Completely disagree. Privacy is a 4th ammendment right, so the government has a duty to support privacy first browsers. How am I "secure in my ... papers and effects" if I must use a privacy destroying browser to interact with the Government? If anything, chrome support is what should be questionable.
To say "we are going to support a browser with 2% market share because we like it more" would therefor be a really big deal. I think a far better avenue would be for the government to provide funding for privacy technologies directly, in an effort to increase their marketshare, and thereby making support of those technologies trivial to justify without any potential issues of bias.
The thing is, the government already does this. The majority of TOR's funding comes from the USG, for example. I'd suggest that maybe the government could fund Mozilla's non profit, to a degree.
This is all based on a premise that Mozilla is worthy of that funding. Is Mozilla really the privacy champion that it touts itself as? Would funding be contingent on anything else? If the government is so determined to prioritize privacy, why not Brave? Or some other entity? Or a new entity?
My understanding is that the consequence is denial of the right to privacy is limited to women while they are pregnant. Not a categorical denial of the right to privacy.
> The final decision was little changed from the leaked draft. Writing for the five-justice majority (with Chief Justice Roberts concurring only in the judgment), Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to privacy is not specifically guaranteed anywhere in the Constitution. When unenumerated liberty rights exist — the right to raise your child as you see fit, for example — those rights must be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Reviewing the history of abortion restrictions in the early United States, Alito concluded that the right to abortion is not.
> The opinion ignited a firestorm of controversy. Predictably so: Dobbs is arguably the first case to formally rescind a fundamental constitutional right. The opinion also failed to explain how its logic would not also result in the overturning of Griswold’s right to contraception or a series of other cases that rely on the same logic as Roe. These include Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which invalidated laws criminalizing same-sex intimate sexual conduct, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which recognized the right to marriage for same-sex couples.
Naturally this enforced competition wasn't in Google's interests as its browser became dominant and it adopted the infamous Microsoft strategy to deal with the threat. Apparently we're fast approaching the extinguish phase.
The correct solution to this is for influential public bodies not to insist upon supporting any specific browser or browsers but instead to once again support open web standards and therefore free access to their information and services for all.
This is almost certainly in their own interests anyway. Google has a nasty habit of suddenly killing off its non-standardised extensions. Relying on functionality that other browsers don't necessarily support as well seems unwise.
How do you think WiFi devices work together? Is it because WiFi is a standard? Not really - it's because WiFi vendors all test their chips against other WiFi chips on the market.
Typically the cost of fixing the problem and going through the whole certification process again from the start is significant. There are some direct financial costs but mostly the damage is increased time to market. That's a great incentive for the maker to get their act together and comply with the standards like everyone else as quickly as possible. If you screw up too many times your product might be obsolete before you're ever allowed to sell it.
Not the kind of standards we are talking about.
No browser deserves special treatment here. And this is as true for Firefox as it is for Lynx.