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Mozilla's petition against in-browser censorship law
(foundation.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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I strongly doubt that Google, Microsoft, Apple etc. would make their browsers unavailable in France.
I could see it. I know they all bend to China, but they also know that fighting China won't change anything. If Google pulls Chrome and Apple pulls Safari, French citizens do actually have a path to be heard and get shit changed.
Equally important to them, plopping their dicks on the table against the French government and having it work might scare them out of curtailing their monopolies next time.
google and microsoft don't have browsers; they are offering a repacked and rebranded chromium with proprietary features. same as vivaldi, brave, etc.
there are only three modern browsers: firefox, safari, and chromium. if these three exit france, all that's left are custom made third party neutered firefox or chromium browsers repacked for france, and they would lag behind security updates.
You're right that under the hood, there's only Firefox, Safari and Chromium, but you're overestimating the influence of Chromium here.
For one, Chromium is controlled by Google. It's *technically* open-source, but Google decides what's included into it.
And secondly, Chromium already has an API for blocking webpages. All these browsers could just pre-install an extension (and hide it from users), to comply with that law.
But even if it didn't have that API, it only takes a relatively non-invasive patch to add such blocking.
Chromium is usually said to exert a strong influence, because you can't just patch things when it comes to web standards. You need to ship what's being shipped in Chrome to enjoy compatibility with all the same webpages. And usually, what's in Chromium is what's being shipped in Chrome.