentage. Explain that! A small, independent browser provider - namely Mozilla - attacking a monopolist's deep-bundled product at the same rate that the mighty Google attacked it.
I'm sure there are some people who will say that Firefox made those miraculous gains against Microsoft on merit. Because "people liked Firefox better than IE". But the thing is, they have to find it first. And then they have to understand technology enough to appreciate the difference. And only a tiny core of Web users will ever do that unprompted. We see that evidenced in the fate of Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium today. Better than Firefox and Chrome, but they don't win on merit, because merit isn't what makes a winner. It's visibility and propaganda that makes a winner.
Opera was a great browser during the second browser war - many would argue better than Firefox in the 2005-2009 period during which Firefox boomed. But without that big push from a big backer, Opera attained only about 1% market share. I repeat, it doesn't work on merit. It works on visibility and propaganda.
So the only rational explanation for Firefox's meteoric rise, is that the small, independent rival to Internet Explorer was, in truth, neither small nor independent. Mozilla, by the start of the second browser war, was really a wing of its actual next-door neighbour, Google.
The notion that Google doesn't control Firefox is not only delusional, but also completely blind to the basic dynamics of competitive business.
Of course it was. It still is. And as Firefox errs dangerously close to market insignificance, we're seeing those hallmarks of arm's-length, faux grassroots, shill-driven, backseat Google marketing leap into action once again. Whereas in the mid to late 2000s, Google was the invisible orchestrator of Firefox's success, today it's the invisible champion of Firefox's survival.
BUT WHY WOULD GOOGLE NEED FIREFOX TO SURVIVE?
Here are some of the more obvious reasons…
- It creates an illusion of competition. Without Firefox, Chromium would be an obvious monopoly, which could see it falling under intensive regulation or being de-monopolised/de-oligopolised by force.
- Google would lose a valuable defence against players such as Brave or Vivaldi gaining much greater market share. At present, Firefox's role is not to compete with Chrome, but to stifle Chrome's competitors, fighting them on terms that Chrome can't.
- Mozilla is a key Google lobbyist, and its departure from the lobbying circus would reduce the effectiveness of Google's backdoor campaigns. In Web Standards, for instance, Mozilla essentially doubleweights Google's whims. It seconds Google's complaints about decentralisation behind closed doors, while pretending publicly that it supports a decentralised web. It campaigns hard on other archetypal Google chants such as interoperability and the encryption racket.
- Mozilla also facades for Google, renting out its brand in areas of the web where Google itself would not be welcome. For example, the "Mozilla" Mastodon instance is Google's own setup, with Mozilla's rented branding. This kind of thing would be impossible if Mozilla were not perceived as a rival to Google.
You may at this point be thinking:
"But Mozilla is pledging to keep adblocking capability in Firefox, while Google prepares to gleefully rip it out of Chrome. How does this square with Mozilla being a wing of Google?"
It's totally in keeping with Firefox's brief. To compete not with Chrome, but with Chrome's competitors, who are also pledging to retain adblocking capability. Once you see Firefox in its true light, as a guard against opposing business models rising up to challenge Google's monopoly, everything it does makes total sense.
And let's not forget that virtually everything Mozilla claims about privacy and ethics is flat-out bullshit. Read the Firefox privacy policy. Read it all. Not just the headlines in massive letters that Mozza hopes will fulfil your attention span and convince you to trot off in ignorant bliss. Search the privacy policy for brands like Google, Cloudflare, Fastly, Microsoft, Comcast, AdMarketplace, Kevel (which is the new alias for that data-desperate ad cockroach Adzerk)… You'll find them all. And there's only one reason you'll find these names in a privacy policy: because Mozilla sends them your data.
THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
Firefox creates an illusion of choice. But it's all a sham. Outside of Apple's ecosystem, if you want to meaningfully use the Web, you'll be using technology sanctioned and controlled by Google.
Mozilla is not a rights activist. It's a Surveillance Valley theatre group renting its brand names, spyware and lobbying capacity to Google on pain of death. The whole idea that Firefox is a last bastion of light in the fight against monopoly is a joke. But we're so neck-deep in monopoly that all we have left is that delusional fantasy.
So be aware, as we see plugs for Firefox slung around the "FOSS" environs like buckets of water in a heat wave, that it's orchestrated by Google, and its purpose is to keep you away from companies like Brave, whose business model would decimate Google's ad revenue if the brand gained serious traction.
This isn't to say we should not use Firefox. I use it, and more commonly derivatives of it. But don't be brainwashed into thinking that using Firefox is a vote against Google. It's a vote FOR the browser monopoly that Google has established outside of Apple, which is another control-freak, abusive surveillance monster, and once again, no alternative to the oppression. At present, the only way not to vote for this oligopoly, is not to use the meaningful Web at all.
REAL CHANGE
To break the monopoly, we need to reject the oppression of current "Web Standards" - which Mozilla has been instrumental in setting - and start building a much simpler Web, which does not require Google's money to accommodate in the first place. As a first step, end the reliance on JavaScript, because that alone would allow small browser providers to re-enter the market, and re-establish real choice.
If you want to build a free Web, build things that are at least accessible without JS. And start calling out projects like Mastodon, whose JavaScript dependency ensures that it can ONLY be accessed using technology that is controlled by Big Brother.
Indeed, this is another area in which Firefox works in Google's favour. If Firefox didn't exist, people would demand that Mastodon and similar fake routes to independence actually provide access to non-Chromium users. And without Firefox as a pretend alternative, that would mean real accommodation of UNIVERSAL access means. Which would mean real choice, and real privacy.
Firefox's illusion of choice ENABLES monopoly, and allows it to persist without challenge.
Stick your fingers in your ears and recite lines from the EFF Bible of Bullshit if you wish, but that is the reality, and we're going nowhere until we make the Web accesssible to ALL.