Mozilla alleges tech giants’ bias against Firefox
Mozilla has published a list of ways big tech gatekeepers prevent independent browsers — such as its browser, Firefox — from flourishing on their platforms.
In a recent blog post, Mozilla expressed concerns about how tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft use tactics to ensure users pick their browsers instead of independent options like Firefox.
It goes on to state that companies do this in several ways, such as “making it harder for a user to download and use a different browser, ignoring or resetting a user’s default browser preference, restricting capabilities to the first-party browser, or requiring the use of the first-party browser engine for third-party browsers.”
To shed light on the issue, the company has published a new issue tracker documenting how it views Firefox as being disadvantaged.
Apple has, by far, the most issues as Mozilla sees it, with ten individual complaints being listed, compared to Microsoft and Google’s three each. Included in its list of issues, Mozilla cites Firefox’s inability to “programmatically set itself as the default [browser]”, import browsing information like history, bookmarked sites, and cookies, and read Messages data as major concerns.
Mozilla may claim the most individual issues against Apple, but Google’s Chrome has the largest worldwide share by far. Chrome holds more than three times the marker share that Safari has, across Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
Mozilla also calls on other browser vendors and non-browser groups to publish their concerns similarly.
The browser developer’s indexing comes at a time when big tech faces increased scrutiny over alleged gatekeeping practices. Recently, European media and technology companies have signed a letter stating that tech giants have neglected their obligations to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act.
After more than four years of investigations, the Department of Justice is preparing to sue Apple for alleged anticompetitive behavior, potentially in the next few months.
