> If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked.
I mean, you could just stop using Chrome if this happened, if you haven’t already. All the other popular browsers would be unaffected, and I’m sure projects like ungoogled-chromium would patch a change like that out.
I'm using Ungoogled Chromium. But let's don't kid ourselves, this is just a temporary solution. There will always be the point where it's impossible to maintain patches and keep up with the cat and mouse game upstream.
Also all the other popular Browsers are either based on Chromium or based on Gecko, an engine that has no developers anymore since last year.
When I wrote about sustainability, that's exactly what I was talking about.
You're confusing gecko and servo. Servo is an experimental web engine which was being developed by Mozilla to test experimental tech. Recently its dev team was laid off. Gecko is the production engine that Firefox is based on, and it's still under full steam ahead development by engineers employed by Mozilla.
The Mozilla Corporation receives nearly all of its revenue from Google. As their market share inevitably trends toward zero (iOS defaults to Safari, Windows to Edge, and Android to Chrome), their negotiating power with Google and other search engines will suffer.
Yes, this is a serious issue. However, I wouldn't claim that Mozilla has any negotiating power with Google even today - Google is likely to continue to fund Mozilla in order to stave off potential antitrust action.
Are we counting open source contributors or paid developers here?
Because I think there's a difference in assumption vs reality here. External contributors work in their free time and are, as I'm trying to point out in my other comment, unsustainable as a work model [1] [2]
I mean, you could just stop using Chrome if this happened, if you haven’t already. All the other popular browsers would be unaffected, and I’m sure projects like ungoogled-chromium would patch a change like that out.