Firefox Browser: best for a free web(mozilla.org) |
Firefox Browser: best for a free web(mozilla.org) |
From here: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps.
Worst of all, Firefox runs as a single process on mobile and has no sandbox beyond the OS sandbox. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux, where it can hardly be considered a sandbox at all) and lacks support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole.
This does nothing to improve browser engine diversity but at this point Mozilla's best path to commercial success would be to launch a new browser product that's a rebranded Blink/WebKit with a focus on privacy, e.g. ad/tracker blockers, optional integrated VPN, simple UX for clearing browser history per site/date range/etc. Personally I'd prefer they adopt Safari's WebKit over Chrome's Blink to remove the dependency from Google.
I'm too old to deal with navigating the web with rendering inconsistencies of browser web developers don't test against. For the same reason I've no hesitation to use their gorgeous Firefox Focus iOS browser over Chrome since they're all forced to use the same rendering engine, and given all things being equal I trust Firefox to protect privacy much more than Google.
Being reminded today I also just installed Firefox on my - relatively new - work machine. Somehow I am more tolerant there running Chrome than on my own machines.
Sadly though, the mobile version (still) lacks support for "pull to refresh" gesture. Other than that, mobile FF is great (privacy features, browser addons...).
A few months in I'm really happy with it. Main tip is: I found the scroll behaviour janky when the URL bar was at the top. Once I put it at the bottom (IIRC this is the default anyway, and once I got used to it I realised it's pretty unambiguously a better location) things behaved nicely.
I wish I could install an add-on to deal with GDPR spam but unfortunately without significant faffing you can only run vetted extensions from a fairly short list of adblockers and privacy tools. This seems like a smart move but I wish they'd expand this list, e.g. perhaps blanket-allowing extensions that only use certain safer API subsets.
I have seen only inside Chrome as I was debugging some edgecases; it’s very google C++, but once you get used to the enormous size, it’s not that hard to follow.
Sorry Mozilla, we love you, but all the good you think you're doing means nothing when you end up with no one using your browser.
Of course, Mozilla can continue to arrogantly ignore its user base.
Edit: I’m HN-wrong, best type
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
> Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
However, recently I have run into a lot of situations where foxfire does not work with some of the apps I need, and chromium based browsers do work. These apps are vital to what I do, and while I prefer firefox for all the usual reasons, I cannot use it. Sad really.
A "free" web where you pretend to fight against Google, but copy every user-hostile anti-feature from them, take almost all your money from them, and put them as your default search engine.
Mozilla deserve every bit of their recent problems, just like they deserved their meteoric rise in the 2000s.
Mozilla could implement a similar feature to block portions of the web, or particular content, or add a feature that pro-actively fact-checked page content.
I still use a firefox fork, because it isn't chromium. But I won't be surprised if Mozilla decides to go a similar route to Tusky based on their espoused values.
It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features.
I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy features, built-in ad/tracker blocking and for the time being seems to be user-not-revenue-first.
But using a non-free browser feels like a trap to me. Just as what happened with Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Netscape before, being the middle man between the user and the rest of the internet is just too tempting for any company not to try to leverage for their own advantage.
FF hasn't been always perfect, but for 20 years now they have made a browser that didn't have a shady corporate agenda. It feels like the writing is on the wall though. Even people I know who care about FLOSS are using Chrome as their daily driver these days.
Mozilla is great and I hope they continue to focus on building a best-in-class browser.
This doesn't fully describe situation, but over last 3 years, mobile users went from 50% to 75% users in my prev company's data. And Firefox is nowhere in those mobile stats.
Also, the market share numbers reported by client side trackers like StatsCounter are very close to log file collection and analysis by companies like Kinsta.
Even before the whole privacy focused thing FF was already in decline to sub 10% market on Desktop.
If you think about it the other way around, it is still hanging on to 5-10% of Desktop market after all is actually quite good. At its peak, Firefox was closing to 40% in some European countries. If you consider IE in Business Cooperate usage and Firefox are not available in those settings, 40% is a really big deal.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
I’ve watched the decline for years, straight from the source. These usage numbers are not affected by privacy settings.
Between telemetry, safe browsing, sqlite database with all sites you visited & gvfs they siphon off some serious data. So bad for privacy but snappy otherwise, particularly the new versions. MDN is pretty good too, but they chopped off their tech team to “save money” for a top heavy mgmt team.
I would bet money that even the majority of HN readers wouldn't pay money for something so heavily commoditized.
Is that really a fact though? I read somewhere that >80% FF users have Ad Blocker installed. Wouldn't that keep it hidden to Google Analytics and similar outfits that come up with browser usage stats?
Do you trust Mozilla? They share the numbers.
I'm not too informed on the subject.
A parent company that could and would literally put ads for it on the front page of Google? (i.e. before a sesrch term has been entered)
This is a place where I'm not aware that anyone else has been allowed to put anything, so if this isn't abuse of market power then I don't know what.
Same with other Google web properties that magically work better in Firefox if you change the request headers..!
Firefox on the other hand prioritizes your browsing history by default (you can still change that in settings) which makes finding anything much faster and the whole experience much smoother. Plus you can easily limit the search to your history by preceding the keywords with ^, or to your bookmarks with *.
Making Google web applications (YouTube) use technologies only available in Chrome with much slower fallback used in other browsers.
Bundling Chrome with Android.
Ads pushing it aggressively on Google/YouTube. Ads IRL.
After the rewrite things were super fast but it has gotten slower each release.
Today it might be a top 50 website that doesn't work properly, yesterday maybe it's excessive cpu usage, day before maybe pinch to zoom doesn't work. Who knows what dumb crap is happening tomorrow.
Life is too short to muck around with half baked software.
I still have to restart Firefox at least once every other day because it leaks and becomes a runaway process.
No plugins/addons. As stock as it gets. One single website only... and it still pukes all over itself.
Since that's where most users are, I hope Mozilla will be able to communicate these advantages better. Chrome is arguably better on the desktop for most users, unless they're in the tiny subset of users who care about privacy.
It's interesting to me that many of my favorite/most used web technologies in the past decade or so have come from individual, non-profit developers just trying to make something useful, free and flying in the face of a lot of legal and industry norms (e.g., gorhill, elbakyan). In my experience, these tend to work best on FF + VPN, or on Tor (built from FF).
Firefox is a really good browser (at least on Linux, even though the lack of HW-acceleration on NVIDIA cards is a pain) made even greater with best-in-class uBlock Origin support, and of course piroor's Tree Style Tab. Containers are also a great feature (I containerize Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter properties in their own silo). Tab unloaders (I don't remember which I'm currently using) is also a good idea to reduce memory usage (even though with 32 GB I have NEVER run into issues)
I've been rocking it and a custom user stylesheet to hide the tabs on top, reorder and customize the address bar to be tighter, have more contrast; and the whole UI to be black (I use the dark variant of Adwaita all day on my desktop). Having an ultrawide display, I have plenty of horizontal space. Here's an screenshot if that interests you: https://imgur.com/a/8PEKED5
Edit: How could I have missed that?! Picture-in-picture is incredibly good as well! I use it daily, mainly to watch a YT video on the side while continuing to browse the web. They even added multiple PIP windows a while back, which is a god-send when I watch livestreams such as a rocket launches (eg. official livestream in one window, and EverydayAstronaut's in another)
Edit: following this¹ (without installing any driver though) was enough to make it work for YouTube, apparently. Thanks for the info!
"Firefox Browser:
1. It is not google.
2. It's not a Chrome fork maintained by potentially flaky/untrustworthy players.
3. uBlock Origin.
4. Multi-Account Containers."
6. Incredibly customizable via CSS, including multiple rows of tabs
8. Non-nerfed ad blocking
I have only seen the code of Chrome and it’s very Google-like C++, with truly enormous codebase.
Even Chrome did not fork Firefox back in the day and forked Safari.
Electron did not use Firefox either.
For example, I have tried Bromite on my phone but the adblocking is limited. I've tried ungoogled-chromium on desktop and the speed is impressive.
The main things I want:
1. Speed
2. Speed
3. Native plugins that can preempt network requests
4. Configurable for privacy (referrer, first party isolation, etc)
All these are doable in Firefox but I've doubted them ever since Pocket integration
It also has its own advertising platform. The ads are simple notifications, no bullshit. It actually pays users in cryptocurrency for their attention. It can also be completely disabled.
My personal experience with it is that it is slow to start, bloated, the ad-blocker doesn't block Google ads by default and it fills home screen with some kind of crypto sites by default. It looks like it is trying to be a general purpose browser but judging by the choice of default options it looks more like a very niche browser for the crypto community.
The most innovative thing they have right now is Search, hopefully it doesn't end up being ad-monetized too.
- Picture in Picture
- Expanded Dark Mode
- DNS over HTTPs
I really like Firefox, but features like this are not going to cause people to switch browsers. I'm pretty sure most end users would never even notice them. DNS over HTTPs is actually a bit of a pain if you want to host your own DNS.
Also Firefox: We support internet censorship.
(source: CEO of Mozilla, link: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...)
Just imagine Blender Foundation or GIMP making statements about how we need a tools to control whatever 3D models people able to work on because you know you can create some fake child pornography using them.
Or might be Apache or Linux Foundation management would say how we need to track all possible malicious actors who can run some botnet / CNC software using their products. This would be totally dystopian, isn't it?
Not to mention what immediately follows, advocating for something beyond this in the future: "This is how we can begin to do that."
Looking forward to the silently installed browser extension that hides search results and social media posts that they don't want you to see. (related: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-back...)
Where we're at, is that most people are happy running a Chromium variant. It's open source and there are enough downstream consumers that you can pick your poison.
If Mozilla is going to push the "private browser, for you" angle, they are going to need to push harder on the "for you" angle.
I'm still a loyal Firefox user. It seems to me that its users would rather have more say in its direction - give the people what they want.
* as-in-freedom
And how can you claim you are free* when 90% of your revenue comes from your main competitor?
Maybe making a paid browser is what they need to become truly free* and reset to a user-centric product development culture, which could then actually make it an exciting product again (even if they initially lost 90% of users as a consequence, those would be lost with time anyhow).
1. Firefox has Ctrl+Tab MRU
2. Firefox has a way more usable address bar - Chrome breaks it on purpose and returns weak results to push you to use Google search for things which should immediately pop up in the address bar.
3. Firefox has container tabs - a feature so crucial to browsing the web (whenever you need to login to 2 different accounts on the same site) that you would wonder why on Earth would the leading web browser not implement it (until you remind yourself that the browser is brought to you by a certain company that has the word "evil" in it's motto and likes tracking too much).
4. Firefox has a sidebar, enabling interesting extensions.
5. This is small - but I recently noticed how Chrome broke the bookmark UI, after clicking the star icon, you don't add bookmark immediately, no. You have to choose between a bookmark or reading list first.
Please don't do things to make titles stand out, “
The title you wrote isn’t even in the article as far as I can tell. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I'd also imagine it's hard to convince younger folks (eg. those who didn't leave firefox in the first place) on firefox over brave which includes adblock out of the box, no setup or extensions required
Technically it's a great rendering engine, fast, standards-compliant, maybe only slightly more buggy than Webkit. Unfortunately it has a different set of bugs than webkit. Web developers have just so much time to debug the apps. Once the app works for ~90% of users on webkit, spending as much time or more testing and debugging for ~7% of FF users is not always justified.
This is a catch 22: FF users get more bugs - more pressure to move to Chrome, fewer users on FF - less money to develop Gecko leading to more bugs. My prediction is that FF will either drop Gecko or die.
Do you mind sharing your WebUSB use case(s)?
Besides, there's only one mainstream browser that's better than Chrome, and that browser is Edge
Anyone who uses this feature, feel free to chime in.
This being said, I agree with you about the optics of Firefox management. There is a lot going on that isn't good and the personal enrichment of the executives feels all sorts of wrong.
If FF management can not be good stewards of a vital product, who can be? What sort of system could be set up to properly manage, motivate and pay for development?
A lot of questions are not answered, which makes the whole FF a bit shady. As a user, how much can I trust FF as a browser? Before answering, keep in mind that the browser is the single most important software we use every day since it carries most of our activities. Is it safe to use software made by someone who is not capable of sustaining themselves?
I've noticed that when the words "duopoly" / "monopoly" get thrown around in a thread about Firefox, it almost reads as if people use Firefox for the sole reason that it isn't Chromium.
In that vein, I've always wondered why some Firefox users tend to use it because of something it isn't?
I'm starting to realize (taking off my rose-tinted glasses) that a lot of these companies really like children. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. etc.
I'm guessing it's because children will learn how to use their products and probably stick with it. I'd love to see some statistics of this in practice though.
One would assume children would rather a "proper computer" (read: Windows) when they grow up though. I'm not sure.
There might still be a small window of opportunity for Mozilla to be the champion of the web platform. It has an excellent operations team. Its CDN still delivers updates to hundreds of millions of devices. I would have loved to see Moz Inc create a Netlify service for developers and a Shopify service for small businesses.
Also, stop removing useful features from Firefox. It's insane the amount of functionality that has been totally chopped out.
Sometimes the most important thing is persistence.
Anyway, they should really put more focus on polishing the containers extension, and make it one of the main selling points. This is the feature that has converted the most people in my experience. And since it's unique to any browser AFAIK, it has great retention power once one integrates it in their workflow.
Edit: ah, nevermind, I thought this was specifically a Firefox IOS release today. Taking the link directly talked about iOS for me.
But it seems like Cloudflare is working on it https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypt-that-sni-firefox-edition...
- https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/07/encrypted-clien...
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1709263
Cloudflare has another blog post with the implementation details for ECH:
I'm not even really sure what "Expanded Dark Mode" is.
DOH is probably good for many people, but I prefer to run my own DNS server (and I VPN back into my LAN when not at home with WireGuard).
Or anything at all it seems ...
Do you have any reference to issues where firefox lost credibility?
Sure, it's using Safari as a renderer, but these days that's hardly where the differentiating value is.
There's no way that the intersection of people who care about online privacy, don't mind that Firefox is less web-compatible than a Chromium-fork, but also don't care at all about FOSS is big enough to sell a product that everyone else is providing for free, especially since you're not just saying goodbye to the Googlebux, you're also saying goodbye to part of your workforce (the volunteers,) free advertising (FOSS advocates and default installs on desktop Linux,) web devs (no one would pay to test pages on a niche proprietary engine,) extensions (most high-profile extension devs are FOSS advocates,) and most of the community. It wouldn't work.
What I am advocating for is making Firefox users also become its customers, vs current situation where user!=customer, and customer being Google. This obvious and giant conflict of interest has to be a major contributing factor to the decline of Firefox.
I am aware that Firefox may lose 90% of its user base if it switched to a paid model, but my point is it will do so eventually anyway - if things do not change radically.
However, Microsoft was once forced to offer a choice of browsers to EU users of Windows, which included all major competitors and even a number of minor browsers. Google doesn't have quite as strong of a monopoly as Windows did, but it wouldn't be too unreasonable to offer the user a choice.
Additionally, while I see a small number of Android apps that actually embed the default browser when they want to show some web content, I see many more that embed what is clearly a Chrome-based web view. I'm not familiar with what the relevant underlying APIs are, but I would prefer it if more apps respected my choice, and Google are probably in a position to make that the easy/default choice, but they don't.
I mean technically apps on Android can bundle whatever web rendering engine they want. The majority of them either use Android's WebView components (see: DuckDuckGo, and a LOT of others), or are just a hard fork of Chromium (see: Kiwi Browser, Bromite, Brave, etc.)
On that note, I remember trying to find a non-Chromium browser on Android (bar Gecko / Firefox, of course). It was practically impossible. I think there was some sort of WebKit thing, but it was like 10 years out of date.
The only practical alternative is Gecko, but IMO it has a lot of catching up to do with performance, battery life, etc. etc. Personally I don't like the redesign, but I'm not sure what the public sentiment is aside from vocal Firefox users.
It's the same with desktop mostly IMO: either Firefox or Chromium. I'd love to be proven wrong here, though.
It'd be interesting to see if Servo would change things on both mobile and desktop, though. Again, it has a lot of catching up to do in comparison to Chromium.
"Allowed?" Next you'll tell me that Microsoft should be forced to exclusively advertise other browsers other than their own on Bing before search...
> so if this isn't abuse of market power then I don't know what.
Abuse of market power would be preventing the mention of any other browser when using search and Google has never done that.
Or how about a better example: Apple actively preventing any third party web browsers on iOS, then later only allowing third party web browsers to use the Safari Engine. THAT is anticompetitive.
Google simply has the better product in this case.
> Abuse of market power would be preventing the mention of any other browser when using search and Google has never done that.
Another way to abuse market power is to use ones dominance in one maket to crush competition in another market.
Microsoft was punished for this after they bundled IE with Windows back in the day. Google has gone extremely much further down the road of abusing market dominance in one market (search, ads) to crush competition in browsers.
Also: did you forget my point about how Google web properties work better if you fake the headers and pretend to be Chrome?
> Or how about a better example: Apple actively preventing any third party web browsers on iOS, then later only allowing third party web browsers to use the Safari Engine. THAT is anticompetitive.
The value is not in the engine. The engine is something you make to get an advantage in customers mind. Many browsers, both historic and present are just skins on top of other browser engines.
> Google simply has the better product in this case.
So you say Tree Style Tabs work in Chrome now and it doesn't eat memory for breakfast, lunch and dinner? That's news to me ;-)
Google had to have had the better product otherwise you wouldn't have been introduced to Chrome by using their search engine.
Tell me more!
I was clearly wrong, though it is easy to change your user agent it's unlikely that many Firefox users have done it.
Yeah, i do.
> so I'd take a trustworthy chrome fork that meets my other requirements.
Fair enough.
> Unfortunately, Brave = untrustworthy player: https://brave.com/brave-ads/
Yeah, but i can compile that stuff out like i do with the mozilla crap, while still getting some of the core stuff they add like native ipfs support
But I was mostly interested in the theoretical situation if brave forked from the servo stuff and not its existing chromium stuff, no interest in touching that.
I'm going to go with the latter, but at best this is debatable and highly subjective depending on what matters to you.
> I have only seen the code of Chrome and it’s very Google-like C++, with truly enormous codebase.
I don't know where you are going with this; FF is a large code base too, uses servo (rust) and c++.
> Even Chrome did not fork Firefox back in the day and forked Safari.
> Electron did not use Firefox either.
Good for them? Never been interested in chrome/chromium or electron based apps.
I had always wondered why since Brendan Eich came from mozilla, forking from it and going their own way would be natural for them (imo), highly doubt that all of a sudden all the stuff he worked with for years became crap overnight and the decision was probably more political than anything, but who knows, just baseless speculation on my part.
This[0] says they started off with electron pre dec-2018, nothing about gecko.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#History
Of decentralized lending protocols? aave, compound, benqi, etc.
Because I have firefox instances running for months with tremendous amounts of tabs open on 8GB of RAM laptop and has absolutely zero problem with it.
Apt runs weekly.
Firefox still blows.
I'd add there is a large gap in usage between uBlock and Matrix. uBlock has over 10 million users whereas Matrix is somewhere over 100,000.
Do you mean that tree style tabs now works on Chrome or that everyone agrees that Chromes memory issues have been sorted? Or something else?
> Google had to have had the better product otherwise you wouldn't have been introduced to Chrome by using their search engine.
Maybe ten or fifteen years ago this was true.
These days it is so broken you can search for a literal term and get all spam and no ham.
Also ads are exempt from that anyway and these ads in particular were probably hard coded since no other ads has ever been shown in that spot.
Edit, some more details:
The reason Chrome leads is kind of the same as why IE dominated the marked for years:
- a generally good browser (IE was best for a long time)
- strategic incompatibility on core web assets: MSDN for Microsoft (worked nicely if you changes request headers in Opera to simulate IE), various web properties for Google
- enough non standard hacks that people who just slap together code and only test in IE/Chrome might easily include some IE/Chrome-specific hack
- carpet bombing of the market: In Microsofts case by bundling it with all new PCs, in Googles case by massive ad campaigns, including smothering the otherwise always clean and minimal front page(!) with Chrome ads.
- Also by adding it to shareware/freeware installers
- In Microsofts case also by shadyd deals with others about not including competing browsers. (Not confirmed in Googles case, yet ;-)
There is a reason why we old timers say "Chrome is the new IE".
A company putting an ad on their own website for their own product isn't an abuse of market position. That's the falsehood I'm referring to.
Everything else that you keep tossing back in as "do you mean..." is an attempt to evade that point that I made and to put words in my mouth.
Don't trust Google? Don't like Chrome? Don't use it. It's not like we've only got one bundled browser to work with these days. Even if it's crypotrash mining and referral link hijacking software like Brave. That's better, right? Or Apple's stagnant Safari. Or... Perhaps you'd be more comfortable in Lynx or Mosaic. They work as well now as they used to then.
So. Yeah. Chrome has market share because it continues to remain better than the alternatives. Not really that difficult of a concept, methinks.
The difference between then (IE/Windows Bundling) and now (Chrome/Google Advertising Might) is that we still get everything Google releases as open source. Use de-Googled Chromium and move then fuck on with your life.
Get off my lawn, punk.
In that case bundling IE with Windows definitely isn't abuse of market power either.
> It's tiresome and doesn't contribute one bit when you defeat any points you may legitimately have with all that griping. What's the point in tossing out the age card here?
First time I've heard anyone at HN indicating age is an advantage.
I put that there for humorous effect, a self depreciating joke in between the serious comparison of two abusing monopolies.
> Everything else that you keep tossing back in as "do you mean..." is an attempt to evade that point that I made and to put words in my mouth.
So tell me what you mean then.
Except that having only one implementation of the web will make it into a closed ecosystem. The current few (partial) implementations are a very weak state and firefox should be kept alive for this reason alone.
And with the grossly huge scope of web browsers, creating a new one is basically impossible to even large players.
Electron's architecture is insecure by default in too many ways, even if one enables the Chromium Sandbox (which was off by default at least when we used Electron).
> unrelated to the prior move from Gecko to Chromium/Blink
Is there publicly available reason for this move? No worries if there isn't.
No plans on forking from ff v ~70-ish with the servo stuff and going with the rust stuff or just more with chromium? Too much work and not worth it at this point or other tradeoffs? I like a lot of stuff you have been doing with brave (use the default search instead of ddg now in my ff fork) and wish some of it was in ff without me personally having to do it xD
It's a memory leaking hog on every system I use it on. Windows, Ubuntu, even Android.
Even back to the days of Phoenix, it always had issues with not eventually turning into a leaking process.
The memory usage isn't amazing but it's not terrible. If I go to about:memory and do a report, it seems that nearly all of it is going to Google websites despite being the vast minority of my open tabs. Gmail, Gchat, and Youtube.
So I'm not going to sit here and blame Mozilla because Google websites in particular are hogging a lot of memory.
And this was after nuking the configs and doing an "sudo apt purge firefox && sudo apt install firefox"
I already have.
Being disingenuous is all you have left, apparently.
Google is evil because they took over the web with Chrome.
But they're still evil because they're singlehandedly keeping Mozilla alive with funding.
Yes. Especially evil for keeping distant competition alive.
And really evil for enforcing web standards with a browser engine that works.
And also evil because they open source everything.
Grr. Google bad, of course.
But can you see that a company can be both good and bad at the same time?
And that in cases like this with huge companies (both in brain mass and economic impact) the negative sides has extreme effects on the surroundings?
One nitpick:
> And really evil for enforcing web standards with a browser engine that works.
One of the problems with Chrome and IE was that they don't enforce web standards: you get away not only with behavior that others hasn't implemented yet, but also with certain shortcuts that aren't in any standard.