> It's sad to see people supporting monopoly this way...
The realistic way to avoid monopolies and retain free-ish markets is to actively enforce anti-trust legislation. (And in the case of social media companies: force all players of a certain size to provide federation APIs, so people can leave the service and still talk to their friends and family.)
There will always be some people that try to avoid monopolies for ideological reasons; but 90% of the population won't care, they just want things to work and move on with their lives, and capturing that segment still makes you a monopoly.
> but 90% of the population won't care, they just want things to work and move on with their lives
Yes, I meant it more specifically that people here on HN who should know and should care are actively propagating and helping a monopoly. (these people often also have disproportionate influence)
What do we get from supporting Firefox against the "monopoly" though? Chromium is as open source as Firefox, and users have as much influence on features Firefox implements as on features Chrome implements, which is zero. I would wholeheartedly support federation apis, as parent comment suggests, standardization of browser sync api, etc. But i don't see what does Firefox accomplish now about which i should care.
When google controls the only remaining browser engine, it effectively controls web standards (or in other words, independent standard documents lose meaning since Blink is the standard).
Google is then free to push the web technologies in the direction which benefits mainly Google (think AMP) and which further tightens their grip on the web.
The realistic way to avoid monopolies and retain free-ish markets is to actively enforce anti-trust legislation. (And in the case of social media companies: force all players of a certain size to provide federation APIs, so people can leave the service and still talk to their friends and family.)
There will always be some people that try to avoid monopolies for ideological reasons; but 90% of the population won't care, they just want things to work and move on with their lives, and capturing that segment still makes you a monopoly.