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EU's new tech laws are working as small browsers gain market share (www.reuters.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet's Google, Microsoft, and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies.

The early results come after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a "choice screen."

Cyprus-based Aloha Browser said users in the EU jumped 250% in March - one of the first companies to give monthly growth numbers since the new regulations came in.

Norway's Vivaldi, Germany's Ecosia and U.S.-based Brave have also seen user numbers rise following the new regulation.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The web standard is so broken that it’s absolutely infeasible to write a new engine, and Chromium is much easier to embed into an application than Mozilla’s engine.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The web standard is horrible but it's not infeasible to write a new engine, see https://ladybird.dev/. And there's also still WebKit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Ladybird is pretty infeasible in terms of getting to a point where you can realistically use it for normal web browsing, though.

It's a great project, but it's not proof of the viability of writing an engine for the modern web.

[–] JubilantJaguar 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This seems a bit nihilistic. Yes, Google is in the driving seat but it still has to deal with Apple and even Mozilla within the W3C. So a framework for open web standards exists, and a new engine is always just one fork away. Surely what is lacking is exactly this kind of antitrust regulation, which might incentivize competition at last. So thank you, EU Commission. The web standard is all we have. If it's broken then we need to get fixing it right now.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Would be interesting what would happen when the EU regulates that browsers aren’t allowed to render non-standards compliant pages at all in order to allow new engine development just based on the spec, rather than having to implement all error fallbacks as well.

The EU is just bureaucratic enough that they could do that without realizing what a tornado of poo that would cause.

[–] JubilantJaguar 1 points 7 months ago

Seems unlikely that anyone is going to attempt to regulate browsers. But if they are, then they should begin by forcing them to block ads if the user says so. But that idea sounds too good to be possible.