As the Great Poet of the twentieth century wrote that a ring was enough to rule them all and in the darkness bind them, thus the last Browser War has finally ended with one winner, many losers and a single casualty: the end user, and with them any hope for the future of a Web that is really open and free from the grasp of the new masters of digital steam. Welcome to a new episode of the chronicles from the Internet trenches, an ugly and bad place where technology blends with propaganda, the multi-billion business with advertising virtual impressions and where the aforementioned users are useful just as a number in Web browsers market shares.

If the mood of the previous post I wrote about the so-called browser war was gloomy, the trends outlined three years ago have now matured in a status quo from which there is no way out: Google has finally imposed Chrome as the most used computer browser, all the analysis tools crown Mountain View’s software by confining the competition to a marginal position at the bottom of the market. For NetMarketShare, on February 2018 Chrome has almost 61% of users, while StatCounter places the desktop browser popularity even higher (67.49%).

Chrome has completely disrupted the market share of Microsoft browsers, which after splitting with the release of Windows 10 (Internet Explorer+Edge) are now less popular (in two) than the second most used browser on PC (Firefox). Even Microsoft engineers are forced to use Edge to download Chrome while trying to carry forward an official presentation, so the new Windows 10 browser has officially taken the place of IE which was once useful just to download Firefox.

Firefox, indeed: these days talking about the Red Panda browser cause me sudden rage fits, considering the conditions the project is in. “Firefox is a browser unavoidably doomed to oblivion”, I wrote in the October of 2015, maybe in 2018 that oblivion isn’t here yet but certainly the Mozilla software is sailing steadily towards the abyss of insignificance. For analysis companies Firefox is used by 10.94% (NetMarketShare) or by 11.54% (StatCounter) of PC users, while Mozilla’s former CTO highlighted the browser’s descending curve in a market that’s completely unrecognizable compared to the past.

Firefox has been completely crushed by the ubiquitous advertising for Chrome, a browser that Google can afford to promote on all the company’s services – Web search, Gmail’s webmail, YouTube videos, … – thanks to a monopolistic position never seen before in the history of Internet. Mozilla decided to renew its identity and to focus the best of the foundation’s energies – starting from a financial situation more thriving and stable than ever – on Firefox development, and from a technical standpoint some remarkable results have been achieved.

On November 2017 the American foundation released Firefox 57 “Quantum”, a browser that cuts many ties with the past (too many for me anyway) and thinks about the future by challenging the competition – Chrome above all – in performance, customization and regard for privacy, a modernization effort that went further with Firefox 58 and that will go on to affect the future as well. Performance aside, in practice Mozilla behaves exactly like the competition by spreading propaganda, and by using its more and more limited user base to test new types of advertising masked as reading advices on Pocket. Frankly speaking, Mozilla doesn’t give a shit anymore about what users think or want, nay, the corporation doesn’t quite understand what it means to deal with thinking users and gets surprised for the controversy when it is caught installing marketing add-ons to promote the Mr. Robot TV series.

The excessive power of Google’s advertising business is such to have widely helped to twist the nature and the purpose of the Web, a technology born to widen access to knowledge to everyone and that is now used to defend the interests of the industry with the backing from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): the Web standards organization has become the defender of DRM technologies (EME+CDM) that are so beloved by Netflix, Microsoft, Apple and the aforementioned Google, furthermore causing the justified leaving of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The implementation of anti-copy DRMs as a Web standard marked a fundamental turning point in the last browser war, or rather in the war for the control of Internet, and the future doesn’t leave room for any hope: marketing companies will be able to continue tracking users browsing habits wildly thanks to HTML5, Google will be able to impose any kind of absurd rubbish useful for its plans behind the “new Web standard” excuse and invasive advertising will still flow strong behind Mountain View’s fake and ludicrous ad-blocker. If this is the future, a future where browsers are used as “platforms” to spread the commercial ideology of their respective companies, I want to go back to Adobe Flash.

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