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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 0x815@feddit.de to c/europe@feddit.de

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 0 points 7 months ago (4 children)

How many of these independent browsers are based on Chromium? I tried looking into Aloha first, but couldn't find anything to confirm either way.

[–] anlumo@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago (1 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.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 0 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.

[–] anlumo@feddit.de 0 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] Diplomjodler@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

If you strip out all the data mining, chromium is a fine browser engine.

[–] Kornblumenratte@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago (3 children)

According to softpedia (the descriptions of the web engine is somewhat buried in the texts):

Aloha: chromium

Vivaldi: chromium

Brave: chromium

AFAIK Ecosia is not a browser, but a search engine.

TL;DR all

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Gotcha. So really the only viable competition is Mozilla Firefox (+ forks) vs Google.

[–] Zacryon@feddit.de 0 points 6 months ago

As it always has been.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ecosia web browser for Android devices is based on Chromium too, see its Wikipedia article.

[–] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ecosia isn't even a search engine. The search engine is bing, ecosia is just a frontend for Bing

[–] Kornblumenratte@feddit.de 0 points 6 months ago

Is it just a frontend for Bing? The results differ. I'm not shure which search engine I like best.

[–] blackfire@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

All of them. None are building their own engines.

[–] Zacryon@feddit.de 0 points 6 months ago

Mozilla Firefox does.

[–] ClearCutCoconut@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What about Servo?

[–] Flipper@feddit.de 0 points 6 months ago

Sadly it's not really usable yet. Would be better if Mozilla hadn't axed them for 2 years.