"Web Environment Integrity" is an all-out attack on the free Internet

salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 700 points –
fsf.org

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2546109

Read why "Web Environment Integrity" is terrible, and why we must vocally oppose it now. Google's latest maneuver, if we don't act to stop it, threatens our freedom to explore the Internet with browsers of our choice.

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Everyone who uses Chrome (or Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, or anything else that uses Chromium as a base) - you're helping google extend their power over the open web, and those helping them do this.

It's a small thing, but Google's power over the web derives from each of the the millions of people who continue to make Chrome the standard that webdevs cater to.

Just switched to Firefox today!

Sidebery v5 beta (on GitHub not on the addon store yet) + Firefox on MacOS and a few CSS tweaks has my experience almost exactly matching what I loved about Edge.

Just wish I could collapse (on demand , not via auto-hide) the vertical tabs sidebar to 1 icon wide when I need more horizontal room (anyone got a trick for that?)

I don’t think it’s fair to place the blame on the user. It’s not their fault for using a browser they like. Blame those whodient prevent or try to breakup google owning the browser. The damage is done an most of chromium’s base won’t know shit about this or why.

Everyone else should do something just not the holly user. No, they are not to be bothered by the consequences of their actions.

Well my friend when everbody flocked to Chrome or one of the various clones because they like it they gave power to Google whether they like it or not. And now Google is using this power against the user in it's best interest because they like it (to be read "can").

But do they like Chrome, or do they just use it out of habit, and because it's the default on Android phones and constantly marketed on Google's search engine? Perhaps they use it because it's the "good enough" solution that's dropped right in front of them?

I don’t think it’s fair to place the blame on the user.

Consumers/users don't deserve all the blame, obviously but they deserve a significant share.

It’s not their fault for using a browser they like.

A huge amount of what's wrong with the world comes down to people saying "I'm going to go ahead and do this even if it causes harm". Same situation here.

It's someone fault if they choose to do something that causes harm. We can't help what we like, but we can help what we do.

Not true. Brave is a fork of Chromium and will not be implementing WEI.

You’re looking too narrowly. By getting devs to cater to whatever gets rolled out in Blink and v8, google extends the power they have over the whole ecosystem by making any browser that doesn’t follow them look “broken” (as opposed to, not slavishly following everything google does).

It also increases the difficulty of making a competing browser engine by adding tons of complexity (for questionable value), only further entrenching google’s dominance. But at least you get some stupid new CSS3 behaviors (that people will bitch about not working in Firefox or Safari) so I guess it’s worth it.

People who didn't live through the first browser migration (away from ie6) don't understand just how insidious browser lock in is.

Mosaic and Netscape would like a word.

In those days the internet was a curiosity, mostly untapped potential. It became a bit different in 2000 +/- 5 years, and started being a livelihood for most of the planet.

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