It could have had legal bearing, if Microsoft had not turned it on by default.
Before DNT, the way consent basically worked was that companies just assumed you consented, and only if you specifically denied consent, they would have no chance to defend that in court.
With DNT, if the user turned that on themselves, they would have clearly signalled that they want this the other way around. Do Not Track me, unless I specifically give you my consent. This would have made it hard for companies to defend their behaviour in court.
With Microsoft turning it on by default, there was no way for companies to know, if the user actually wanted privacy, or if they supposedly wanted to be tracked, for whatever reason.
With the GDPR in place, you theoretically now need to get consent every time (including implicit consent, e.g. when the user asks for something to be shipped to their address, that means you can process their address). Most companies don't yet keep to it, though.
Surely google can assume that browser settings represent the user'choice when it fits Google's interest, and they can assume that browser settings don't represent the user's choice when it fits their interest. But everyone knows that google won't tolerate a privacy measure that is used by a majority of users. Microsoft is not to blame for making privacy a default in their browser. It's google who is ignoring that setting.
You cannot just assume the user did not actually want the default setting in their browser.
>With the GDPR in place, you theoretically now need to get consent every time
This is false. There are multiple ways to justify processing of personal data, and your example would fall under data processing necessary to perform a contract at the customer's request. Depending on your location, there might also be legal requirements to record and keep user data, which is also a valid reason that doesn't require consent of the user.
> It could have had legal bearing, if Microsoft had not turned it on by default.
How would that happen?
> Before DNT, the way consent basically worked was that companies just assumed you consented, and only if you specifically denied consent, they would have no chance to defend that in court. (...) With Microsoft turning it on by default, there was no way for companies to know, if the user actually wanted privacy, or if they supposedly wanted to be tracked, for whatever reason.
Herein lies the problem. Companies assumed consent. Which is a nice assumption if you want to abuse users and sell their data - though how can users consent if they typically don't even know what's being done to them? In reality, what companies should assume is lack of consent, and I'm very, very happy that at least for some of us, GDPR is fixing that.
> With the GDPR in place, you theoretically now need to get consent every time (including implicit consent, e.g. when the user asks for something to be shipped to their address, that means you can process their address). Most companies don't yet keep to it, though.
No you don't; you only need it for using user's data for things other than fulfilling user's request. It's kind of like with Cookie law - you don't really need a cookie banner, unless you're tracking people.
(Or in other words, amount of UX problems GDPR/cookie law cause are directly proportional to how abusive a website is towards its visitors. It's a useful signal.)
> And the second feature missing is the search highlight in the scrollbar. It's a mandatory feature for my when searching on a long page (like this one for example) to search for "firefox" and find in the scrollbar everywhere it is.
I don't see how this is mandatory, you can just use the next/previous-result buttons (F3 / Shift-F3) to go to each result, but I guess it would make it much easier to establish some context as to where you are on the page, especially after you've jumped to the next search result.
And the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. That means their only stakeholder that they could pay out their profits to, is the Foundation, which can't take the money, because it's a non-profit. The Corporation can only really save up the money to reinvest it later.
The Mozilla Foundation's legally-binding mission statement is therefore also effectively enforced for the Corporation. The Foundation could throw out the CEO of the Corporation and in general gets to decide what happens in the Corporation, which they're legally bound to tell to follow the Foundation's mission statement, i.e. making the web a healthier place, improving privacy etc.
As a result, the only profit-motive that exists in the Corporation is that the employees want to keep their job.
A small correction: if I recall correctly, the Corporation is legally allowed to give some money to the Foundation, and it does so. But the allowed amount is quite small -- maybe a couple a million a year? I don't remember exactly -- and only a tiny fraction of the Corporation's profits.
Yeah, I simplified there. I remembered it being a really insignificant amount that they're limited to, and then more importantly, it's still a non-profit. If they take the money, they're just as well forced to reinvest it into their mission statement.
The problem is that WebKit isn't really a competitor to Blink:
1) It holds this marketshare mostly because of the forced monopoly on iOS. It's not technologically particularly far ahead or even has a browser implementing it with good marketing.
2) It exists on platforms other than macOS and iOS, but it is being optimized specifically for those platforms and only there can kind of compete with the other browsers. So, if you're not on macOS/iOS, it is hardly a competitor that you could choose from.
3) Chrome's Blink engine was forked from WebKit, so they are actually very similar in a lot of ways. A Blink-WebKit-duopoly would still have many of the disadvantages of a monopoly, like security vulnerabilities being shared and certain innovations being harder, because they have the same architecture.
> sneaking extensions into updates that users didn't opt for.
If you have auto-updates enabled, Mozilla, like Google, has complete control over the source code that runs on your system. Had they wanted to sneak new source code in, they would have specifically not packaged it as an extension, which made it user-visible and limited to the extension API in its capabilities, and instead just patched the Firefox code to include it. So, they were decidedly doing the opposite of sneaking it in.
The Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the legally non-profit Mozilla Foundation. They can't pay out their profit to their stake holders. So, the only profit motive comes from Mozilla employees wanting to keep their jobs.
That's a pretty good reason for Mozilla's decision.