Why would they? It's FrEE maRKeT. Google can point to Edge and Safari as proof that they don't have a monopoly on browsers, so no anti-trust issue there no sireee. The fact that Edge is based on Chromium does not factor into this (in fact the EU loves it, just look at what they did to "liberalize" the electricity market, aside from some extremely anecdotal stories, it's all companies whose only job is to build a website and the fiscal "infrastructure" to buy energy from state-controlled producers to resell it at a markup using state-controlled energy distributors, but hey there is a private middleman so it's liberal and the innovation/investment dividends will pay out any year now... any year...).

The concept of the WWW being supported by free, standard, interoperable protocols was never codified into law. Despite how much good it has done so many industries to have a common free interoperable tech stack, it doesn't have to be this way; the French Minitel was a walled garden built by France Telecom, and that was 100% legal, because interoperability is not a legal requirement. The Apple Store and Game Consoles work under the same principle, you basically can't sell anything on there without abiding by some asinine rules (Apple has had some issues but IIRC that has to do with them abusing their monopoly position to extract 30 % of all sales, not with the fact that they have an exclusive App Store to begin with).

Also this whole bullshit is not new and was never legally challenged because there is no case. For years you could not even browse instagram in your browser because they "only supported the mobile app", which was a blatant way to force you into a walled garden where they can force you to watch as many ads as they want and where scraping is much harder.

Brave is built on Chromium. So, by default, no they are not safe from this. Without extra effort, Brave will have this feature. I don't know if its feasible but there's a chance the Brave devs can remove the code from their distribution, but that's the best case scenario and just puts them in the same position as Firefox: they get locked out because they refuse to implement the spec.

Not saying you don't realize, but Safari already has this tech. They call it Personal Access Tokens.

No, they didn't mean to render it all as an image, but that everything comes from the content server you're getting the content you want from and thus the ads should be indistinguishable from content. I don't understand how you could misunderstand it to such a degree as to think they meant to render it all as an image.

I don't think that checks out.

Firefox only exists because it's primarily funded by Google. It's funded by Google to ensure they actually have some competition and avoid becoming a Monopoly.

If they kill Firefox or otherwise make it unusable they'll be shooting themselves in the foot.

However, if it ends up being a bad experience that no one wants to use, well that's not on them and they have no responsibility to fix it.

What will likely happen is Firefox will also adopt this DRM.

This needs to be pinned at the top of every single threat about this. Far too many people are just saying "Well I'll just keep using Firefox". They do not understand the gravity of the issue.

Manifest 3 didn't create noticable chnages for the average user. Not yet anyway.

The idea is these changes are never a full at first. The internet will not break tomorrow because of integrity checking.

But it will in a few years. And people will be upset then. When it's far too late.