Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Safari are the most used browsers in the world, but Mozilla decided to provoke them all with a 60-page document published on its official portal showing how these companies often use their operating systems to make their browsers more popular.
According to the report entitled “Five Walled Gardens: Why Browsers Are Essential to the Internet and How Operating Systems Maintain Them”, operating systems like Chrome OS, Windows and macOS make it difficult for their users to choose a browser, forcing them to often to use the one that comes installed by default.
Why is it important? Without Mozilla’s Gecko engine, Google’s Blink engine would have no competition, so the web would end up in the hands of a single company putting security and privacy at risk.
The document mentions several issues with this practice, ranging from limiting choice to even user privacy to reducing competition and collecting data for the purpose of targeted advertising.
Mozilla also claims that the quality of browsers tends to be reduced with reduced competition, as browsers appeal to unique integrations for their operating systems, making competition unfair by making it difficult to change the default browser on systems such as Windows, where several steps are required to switch browsers.
Windows users who want to get closer to Firefox have to overcome a series of entries that try to convince them to continue using Microsoft Edge: in the start menu, in the App Store and even in Bing search.
It is not difficult to remember examples of features unique to certain systems, such as support for voice assistants such as Siri on iOS, which even forces third-party browsers to use Safari’s WebKit engine, and Google Assistant on Android, which restricts commands to Chrome.
Which browser do you use? Tell in the comments.
