An anonymous reader writes: It's been some 18 months since VentureBeat's last browser benchmark battle. What better time to get the latest results than the start of a new year? Over the past year and a half, Google Chrome has continued to dominate market share, Mozilla Firefox has doubled down on privacy, Microsoft Edge has embraced Chromium, and Brave launched out of beta.

You can click on the individual test to see the results:
SunSpider: Edge wins!
Octane: Chrome wins!
Kraken: Firefox wins!
JetStream: Edge wins!
MotionMark: Edge wins!
Speedometer: Edge wins!
Basemark: Brave wins!
WebXPRT: Firefox wins!

The Chromium version of Edge did a lot better given that the stable release only arrived this week. We were expecting improvements, but not so many outright wins. That said, browser performance was solid across all four contestants -- each browser won at least one test. Performance of course shouldn't be your only consideration when picking your preferred app for consuming internet content. As long as you're using a browser that receives regular updates (and all four of these meet that criteria), you can expect performance to be solid. There is certainly room for improvement, but Chrome, Firefox, and now Edge, as well as Brave, are all quite capable.

In 2018 an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design wrote an article titled "Why I'm switching from Chrome to Firefox and you should too."

Today shanen shared a similar article from Digital Trends. Their writer announces that after years of experimenting with both browsers, they've also finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox -- "and you should too." The biggest draw for me was, of course, the fact that Mozilla Firefox can finally go toe-to-toe with Google Chrome on the performance front, and often manages to edge it out as well... Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. I don't have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. It's rare that I'm forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro's fans don't blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop's fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running. This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years...

Its Enhanced Tracking Protection framework keeps your identity safe by blocking trackers and cookies that otherwise follow you around the internet and collect sensitive information you probably didn't even know you were giving up. On top of that, Firefox can warn if a website is covertly mining cryptocurrency in the background. Most of these protections kick in by default and you have an exhaustive set of options to customize them the way you want. Firefox also lets you look into just how invasive a website is. It actively updates your personal privacy report so you can check how many trackers it has shut overall and for a specific website...

What really clinched the switch to Mozilla Firefox was the fact that it's the only cross-platform browser that's not running Google's open-source Chromium platform. Microsoft's Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi -- each of these browsers run on Chromium, accelerating Google's dominance over the web even when you're not directly using a Chrome user. Firefox, on the other hand, is powered by Mozilla's in-house Gecko engine that's not dependent on Chromium in any way. It may not seem like as vital of a trait as I make it sound, but it truly is, even though Chromium is open-source. Google oversees a huge chunk of the web, including ads, browser, and search, and this supremacy has allowed the company to pretty much run a monopoly and set its own rules for the open internet...

Mozilla as a company has, despite a rocky journey, often taken bold stances in complex situations. In the Cambridge Analytica aftermath, Mozilla announced it would no longer run Facebook advertisements, cutting off direct marketing to over 2 billion users. In a world of tech companies taking frail, facile shots at protecting user privacy and barely delivering on their commitments, Mozilla is a breath of fresh air and you no longer have to live with any compromises to support it.

After 42 years the final installment in the 9-movie Star Wars franchise arrived this weekend during a "moment of transition for the movie business," reports Variety: Its $176 million debut, though massive, ranks as the lowest opening of the most recent three films in the saga, falling far below 2015's "The Force Awakens" ($248 million) and 2017's "The Last Jedi" ($220 million). Enthusiasm for the series is beginning to flag (2019's spin-off "Solo: A Star Wars Story" did the impossible, becoming the first Star Wars movie to lose money). Reviews were lackluster and it's unclear what Star Wars' future will be on the big screen... Disney, the company that bought the rights to the space opera with its $4 billion purchase of Lucasfilm, once envisioned something different for "Star Wars." It believed that the mythology of virtuous Jedi warriors and evil Sith lords was so rich it could spawn a movie a year, making it analogous to Marvel, another in-house purveyor of global blockbusters. Faced with diminishing box office returns, it has been forced to acknowledge that it may have done too much, too fast. Even its ambitious Disneyland theme park, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, has been a disappointment, with attendance far lower than expected.

The one, recent bright spot for Star Wars lovers has been "The Mandalorian," a Disney Plus series that follows a planet-hopping bounty hunter and a co-star in Baby Yoda that boasts a face cute enough to launch a thousand memes. Buoyed by that success, Lucasfilm is moving along with other Disney Plus shows set in a galaxy far, far away, including one featuring Ewan McGregor reprising his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. This flurry of activity indicates that Star Wars' future may not lie in cinemas. It may be in streaming.

If that's the case, "Star Wars" is pivoting along with the rest of the movie business.
The Los Angeles Times seems to agree, noting that this year 10 movies accounted for 38% of the total box office "that's dominated by intellectual-property-powered blockbusters, at the expense of almost everything else." As the studios become increasingly risk-averse, much of the market for midbudget comedies, dramas and rom-coms has migrated to streaming services such as Netflix. Studios are loath to risk the embarrassment of a flop, and streamers are more than happy to use such content to draw subscribers...

"The studios are more corporate-driven and guided by marketing and bean counters than ever before, and the ability to invest in originality is all moving toward streaming," said Rick Cohen, who runs the five-screen Transit Drive-In in Lockport, N.Y. "But they still have $200 million to throw at 'Dark Phoenix.' You could have made 10 original movies for that budget."

Avast, the multibillion-dollar Czech security company, doesn't just make money from protecting its 400 million users' information. It also profits in part because of sales of users' Web browsing habits and has been doing so since at least 2013. From a report: That's led to some labelling its tools "spyware," the very thing Avast is supposed to be protecting users from. Both Mozilla and Opera were concerned enough to remove some Avast tools from their add-on stores earlier this month, though the anti-virus provider says it's working with Mozilla to get its products back online. But recently appointed chief executive Ondrej Vlcek tells Forbes there's no privacy scandal here. All that user information that it sells cannot be traced back to individual users, he asserts. Here's how it works, according to Vlcek: Avast users have their Web activity harvested by the company's browser extensions. But before it lands on Avast servers, the data is stripped of anything that might expose an individual's identity, such as a name in the URL, as when a Facebook user is logged in. All that data is analysed by Jumpshot, a company that's 65%-owned by Avast, before being sold on as "insights" to customers. Those customers might be investors or brand managers.

What do those customers get? Vlcek says Jumpshot, which was initially acquired in 2013, provides "insights on how cohorts of users on the internet use the web." For instance, it could show a percentage of visitors who went from one website to another. That could be useful to anyone monitoring an advertising campaign. "Typical customers would be, for example, investors, who would be interested in how online companies are doing in terms of their new campaigns," the new Avast chief explains. Say Amazon launches a new product -- Jumpshot could determine how much interest it's getting online.

All major browsers -- including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Brave -- have plans to support DNS-over-HTTPS (or DoH), a protocol that encrypts DNS traffic and helps improve a user's privacy on the web. From a report: The DoH protocol has been one of the year's hot topics. It's a protocol that, when deployed inside a browser, it allows the browser to hide DNS requests and responses inside regular-looking HTTPS traffic. Doing this makes a user's DNS traffic invisible to third-party network observers, such as ISPs. But while users love DoH and have deemed it a privacy boon, ISPs, networking operators, and cyber-security vendors hate it. A UK ISP called Mozilla an "internet villain" for its plans to roll out DoH, and a Comcast-backed lobby group has been caught preparing a misleading document about DoH that they were planning to present to US lawmakers in the hopes of preventing DoH's broader rollout. However, this may be a little too late. ZDNet has spent the week reaching out to major web browser providers to gauge their future plans regarding DoH, and all vendors plan to ship it, in one form or another.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Firefox is the only browser that received top marks in a recent audit carried out by Germany's cyber-security agency -- the German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik -- BSI). The BSI tested Mozilla Firefox 68 (ESR), Google Chrome 76, Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, and Microsoft Edge 44. The tests did not include other browsers like Safari, Brave, Opera, or Vivaldi. The audit was carried out using rules detailed in a guideline for "modern secure browsers" that the BSI published last month, in September 2019. The BSI normally uses this guide to advise government agencies and companies from the private sector on what browsers are safe to use. The article includes a list of all the minimum requirements required for the BSI to consider a browser "secure." It also lists the areas where the other browsers failed, such as: Lack of support for a master password mechanism (Chrome, IE, Edge); No built-in update mechanism (IE), and No option to block telemetry collection (Chrome, IE, Edge).

Yesterday, Opera announced the launch of version 68 of its flagship desktop browser, bringing a tracker blocker that will make it harder for advertisers and others to track you while you browse the web. The company says it also has the additional benefit of speeding up page loads by up to 23%. TechCrunch reports: The new tracking protection feature is off by default (as is the existing ad blocker). The tracking feature uses the EasyPrivacy Tracking Protection List, which has been around for quite a few years now. In addition to the new tracking protection, which is increasingly becoming standard among browser vendors (and which is surely putting some additional pressure on Google and its Chrome browser), Opera is also introducing a new screenshotting feature with this update. That's not an unusual feature, but it's a pretty full-featured implementation, with the ability to blur parts of a page and draw on the screenshots.

Developers of the LastPass password manager have patched a vulnerability that made it possible for websites to steal credentials for the last account the user logged into using the Chrome or Opera extension. Ars Technica reports: The vulnerability was discovered late last month by Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, who privately reported it to LastPass. In a write-up that became public on Sunday, Ormandy said the flaw stemmed from the way the extension generated popup windows. In certain situations, websites could produce a popup by creating an HTML iframe that linked to the Lastpass popupfilltab.html window, rather than through the expected procedure of calling a function called do_popupregister(). In some cases, this unexpected method caused the popups to open with a password of the most recently visited site. "Because do_popupregister() is never called, ftd_get_frameparenturl() just uses the last cached value in g_popup_url_by_tabid for the current tab," Ormandy wrote. "That means via some clickjacking, you can leak the credentials for the previous site logged in for the current tab."

On Friday, LastPass published a post that said the bugs had been fixed and described the "limited set of circumstances" required for the flaws to be exploited. "To exploit this bug, a series of actions would need to be taken by a LastPass user including filling a password with the LastPass icon, then visiting a compromised or malicious site and finally being tricked into clicking on the page several times," LastPass representative Ferenc Kun wrote. "This exploit may result in the last site credentials filled by LastPass to be exposed. We quickly worked to develop a fix and verified the solution was comprehensive with Tavis."

Almost three years after launching its desktop version, cross-platform browser Vivaldi has finally released its mobile app today. From a report: The brainchild of Opera's co-founder Jon von Tetzchner published an Android beta version today that brings swipe gesture for navigation, built-in note-taking functionality, and privacy controls including a no-tracking option. While the browser is in beta, I've been using it for a few days, and I haven't faced any major hiccups. Here are some of the features I enjoyed in the new mobile version: Easy bookmark management, easy navigation, plenty of option for tab management, and dark mode, screen capture, notes, and no-tracking features.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The UHD Alliance, a collection of companies who work together to define display standards, has announced Filmmaker Mode, a new TV setting that's designed to show films as they were originally mastered, with as little post-processing as possible. Although the mode will affect multiple settings like frame rate, aspect ratio, overscanning, and noise reduction, its most important element is that it turns off motion smoothing, which creates that horrible "soap opera effect" that makes even the most expensive films look cheap. LG, Vizio, and Panasonic have all expressed an interest in including the new mode in their TVs.

Of course, it's always been possible to turn off this setting (we've got a guide on how to do so right here) but TV manufacturers have an annoying habit of referring to the same setting by different names, confusing the process. LG calls it "TruMotion," Vizio calls it "Smooth Motion Effect," and Panasonic calls it "Intelligent Frame Creation," for example. The difference with Filmmaker Mode is that it will have the same name across every TV manufacturer, and the UHD Alliance also says that it wants the setting to be enabled automatically when cinematic content is detected, or otherwise easily accessible via a button on the TV remote. Over a dozen high profile directors have expressed support for the new mode, including Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and JJ Abrams.

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian about the questionable decision in the 1950s to get rid of Sydney's trams in favor of private cars. From the report: In the late 1950s Sydney ripped up its tram network, once one of the largest in the world. Nearly 1,000 trams -- some only a few years old -- were rolled to the workshops in the city's eastern suburbs and stripped of anything that could be sold, before being unceremoniously tipped on their sides, doused with sump oil and set ablaze. Barely a decade before its closure, Sydney's tram system had carried 400 million passenger journeys a year on a network of more than 250km, primarily serving the eastern, southern and inner-west suburbs, and stretching as far north as Narrabeen at its peak. But the explosion of car traffic in the postwar years persuaded the New South Wales government that urban freeways were the way of the future (the first in Australia, the Cahill Expressway, opened in 1958), and trams were an impediment to that vision.

The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to "burning hill" at Randwick. Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network "the largest organized vandalism in our nation's history." He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. "When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic. That wasn't how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia. The trams are slowly returning, as the city painfully rebuilds a tiny part of its old system. "The construction of 12.8km of light rail from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford will cost $2.7 billion at the latest estimate, has caused untold misery to shops and other businesses in its path and will be almost a year overdue by the time even the first section is open," the report says.

"The new line hardly represents a fundamental shift in Sydney's transport thinking, coming as it does alongside the vast 'congestion-busting' WestConnex freeway project, and further investment in metro rail (a separate light rail link is also under construction at Parramatta). But it is a reminder that the city might have looked very different today but for the decision taken in the 1950s -- and ruthlessly carried out -- to prioritize motor transport."

With TVs now delivering images faster than movies, TV manufacturers have tried to make up for that discrepancy via a digital process called motion smoothing. Whether you've realized it or not, you've likely watched a movie in motion smoothing, as it's now the default setting on most TVs sold in the United States. Bilge Ebiri from Vulture says that while this feature was well-intentioned, "most people hate it." He argues: "Motion smoothing transforms an absorbing movie or narrative TV show into something uncanny. The very texture of what you're watching changes. The drama onscreen reads as manufactured, and everyone moves like they're on a daytime soap -- which is why it's sometimes called the 'soap-opera effect.' In other words, motion smoothing is fundamentally ruining the way we experience film." From the report: Motion smoothing is unquestionably a compromised way of watching films and TV shows, which are meticulously crafted to look and feel the way they do. But its creeping influence is so pervasive that at the Cannes Film Festival this May -- the same Cannes Film Festival that so valorizes the magic of the theatrical experience and has been feuding with Netflix for the past two years -- the fancy official monitors throughout the main festival venue had left motion smoothing on.

That seems like a funny oversight, but it's not surprising. "There are a lot of things turned on with these TVs out of the box that you have to turn off," says Claudio Ciacci, lead TV tester for Consumer Reports, who makes sure to switch smoothing off on the sets he evaluates. "It's meant to create a little bit of eye candy in the store that makes customers think, at first glance, Hey, look at that picture, it really pops. But when you finally have it at home, it's really not suitable." He notes that most people don't fiddle much with their settings because motion smoothing isn't easy to find on a TV menu. (It's also called something different depending on the manufacturer.) Which gets to the heart of the problem: As more and more people watch movies at home instead of in theaters, most won't bother trying to see the film as it was intended to be seen without the digital "enhancements" mucking it up. "Once people get used to something, they get complacent and that becomes what's normal," Morano says. And what films were supposed to look like will be lost. Mark Henninger, editor of the online tech community AVSForum, suggests TV manufacturers "just put a couple of buttons on the remote that are direct surface level -- TV, movie, sports, or whatever." The industry's reluctance, he says, has as much to do with uncertainty as anything else. "Manufacturers don't know who to listen to. They don't know if it should be the reviewers, their own quality-assurance lab, or user complaints."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Malicious apps from a campaign called "Agent Smith" have been downloaded to 25 million Android devices, according to new research by cyber-security firm Check Point. The apps, most of them games, were distributed through third-party app stores by a Chinese group with a legitimate business helping Chinese developers promote their apps on outside platforms. Check Point is not identifying the company, because they are working with local law enforcement. About 300,000 devices were infected in the U.S.

The malware was able to copy popular apps on the phone, including WhatsApp and the web browser Opera, inject its own malicious code and replace the original app with the weaponized version, using a vulnerability in the way Google apps are updated. The hijacked apps would still work just fine, which hid the malware from users. Armed with all the permissions users had granted to the real apps, "Agent Smith" was able to hijack other apps on the phone to display unwanted ads to users. That might not seem like a significant problem, but the same security flaws could be used to hijack banking, shopping and other sensitive apps, according to Aviran Hazum, head of Check Point's analysis and response team for mobile devices. There was also a "dormant" version of "Agent Smith" in 11 apps on the Play Store, which could have been triggered into action by a banner ad containing the keyword "infect." The apps have since been removed from the Play Store, but had over 10 million downloads.

The Google Earth team recently released a beta preview of a WebAssembly port of Google Earth. The new port runs in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, including Edge (Canary version) and Opera, as well as Firefox. From a report: The port thus brings cross-browser support to the existing Earth For Web version, which uses the native C++ codebase and Chrome's Native Client (NaCl) technology. Difference in multi-threading support between browsers leads to varying performance. Google Earth was released 14 years ago and allowed users to explore the earth through the comfort of their home. This original version of Google Earth was released as a native C++ based application intended for desktop install because rendering the whole world in real time required advanced technologies that weren't available in the browser. Google Earth was subsequently introduced for Android and iOS smartphones, leveraging the existing C++ codebase through technologies such as NDK and Objective-C++. In 2017, Google Earth was released for the Chrome browser, using Google's Native Client (NaCl) to compile the C++ code and run it in the browser.

Opera Software, the company behind the Opera browser, today launched a custom version of its browser dedicated to online gamers and streamers on Windows platform. From a report: Named Opera GX, the browser comes with dedicated features that let users limit the browser's access to computer resources such as CPU (processor) and RAM (memory). The idea is to provide gamers with a way to navigate the web while leaving resources available for games or streaming applications that the gamer might also be running at the same time. "Running a game might require a lot of effort from your machine. Even more so if you are streaming while you play," said Maciej Kocemba, product director of Opera GX. "Before Opera GX, gamers often shut down their browsers to not slow down their gaming experience. We came up with the GX Control feature to make people's games run more smoothly without requiring them to compromise on what they do on the Web." Besides the GX Control Panel that lets users manage CPU and RAM usage limits, Opera GX also comes with Twitch integration, meaning users can log into their Twitch accounts via the browser's sidebar.

Despite sharing a common Chromium codebase, browser makers like Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi don't have plans on crippling support for ad blocker extensions in their products -- as Google is currently planning on doing within Chrome. From a report: The three browsers makers have confirmed to ZDNet, or in public comments, of not intending to support a change to the extensions system that Google plans to add to Chromium, the open-source browser project on which Chrome, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi are all based on.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft started testing a new Microsoft Edge browser based on Chromium a little while ago. The company has been releasing new canary and dev builds for the browser over the last few weeks, and the preview is actually really great. But if you watch YouTube quite a lot, you will face a new problem on the new Edge. It turns out, Google has randomly disabled the modern YouTube experience for users of the new Microsoft Edge. Users are now redirected to the old YouTube experience, which lacks the modern design as well as the dark theme for YouTube, as first spotted by Gustave Monce. And when you try to manually access the new YouTube from youtube.com/new, YouTube simply asks users to download Google Chrome, stating that the Edge browser isn't supported. Ironically, the same page states "We support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge." The change affects the latest versions of Microsoft Edge Canary and Dev channels. It is worth noting that the classic Microsoft Edge based on EdgeHTML continues to work fine with the modern YouTube experience.

Few home-grown Google products have been as successful as Chrome. Launched in 2008, it has more than 63% of the market and about 70% on desktop computers, according to StatCounter data. Mozilla's Firefox is far behind, while Apple's Safari is the default browser for iPhones. Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers are punchlines. From a report: Google won by offering consumers a fast, customizable browser for free, while embracing open web standards. Now that Chrome is the clear leader, it controls how the standards are set. That's sparking concern Google is using the browser and its Chromium open-source underpinnings to elbow out online competitors and tilt entire industries in its favor. Most major browsers are now built on the Chromium software code base that Google maintains. Opera, an indie browser that's been used by techies for years, swapped its code base for Chromium in 2013. Even Microsoft is making the switch this year. That creates a snowball effect, where fewer web developers build for niche browsers, leading those browsers to switch over to Chromium to avoid getting left behind.

This leaves Chrome's competitors relying on Google employees who do most of the work to keep Chromium software code up to date. Chromium is open source, so anyone can suggest changes to it, but the majority of programmers who approve contributions are Google employees, and any major disagreements get settled by a small circle of senior Google employees. Chrome is so ascendant these days that web developers often don't bother to test their sites on competing browsers. Google services including YouTube, Docs and Gmail sometimes don't work as well on rival browsers, sending frustrated users to Chrome. Instead of just another ship slicing through the sea of the web, Chrome is becoming the ocean.

"When you turn on the setting in your browser that says 'Do Not Track', you probably expect to no longer be tracked on most websites you visit. Right? Well, you would be wrong," explains DuckDuckGo's blog.

Their recent study found "a quarter of people have turned on this setting" -- representing hundreds of millions of web surfers -- and that most of them were unaware that in fact, "no law requires websites to respect your Do Not Track signals, and the vast majority of sites, including most all of the big tech companies, sadly choose to simply ignore them."

Now they've written draft legislation -- "the Do-Not-Track Act of 2019" -- to "serve as a starting point" for legislators to close this loophole. SearchEngineLand reports: If the act picks up steam and passes into law, sites would be required to cease certain user tracking methods, which means less data available to inform marketing and advertising campaigns. The impact could also cascade into platforms that leverage consumer data, possibly making them less effective. For example, one of the advantages of advertising on a platform like Google or Facebook is the ability to target audiences. If a user enables DNT, the ads displayed to them when browsing those websites won't be informed by their external browsing history...

This proposal is quite far from being signed into law, but the technology is already built into Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and Internet Explorer. With the adoption of GDPR just a year behind us and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren's proposed legislation to regulate "big tech companies" drawing more attention to digital privacy issues in Washington, the Do-Not-Track Act could be a realistic outcome.
DuckDuckGo says they're announcing their draft legislation because "It is extremely rare to have such an exciting legislative opportunity like this, where the hardest work -- coordinated mainstream technical implementation and widespread consumer adoption -- is already done....

"We hope the Do-Not-Track Act of 2019 serves as a useful guide to start thinking seriously about this amazing legislative opportunity."

Google said today it will start giving European Union smartphone users a choice of browsers and search apps on its Android operating system, in changes designed to comply with an EU antitrust ruling. From a report: Starting Thursday and following a software update, users in the EU opening Google's mobile app store will be presented with a choice of alternatives to Google search and Chrome. The Alphabet unit said options will vary by market, but Microsoft's Bing and Norway's Opera are notable competitors in the European search and browser market respectively.

The changes could help Google avoid additional fines after being scrutinized by the EU for almost a decade. The European Commission, the bloc's antitrust body, last year fined Google $4.8 billion for strong-arming device makers into pre-installing its Google search and Chrome browser, giving it a leg up because users are unlikely to look for alternatives if a default is already preloaded. The EU ordered Google to change that behavior and threatened additional fines if it failed to comply. In a statement, FairSearch, a group that includes Czech search engine Seznam.cz and Oracle, rejected the changes as insufficient. "It does nothing to correct the central problem that Google apps will remain the default on all Android devices," the group said. FairSearch filed one of the first complaints to the EU on Android.