It all comes down to web engines. There are many browsers built on top of Chromium and a few that use Gecko or WebKit. Some of these try to make as few changes to the underlying engine as possible to ease the engine upgrades in their codebases, and due to the nature of the web they have to keep updating their engines.
So, a big question then is if Google, Apple, or Mozilla decide to change their engine in such a way that it would improve user tracking on the web how many of these custom browser companies and individuals (Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, Tor, folks, etc.) would be willing to undo those changes, or add code to mitigate the tracking? And then how many of them will keep migrating their patches from one version of the engine to the next? And how many of them will continue doing so when the engine maintainers will actively try to make this work harder? And how many investors will keep giving money to these browser companies?
The web is very vulnerable, and Mozilla with its board slowly leeching off all the resources out of it has long been loosing its ground for a long time. I'm afraid that we are at a point when the only way to preserve user privacy is via regulatory means. EU is clumsy, but at least they make the user tracking more annoying for advertisers, and some actors like Apple would be more hesitant to blatantly add ad supporting code to WebKit just to avoid further confrontations with the EU.
So, a big question then is if Google, Apple, or Mozilla decide to change their engine in such a way that it would improve user tracking on the web how many of these custom browser companies and individuals (Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, Tor, folks, etc.) would be willing to undo those changes, or add code to mitigate the tracking? And then how many of them will keep migrating their patches from one version of the engine to the next? And how many of them will continue doing so when the engine maintainers will actively try to make this work harder? And how many investors will keep giving money to these browser companies?
The web is very vulnerable, and Mozilla with its board slowly leeching off all the resources out of it has long been loosing its ground for a long time. I'm afraid that we are at a point when the only way to preserve user privacy is via regulatory means. EU is clumsy, but at least they make the user tracking more annoying for advertisers, and some actors like Apple would be more hesitant to blatantly add ad supporting code to WebKit just to avoid further confrontations with the EU.