If you say browser developers need money from the search giant to compete in browser development, you are saying that - right now - you can't compete in browser development without it.
That is a cartel.
We only have four major browsers because only four players can play on a fair playing field. There are people who have been paid millions to create and perpetuate this system. Web developers worrying about feature development without it is their KPI. None of this is a coincidence, none of this is a natural law.
I think we're at an awkward place where governments worldwide have been slow to understand the importance of the global infrastructure that has sprouted, largely due to open source software...
Given that browsers are essential to access information, I think they shouldn't be developed behind a business model, but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.
There should be some independence guarantees in order to make that organization not have to bow to pressure from governments to sacrifice privacy due to funding threats.
I agree in ways, but I think a single global fund is a bit far-reaching and over-centralized, thus prone to corruption.
I think it would make sense for, say, the US, EU, and BRICS (with maybe China as a separate entity) to each have open-source funds for OSS digital infrastructure, and cooperate on global web standards. So if one fund goes rogue/corrupt or is crippled by Republican-types, the world still has two (or three) backups.
You don't need a global infrastructure fund. We already know that projects can be run where people and groups come alongside each other in the context of an open source license and work together. Some people will create "releases" of this project, and some of them will become more and less popular over time, but we don't have to have any one global entity blessing any particular team or aspect of development.
Look to how the Linux kernel is developed, and look to its full history, including forks large and small, alternate releases for alternate reasons, alternate releases by different people and teams, and so on. It's not a hypothetical, it's the organization of one of the largest software projects in the world.
And it's a good thing we don't need a global fund, because trying to start at such a high level is basically asking for this to take the next 15 years to even get started. By contrast, anyone can start a new fork of Chromium or Firefox today... which, again, is not just me theorizing, but is a thing that has happened, several times over. Making it so "getting started" is something that can happen in a distributed fashion without having to get some "global" organization to sign off or be created is superior, which is sort of softballing it a bit because it's honestly the difference between possible and impossible.
If someday that develops into a "global organization" or some set of such, hey, that's fine. But trying to get "someone else" to start it at that level... and it has to be "someone else" since none of us could even hardly start doing that ourselves... is impractical to the level of impossible.
>but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.
How do you ensure it’s not just laundering money with little or no work into the problem.
I think it’s messed up Google essentially funds all browsers but putting it in the hands of politicians isn’t going to help, would be better to try and have more companies funding it so at least the dependency on Google is less.
> but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund
Sounds like a backdoor way to add a kill switch or censor filter to browsers from a central, unelected authority that does not respect the sovereignty and speech and media laws of the individual users' home countries.
No thanks, I'll take an open source, corporate controlled browser 10/10 times.
Be careful, there's some people who actively don't understand what a public good is and are hostile to it very existence, let alone suggesting a government could practically ensure it's viability.
They're also completely blind deaf and dumb to modern society having never had to suffer.
"A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to outlaw cartel practices."
If the article is true, it would be worse than a cartel, it would be effectively a monopoly with a few sockpuppet competitors.
In an actual cartel or oligopoly, you'd expect at least the cartel members be relatively equal in power. But if the article is right, then Google has basically all the power to decide the course of web tech going forward, as the other browsers devs can't meaningfully deviate from whatever vision Google has for the web, without risking their funding.
Of course it’s a cartel. They agree not to compete with each other in online search advertising, one company collects the monopoly profits and then distributes them to the other cartel members.
Google has made sure that _nobody_ can implement a browser with hostile takeovers the "standards" committees and pushing the standards solely in the direction of corporate interests, bypassing consumer interests. The whole point was to make them so complicated it would be impossible for someone without an insane budget to implement one.
Proof of this is the whole advertising sandbox crap... what the hell does an HMTL Client "need" an advert sandbox for?
Breakups are painful. Ultimately they're better for everyone.
I think I share the same opinion: I think this is going to be a very painful break with the previous paradigm, but a much needed one, and that actually this version of the current paradigm is quite bad: browsers only survive when Google pays them money.
Instead this will put all browsers on a much more even playing field, and perhaps it will force governments and citizens to realise that free software takes someone to write it.
Google thinks - accurately - that the more people use the internet the more money Google makes. It invests a fortune into making the internet more accessible through creating better browsers. There isn't anyone else willing to dump that sort of money into browser development.
It is a bit like calling a supermarket a cartel if it relies on local residents for 80% of its profits. No, the technical term is they are paying customers (although in Google's case it is complex and non-traditional because they are carrying the financial burden on behalf of the people who click on ads and there are a bunch of free riders). The odds are against a bunch of alternative customers hiding in the wings waiting to pop up; if they go away then they are just gone.
That’s not correct. Google believes the more people use its search engine the more money it makes from ads. That’s correct.
So it monopolizes the distribution platforms for search engines.
The easier analogy here is an oil monopolist paying off all the tanker and rail and pipeline companies so nobody else can get oil to customers, and then splitting the massive profits with the shippers.
By the way this example actually happened and is the origin of the term “antitrust” which is the area of law that Google was found guilty of violating by multiple judges. So the analogy is right on the nose.
> the technical term is they are paying customers (although in Google's case it is complex and non-traditional because they are carrying the financial burden on behalf of the people who click on ads and there are a bunch of free riders)
Not the fact that Google is the one doing the paying?
It's bizarre to suggest this. They don't need Google's money to compete in browser development. The hard part is competing with a free product. If someone comes up with another way to offer the browser for free, or offer features that make someone want to pay, they can compete. Chromium is already open source. Moving Chrome out of Google does nothing that benefits anyone.
I think offering a simple web browser for free isn't that difficult. That was in place since the 20th century. What will be hard is continuing to develop a web browser that matches the feature set of a browser whose advanced functionality is propped up by the most extractive industry in modern times. That industry has a purpose in funding these advanced features, and while it has opened up a lot of power for individuals it has come at a great cost.
Microsoft isn't exactly a garage startup - and they weren't just dethroned by Google, they actively tried to compete and gain back ground afterwards, building an entirely new browser in the process (pre-Chrome Edge) and offering it for free.
All for nothing, in the end even they had to give up and switch to white-label Chromium.
> A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with each other[1] in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to outlaw cartel practices.
What you are alleging sounds bad, but it doesn't sound like a particularly good match for the term 'cartel'.
It's more of an oligopoly than a cartel to be honest. It's more like how the telco industry operates. High barriers to entry with generous subsidies and incentives for the existing few providers.
Anyone remember when you could buy a physical copy of Netscape Navigator off a store shelf? I personally feel in this weird position where I don't want to pay for software and expect it for free but maybe not fully grasping that "free" software (particularly from for-profit companies) still comes at a cost. Trying to make myself more open to paying for good software again. Unfortunately the subscription model everyone is moving to doesn't make that easier.
Say what you want, but I genuinely miss the comfort of working with Flash where you had a single target and you knew that whatever you see on the screen right now will be exactly the same for every single user, ever, despite on whatever device they will be viewing your project.
I earned my first money for "web developement" in '99, and as much I understand underlying dynamics, I - as a user but mostly as a developer - really enjoy the current phase and I really liked that brief period when IE was the browser.
Are mobile apps the equivalent of that experience today? Cross-platform SDKs for mobile devices have been around for awhile. This might be the closest equivalent to a Flash application?
Web developer jobs are not an obligation of natural law.
You all were impressed upon by the cartel you claim to hate to prop them up.
It’s electromagnetic geometry in the machine. Future hardware makers do not have an honorific obligation to validate developer illusions. They’re working on closed ecosystems that self manage their electromagnetic geometry through to the task at hand without the energy wasting ad hoc effort of human programmers.
Your real problem is nVidia and other chip companies who have no obligation to save jobs of American workers who are just going in circles repeating old memes like a fuzzy VHS.
They literally giveaway the base of Chrome for free under one of the most permissive licenses out there, a new browser doesn't even have to start from scratch.
The complexity is enormous but isn’t google employees are active on various standards committees? Google benefit from the complexity because it ensures there will be less competing browsers.
It has some cartel-like aspects but lacks others, probably because the software industry has a unique structure in which there are nearly no distribution costs.
Cambridge Dictionary: A cartel is a group of similar independent companies or countries that join together to control prices and limit competition. It involves restricting output, controlling prices, and allocating market shares.
Group of similar but independent companies (check) that join together to control prices (no, but they do join together to control the web in other ways), and limit competition (yes, by constantly adding features to HTML whilst market dumping they prevent competitors from arising). It involves restricting output (not in the literal sense, does apply if you consider the synchronized way they implement standards), controlling prices (yes, forcing them to zero instead of the natural market rate), and allocating market shares (yes, if you consider iOS browser restrictions).
This is weird to say the least. All the major browser innovation that has happened during the last decade is because of the funding from Google towards Chromium.
Browsers used to be one of the most critical and insecure software. All the major security enhancement in terms of isolation, sandboxing, privilege separation happened IMHO due to a Google backed browser security research. This benefitted the community because other browsers either adopted Chromium as the base or implemented similar security improvements.
I think it’s not just the browser anymore, the core building blocks like v8, blink etc. forms the foundation of modern web. It will be interesting to see the benefits of anti-monopoly laws when it comes at the cost of destabilising something foundational like Chromium.
> All the major browser innovation that has happened during the last decade is because of the funding from Google towards Chromium.
And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.
Chromium was simply a continuation of innovation that had started before Google even existed.
But in parallel it was Firefox that broke the Internet Explorer monopoly that made 3rd party browsers technically possible in the first place.
But all of that would have been irrelevant if it wasn’t from anti trust actions that prevented MS from doing the stuff they’re doing now (now that the antitrust probationary period is over) such as forcing their browser to be the default browser.
If it wasn’t for antitrust action against MS they would have taken these actions when they were much stronger and the other browsers were not as advanced and Chrome would likely have been nowhere to be seen.
Anyways, you’re wrong even with the idea that chromium has innovated the most. Most of the ideas that Chrome has today were implemented in other smaller browsers such as Opera well before Chrome ever integrated them.
I suspect if Chrome were to disappear tomorrow, browser technology would be far more innovative 2 years from now than it will be with Chrome as the dominant browser.
> And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.
And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would still be a major player in the browser engine race today. Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser engine did.
Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.
I think you should appreciate more how much the tens of billions of dollars Google has invested in Chrome has benefited the web and open source in general. Some examples:
Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.
V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.
Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.
Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.
That antitrust case is what made Microsoft stop developing their browser.
Chrome would still have won because it was force pushed by google.com, every google service, every google software nad large part of 3rd party software had it as bundled (checked by default) install.
I'm going to take a fairly contrarian stance here and say that I've noticed zero improvement this past decade. In fact, stuff seems to be worse.
Google crippled ad blockers on their platform and ads are getting through with increasing frequency.
Stuff that really should be working on my browser or did before is now getting blocked because I apparently should be using a webkit browser. One example is my credit card is getting rejected more and more often lately. But things work fine when I open up Chrome and make a payment.
What things do I want improved? Popups/popunders still happen sometimes. There's still no real solution to block those annoying mailing list popovers either. The dominance of Chrome seems to have frozen the internet in time around 10 years ago. Nothing has really changed between then and now, while before there always seemed to be a feature to look forward to. I guess the last big thing was web assembly, and even that was released nearly a decade ago.
In terms of enjoyment, I think that as a whole things were much better in the late 00s and early 10s. Proprietary crashy resource hog browser plugins had effectively been killed off and JS bloat was still relatively low, so with a few notable exceptions the web was fairly light and sites on average weren’t nearly as irritating or intrusive. Furthermore, devs hadn’t normalized feature chasing and so any modern browser worked correctly for the overwhelming majority of the web and adblock extensions generally didn’t break things.
You're speaking my language here. I think this is exactly what happens when a company has cornered the market. We have completely stagnated, as you say, for at least a decade, maybe more.
Lots of innovation has happened, don't get me wrong. And maybe the web browser as we know is "mature" and therefore lacking need to evolve.
But I'd argue (as I did in a sibling comment) that maybe this drying up of funds could pave the way for new innovation. The web, the creative parts of the web, and definitely the internet as well, didn't have monster budgets to drive its innovation originally. It had some (DARPA, et al), but not like today.
On the surface, it's easy to agree with your opinion.
But then I think, what would it have been like without this investment. Maybe browsers would stay buggy and we'd have an internet with much more diversity in protocol. The internet of today is monotone and subservient to its web master.
I wonder if innovation stagnated because of the extensive (ab)use of the web. Granted, early on, Google's contributions have been more than just pioneering. Both on the backend and the frontend, we all owe them a pint.
But recently, it feels it's just been self-serving. And the monopolistic overtones plus the loss of "do no evil" has arguably hurt us in recent years.
That being said, if the web browser isn't funded so deeply, maybe this is a good thing? Maybe that will give birth to fresh cycles again. I kind of think like letting a corn field grow a new crop to let it regenerate. It could usher in new innovations.
I'm not so sure about that, I bet we'd probably still have Flash, Java Applets, Silverlight and ActiveX controls. The web was a mess before. The recent capture by big platforms is more about taking you out of the web, into their superapps.
edit: On a second thought, as a dev now, I look at React, Angular, all these mega frameworks... and wonder if we're just patching over problems big tech baked into the modern web. First point still stands tho.
The web browser is an ugly mongrel that in a “sane” world would never exist. The only reason it is a platform is due to the immense wealth funneled to ductaping and reinforcing it to hold.
It’s basically a statue of liberty made of ductape and chewing gum, then reinforced with formula-1 level engineering and novel materials research.
The building blocks and lessons learned could be used for something novel (nope not gonna happen it’s permanent now). WASM, json, Skia renderer, pretty awesome v8 virtual machine etc etc … all of that are pretty neat.
I guess the key thing is what is the value of browser now?
It’s the ui to bazillion networked business and government systems, productivity tools etc.
I would argue the sticky moat here is not the web interface, though, but the data and the familiar usage patterns. _Theoretically_ the ux is portable to any system with vector graphics renderer and the data itself should be (a long stretch right) independent of the client ui.
We simply don't know how browsers would have developed in the past years if Google did not have a monopoly. However, we know that monopolies are almost never good for consumers. Therefore, there is a high chance that in an alternative timeline, where one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world did not have a monopoly on browsers, we as consumers, would have been better off.
Exactly. It's like the arguments that are sometimes made to that credit Genghis Kahn with creating an integration of the Eurasian landmass and rolling out administrative reforms. It doesn't tell us what the world could have been like if it wasn't steered towards consolidation, and it doesn't even pretend to morally justify the domination. It's an inevitable consequence of domination that no one but you has the power to roll out reforms or advancements of any type. Organic progression that might have happened anyway becomes something that only could have ever happened through you.
The last major innovation as a product was PWA support starting in 2016.
Browsers used to try new ideas like RSS, widgets, shared and social browser sessions. Interfaces to facilitate low-friction integration with the rest of your life, and to multiplex data sources so that it's not a hassle to have many providers for [news, entertainment, social] experiences.
Likely no coincidence that this innovation languished once monopolies started pumping money into the ecosystem.
Wholeheartedly agree. Opera. Before it pivoted to Chrome and sold to Chinese investors I think was the apex example of this. I will never stop singing the praises of Opera Unite, which was a brilliant and potentially revolutionary way of leveraging the browser for something that could have been the basis of peer-to-peer web and social connection.
I wouldn't call turning browsers into application runtimes "major innovation". Let browsers be HTML document viewers, please. Treat JS like a macro language that doesn't need to be as close in performance to hand-written assembly as possible. Not doing any form JIT at all would be a major boon for security, for example.
>I wouldn't call turning browsers into application runtimes "major innovation".
I would call it one of the most important innovations of the last 20 years. Name another true write-once-run-anywhere universal VM that is installed in billions of consumer devices and costs nothing. It doesn't exist. The only way the entire modern software ecosystem is even possible is because of the web as a platform. Literally everything else is a non-portable closed proprietary stack.
Counterpoint: the majority of it is not really innovation, but is instead it's just a rat race.
The web doesn't need standards evolving at the speed of light, it's only happening because Google's strategy with Chrome has always been to set a pace that others can't follow, not about designing things right.
> it comes at the cost of destabilising something foundational like Chromium
the benefits have already been contributed to chrome, and is easily available even if funding is cut today.
However, google didn't give chrome and their money away altruistically. They wanted something back - control of the browser market, and ability to dictate certain aspects of the web. I do not believe they should have this ability. Taking away monopolistic practises with the browser market can help with this aspect.
Is that a big surprise though? If most economical resources are concentrated into the exclusive control of a few entities, where else could anything that requires some resources be conducted?
Just because an entity happen to output also some positive social impact doesn't mean its current global influence on society is overall extremely toxic. Pablo Escobar is classic example.
> All the major browser innovation that has happened during the last decade is because of the funding from Google towards Chromium.
Some people think innovation mostly happens in startups, but Big Corp monopolies have a unique and important role to play. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC did stuff no startup has the money for.
>major browser innovation that has happened during the last decade
Indeed. And since there has been nothing but bad changes to HTTP and HTML in the last decade, all centered around turning the web into just a means of transporting javascript applications, we know who to blame. I'm still upset that Google and Microsoft agents within the IETF managed to openwash and push QUIC/udp through as HTTP/3.
It's a status quo that definitely needs changing if we're going to have a web usable by human persons and not just corporate persons.
I'm quite certain Apple would have continued their browser engineering and security efforts with or without Google. In the first place, Chromium was a fork of WebKit (which itself is derived from the work of the KHTML team). Apple values the security of their iOS users a lot so they wouldn't have just sat around and watched them get exploited.
It's true that Google 'got there first' on a lot of stuff and that groups like Project Zero do incredible work but the idea that we'd be nowhere without Google is a bit silly.
Agreed that Apple would have continued browser engineering and focused on security as well in response to attack techniques.
I am not suggesting that browsers would not evolve without Google. I am looking at the impact on web today. Perhaps new technologies will emerge, perhaps browser development will adopt different model or perhaps native apps will get a boost.
Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
And if those cash starved tiny companies that develop Safari and Edge lose their Google bribes, I'm sure they'll manage alright.
By the way who funded KHTML? Before everyone except Firefox took that code to make a browser...
firefox is not remotely able to bring in enough cash to justify its current development costs. see https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202... ($12M income from contributions vs $260M spent on software development, the vast majority of which is undoubtedly spent on firefox). so no, mozilla cannot just drop everything else to finally focus only on their browser, as that is guaranteed to bankrupt the company.
Around 2012 I was advocating Wikimedia should have merged with Mozilla where by Wikimedia foundation would continue to fund the development of Firefox.
But then both were rotten and massively over spend.
What? I know the browser is a complex piece of software but considering at least part of the development is done by volunteers isn't this a bit too high?
Maybe at least they should move a part of the operation outside of HCOL areas in the US?
> Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
Why the hell would they?
Mozilla does all the "harebrained" stuff to make money. Especially to diversify their income and rely on Google less. Developing Firefox is a net loss of money.
Is any of their stuff actually making money? It certainly doesn't seem like it, and most of their products and projects were complete failures, because they were getting involved in things where they had no expertise like building a mobile OS.
They won't, and in fact those harebrained moonshots at desperately acquiring scalable revenue will only increase. The money from selling the default search actually directly incentivizes Mozilla to make the browser good to increase the value of the ad space.
Absolutely not. As you say, harebrained schemes would go, also it'd change the browser ecosystem considerably.
In time that might force browsers to adopt a minimum connectivity standard for all browsers that would be simper than those in use today. That would have many upsides for users which I posted about earlier.
> Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
It was the other way around. Other product like VPN, MDN Plus, Pocket was a way to diversify revenue which could be channeled to Firefox, although the problem is Mozilla isn't the best company at making money.
>Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
Again, the whack-a-mole myth that simply won't die. I have asked people about this over and over and over again over I'm gonna say like the past year and a half and at this point I feel pretty confident that this was kind of a mass-hallucinated myth. If you try to be objective and actually look at the numbers and you look at the time period over which Firefox lost browser share and you look at their budgets in the time period over which they engaged in side bets, the math just doesn't add up. None of the side bets ever occurred at prohibitive development costs, and they did not occur over a time period over which Firefox's browser share crashed. There's no such thing as a missing browser feature which Firefox was unable to implement because they didn't have access to resources due to those resources being siphoned away by sidebeds. And people seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually like make a real argument about these things before simply claiming it.
There is a kinda-sorta real version of the argument, which is that around 2016 or so, before Firefox released quantum, the quality of the browser was lagging behind alternatives, and they were investing significant resources in Firefox OS. That's the closest to a real thing that this argument can attach to. But no one making this claim even knows that no one making this claim has looked at their budget, how much it costs to run a VPN, or made any cause and effect connection between that and other things. This is a myth that kind of got hallucinated into existence by hn comment sections.
I do think the critique of straying from a commitment to privacy is a real thing, but the narrative that they wasted time and resources on side features while the core browser experience deteriorated, attempts to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between that and market share is not backed up by any facts. And if you look at my comment history, it's practically a year of pleading with people to cite any example whatsoever that would substantiate this argument.
Back in the 2000s, Microsoft wasn't wasting their desktop money on harebrained schemes like porting Windows to touchscreen mobile devices (or rather, it wasn't a huge priority), and then Android ate their lunch.
Firefox spending money on harebrained schemes like FirefoxOS is a good thing (even if it failed), it's how you find black swans that everyone has to copy from you. Otherwise you're always playing catch-up.
How do you make money by developing a web browser? You build this immensely complex piece of software and then have no choice but to distribute it for free. It seems like with the current browser landscape the only viable business model for companies building browsers is to make your money elsewhere while investing some of it into the browser development.
Mozilla spends very little on "hairebrained schemes" like (for example) Rust these days compared to direct investment in Firefox. Did you miss the massive layoffs that occurred many years ago?
It may also force a minimum-connectivity standard for all browsers (an ISO, etc.) that's simper than existing ones. Users would be the beneficiaries, not Big Tech.
I'm wondering, will the big G be allowed to start another browser project, once they sell Chrome? Let's say Google Cobalt.
They'd fork the open source of Chrome and get to work. After a while, they'll start taking the market share (they can afford to hire back the whole team).
Couple of years later are we in the same position? Maybe, maybe not. I'm curious to see how it plays out.
Probably not a bad thing if you you believe in "antifragility". The technology will improve as it should.
I would consider KHTML as a technology. Much like v8 and blink. I have no doubt the open source technology community is capable of producing great technologies with or without big tech funding. But will it be able to "productize" them and drive large scale adoption? I have my doubts but time will tell.
As a huge open source proponent I have my doubts. A big chunk of the tech people out there are like sheep, that follow the herd. And the herd is filled with people who look at the biggest corp and just copy what they are doing/using cause there must be a reason behind it.
Lately my feeling is more and more people realize why open technology in the hand of the people is important (it is a lot about trust), but I am not too optimistic that it will break that dynamic.
> But will it be able to "productize" them and drive large scale adoption?
Hopefully not. There shouldn't be a "dominant" browser in the "market", there should be a huge mess of choices available. If there is a "dominant" browser, corporations will cut corners and target it directly. They shouldn't be able to get away with that. Browser diversity means they cannot afford to single out users as irrelevant and unworthy of support. They should have no choice but to support them all.
Yeah, I'm sure killing a major revenue stream helps an organization to focus on keeping its cost center going and get rid of other shots trying to bring in more revenue /s
Good. Maybe we can fight back the browser complexity. When you have free browser money, it makes it much easier to partake in turning the web into morass of difficult to implement functionality, that then requires taking browser money.
I completely appreciate what you're saying. Then I look at the level of crazy complexity and backward compatibility in html/css/js/wasm processing. And then I wonder: what are you actually proposing here?
I'm assuming people with such a hatred for browser complexity absolutely love the way those Delphi programs worked back before Web 2.0 made browsers a viable GUI platform, because that's the direction we're going in if browser start dying. Browsers have become the de-facto way to work for most people, and it's a major why Microsoft has been losing market share.
People say HTML/CSS/JS/WASM is complex, but the Ladybird team is proving that a very small team can make a working browser in a few years. Thanks to the efforts of dedicated developers behind browsers, most of the web API, including rendering algorithms and such, has been painstakingly written out in detail.
> the level of crazy complexity and backward compatibility in html/css/js/wasm processing
Most people don't need insane levels of backwards compatibility or intense PWA support. That's just cruft that slows everything down and increases the attack surface for, to the user, no real gain.
Perhaps what we need is a lot of lightweight general-use browsers (based on a small number of engines) and then some heavyweight power-user browsers that can WASM to their hearts' content.
This is going to be unpopular but.. just to illustrate that we didn’t have to be stuck here. Using things like xpra/xephyr to serve a whole x11 gui over web is surprisingly easy and awesome and like 1/100th the complexity of a modern web stack.
This might not be cheap to serve, but it’s cheap to build, and it makes you wonder about the intersection and inflection of those cost curves. And of course we haven’t spent decades optimizing for it.
Don't get me wrong.. REST APIs, HTTP, HTML5, all wonderful. But as a user, the cost/benefits of ubiquitous JavaScript in depth simply to win interactivity and single page apps at the cost of um, everything wrong with the web (and by extension much of the world economy via surveillance capitalism) are a bit suspect.
If I had to make a guess, you, as a person, can't implement an OS, personal computer, or any other appliance in your home. Maybe you can do the wiring or manage to dig out the basement itself. Not sure why browsers specifically draw your ire.
Absolutely! Looking at this objectively, most of the web and browser developments over the last two decades have been for the benefit of Big Tech and business—not typical web users.
These developments have been forced on users to allow that mob to sell us more stuff, confine what we do, and spy on us and collect our statistics etc. Moreover, complicated web browsers provide a larger surface/more opportunites for attack.
Everything I want to do on the Web I could do with a browser from the early 2000s.
I mostly run my browsers without JavaScript. That kills most ads and makes pages load so much faster (as pages are much, much smaller). Without JavaScript I often see a single webpage drop from over 7MB down to around 100kB.
7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the hell do we users put up with this shit?
It seems to me if all that Google infrastructure were to be busted up and browsers went their own way then the changes in the browser ecosystem would eventually force lower common denominator standards (more basic APIs, back to HTML, etc.).
With simper web tech being the only guaranteed way of communicating with all Web uses this would force the sleazeballs and purveyors of crap and bad behavior to behave more openly and responsibly. Also, users would be able to mount better defenses against the remaining crap.
In short, the market would be less accessible unless they reverted to lower tech/LCD web standards, and that'd be a damn good thing for the average web user.
Clearly you’re not doing much front line web development.
Web browsers are incredibly capable and all the features they add are making browsers better and life easier for developers and experience better for users.
This is the sort of comment that back end developers make, who hate front end development.
You do realize, a terrible company will buy chrome and we will be forced to wait until something better arrives (yahoo is interested at the moment). It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.
1) chromium is open sourced and there are plenty of forks
2) You're being facetious if you're saying Firefox is much worse. Feature sets and performance are very similar. Most people would not notice the difference if reskinned
2.1) ditto for Safari or any of the chromium browsers.
3) a monopoly is good for noone (even the monopoly)
I wouldn't personally mind if the pace of innovation changed to being far slower, but I would be concerned if the pace of CVE and bug fixing decayed badly.
I don't think most of the innovation has done very much. I realise this is deprecating the sunk wow factor and deprecating the future wow factor, but in the end, its HTML mostly for me.
In fact, if the primary function of code work for the next 5-10 years was to remove code, I'd be pretty much in favour.
I wrote HTML in the 90s. Modern standards like flexbox are objectively better than the float hacks and tables we used before. The geocities aesthetic is cute but it is extremely limited.
The web is now a competitor for native apps. That would never have been possible without the fast pace of innovation. Don't knock it.
I was last a "web developer" almost two decades ago, but dipping back in on a few occasions I am always appreciative of how much innovation has happened since then.
The world before the huge investment in browser technology was dark. Tables and spacers for meaningful layout and flash or shockwave for anything interactive.
I remember a time when css based drop down menus were seen as some sort of state of the art.
CSS grids are pretty nice, flexbox is ok, float hacks were fine and an improvement over table shenanigans. On the other hand I quite liked the simple hbox/vbox explicit elements that things like ActionScript + MXML had (Flex). I liked Flex overall quite a bit, even if it was just another ill-fated attempt at freeing us from the browser strangleholds like Java applets and the rest. Having native platform functionality and a bunch of other nice things readily available now (barring Safari, especially mobile Safari, holding everyone back worse than IE6 did) is nice, but it doesn't quite feel like innovation when much of that was available via plugins back in the day.
We have to compare apple to apple here. What was the state of native applications back then?
The main point that we could derive from this is that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, and all the more when geopolitics is involved. But still it's fun and sometime inspiring.
The web tried to be a competitor for native apps by offering technical parity but it wasn’t enough. Web versions of serious apps tend to be broken and have a banner asking you to download the native app. You can argue about why it happened, but it happened.
It most certainly is not. Web apps still suck ass compared to native. It's just that users are willing to accept even the crappiest solutions because they don't have very significant needs.
That raises the question why we ended up with such small set of platforms, both being under the umbrella of the same country (no matter which particular one, that's not the point). And then the technical aspects looks several order lower in term of meaningfulness than anything that will influence it at geological level.
Yeah I'm of the mind that most browser innovation has been adding APIs for app development. If all that stuff was split off from the browser and left to electron apps then it would be far less attack surface for exploits.
There's a huge gap between ie6 and what's happening now. I don't think anyone arguing for slowing down what's been happening for the last (let's say) 10 years is talking about the stupidity of ie6. Ie10 has been out for 12 years now!
Does anybody have guesses on what percentage of browser development is for
1. New web standards related changes
2. shiny new service integration(like AI, vpn etc)
3. UI & UX enhancements
4. Bug fixes
5. Security fixes
I believe changes related to 1 and 2 (to an extent) are primarily driven by Google.So, if Chrome changes hands and development slows down I think it would give alternative browsers time to focus on 3 & 4 instead of playing catchup. It might turnout good for the overall browser ecosystem in the long run.
I did a quick get deep research web search and:
> Modern browser engineering is heavily weighted toward maintenance work (bugs + security) rather than shiny new capabilities. After hand-classifying every bullet in the public release notes (stable channel) for the last 12 months of Firefox (versions 117-126), Chrome (versions 126-136) and Safari (17.0-17.6), then folding in counts that Apple, Google and Mozilla themselves publish (for example “39 new features and 169 bug fixes in Safari 17.2”), the picture that emerges looks like this:
Even the most “innovative” browsers invest 45-55 % of their engineering time simply keeping the ship afloat.
True green-field standards work is roughly one-fifth of effort, with Safari and Firefox currently leading in CSS & media-query adoption, Chrome in new JavaScript/DOM APIs.
Eye-catching integrations (VPN, local AI summariser, etc.) stay single-digits because the core browser still has to do the unglamorous work of being correct and secure.
Note that 1. makes web apps more and more powerful, which in turn actually benefits end users (in most cases). It enables us to replace storage and memory consuming Electron and Chromium Embedded Framework apps with their web counterparts.
You could argue that Tauri exists, but I doubt that it would gain large-scale corporate adoption, as storage consumption was never their concern, development time and cost are.
There are two very distinct parts here and the article does a good job of muddying it.
Chromium: the base of Chrome, which is opensource - is developed in part by google and many other companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Brave, and dozens of others who depend on the chromium ecosystem. Google is not "financing" these companies, they are contributing to and benefiting from opensource bidirectionally and the ecosystem benefits from compatibility streamlining. 94% of commits to chromium from Google is also cherrypicked, many are automated commits to update libraries and pull in code from other repos and projects, and they do have a google/chromium handle on them as reviewers and signoff. It is true that they are the primary stewards and that most code in chromium passes through google hands before arriving there - but a good amount is chromeOS/android commits. Most downstream projects prune a ton of this "clank" out - claiming that commits in those directories are supporting 3rd party browsers is bunk. Google’s own docs say any code “that isn’t written by Chromium developers” must live in //third_party, this is enormous: v8, Skia, ANGLE, FFMPEG, ICU, OpenSSL - codecs, llvm... keeps on going. When a new upstream tag is imported, the roll commit is stamped with a Google email, throwing off this number considerably. The committer field shows the Google engineer or CQ bot, not necessarily the external engineer who produced the diff.
Google Search contracts: it is true that Mozilla and Apple receive large royalties in order to have Google be the default search engine in those browsers - in addition to android vendors and other platform partners. I don't think this amounts to 80% of "funding" on those browsers.
The second part is far more dangerous than the first - some care needs to be made rolling these claims together.
Everyone else could jump on quantum/gecko if they really felt like it was critical to their business to not use google-centric codebases.
There seems to me to be a false dichotomy present in a lot of the comments here: either Google funds all web browsers, or all the web browsers will crash and burn and the modern web will die.
Linux is a project spanning many decades with thousands of contributors and is not owned by any company. The BSDs are similar. I do not see why something similar cannot be accomplished with the web; a group of FOSS developers, and eventually, perhaps full-time developers at all manner of companies, could support a modern web browser. This seems to work fine for Linux - many companies pay developers to work on Linux because their business depends on it, so it is a good investment for them. The same applies for web browsers - many companies’ businesses depend on it, so funding a browser is the cost of doing business.
The last argument is basically the key point, you think google is going to let browsers die? Their entire business model depends on its survival; they just get less control over its destiny now, which is probably fine tbh.
This is a radical misunderstanding of how things work.
They might (I'm assuming based on usual foundation policies) own or enforce the trademark, but Linux is owned collectively by everyone who ever contributed to it at all -- there's no copyright assignment in the project whatsoever.
Additionally, Linux was a large, successful commercial project LONG before LF existed.
Readit News
If you say browser developers need money from the search giant to compete in browser development, you are saying that - right now - you can't compete in browser development without it.
That is a cartel.
We only have four major browsers because only four players can play on a fair playing field. There are people who have been paid millions to create and perpetuate this system. Web developers worrying about feature development without it is their KPI. None of this is a coincidence, none of this is a natural law.
Given that browsers are essential to access information, I think they shouldn't be developed behind a business model, but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.
There should be some independence guarantees in order to make that organization not have to bow to pressure from governments to sacrifice privacy due to funding threats.
Look to how the Linux kernel is developed, and look to its full history, including forks large and small, alternate releases for alternate reasons, alternate releases by different people and teams, and so on. It's not a hypothetical, it's the organization of one of the largest software projects in the world.
And it's a good thing we don't need a global fund, because trying to start at such a high level is basically asking for this to take the next 15 years to even get started. By contrast, anyone can start a new fork of Chromium or Firefox today... which, again, is not just me theorizing, but is a thing that has happened, several times over. Making it so "getting started" is something that can happen in a distributed fashion without having to get some "global" organization to sign off or be created is superior, which is sort of softballing it a bit because it's honestly the difference between possible and impossible.
If someday that develops into a "global organization" or some set of such, hey, that's fine. But trying to get "someone else" to start it at that level... and it has to be "someone else" since none of us could even hardly start doing that ourselves... is impractical to the level of impossible.
How do you ensure it’s not just laundering money with little or no work into the problem.
I think it’s messed up Google essentially funds all browsers but putting it in the hands of politicians isn’t going to help, would be better to try and have more companies funding it so at least the dependency on Google is less.
Sounds like a backdoor way to add a kill switch or censor filter to browsers from a central, unelected authority that does not respect the sovereignty and speech and media laws of the individual users' home countries.
No thanks, I'll take an open source, corporate controlled browser 10/10 times.
They're also completely blind deaf and dumb to modern society having never had to suffer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
I don't agree that the current situation in the browser market fits the definition of a Cartel, as I understand it! :-)
In an actual cartel or oligopoly, you'd expect at least the cartel members be relatively equal in power. But if the article is right, then Google has basically all the power to decide the course of web tech going forward, as the other browsers devs can't meaningfully deviate from whatever vision Google has for the web, without risking their funding.
It’s textbook.
Manifest v3 for example, and various standards that make fingerprinting easier.
Google has made sure that _nobody_ can implement a browser with hostile takeovers the "standards" committees and pushing the standards solely in the direction of corporate interests, bypassing consumer interests. The whole point was to make them so complicated it would be impossible for someone without an insane budget to implement one.
Proof of this is the whole advertising sandbox crap... what the hell does an HMTL Client "need" an advert sandbox for?
Breakups are painful. Ultimately they're better for everyone.
Instead this will put all browsers on a much more even playing field, and perhaps it will force governments and citizens to realise that free software takes someone to write it.
Or May be even a new standard that compiles into HTML / CSS / JS. A standard that fits most uses cases and is simpler to implement.
By propping up competitors, Google could always point and say "Look, there's the competition and they're thriving. How can we be a monopoly?"
It is a bit like calling a supermarket a cartel if it relies on local residents for 80% of its profits. No, the technical term is they are paying customers (although in Google's case it is complex and non-traditional because they are carrying the financial burden on behalf of the people who click on ads and there are a bunch of free riders). The odds are against a bunch of alternative customers hiding in the wings waiting to pop up; if they go away then they are just gone.
This comparison does not make sense?
So it monopolizes the distribution platforms for search engines.
The easier analogy here is an oil monopolist paying off all the tanker and rail and pipeline companies so nobody else can get oil to customers, and then splitting the massive profits with the shippers.
By the way this example actually happened and is the origin of the term “antitrust” which is the area of law that Google was found guilty of violating by multiple judges. So the analogy is right on the nose.
Some remember the time, when browsers existed before chrome as well .. and I am not a ware of a uniquie chrome feature, removing significant barriers.
But by developing the browser, they can
A) decide the direction where the web is heading
B) get direct control over peoples internet experience and their data
Not the fact that Google is the one doing the paying?
All for nothing, in the end even they had to give up and switch to white-label Chromium.
Wikipedia says:
> A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with each other[1] in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to outlaw cartel practices.
What you are alleging sounds bad, but it doesn't sound like a particularly good match for the term 'cartel'.
I earned my first money for "web developement" in '99, and as much I understand underlying dynamics, I - as a user but mostly as a developer - really enjoy the current phase and I really liked that brief period when IE was the browser.
This is absolutely true if you simply want a web browser to be a document reader.
Thankfully (in my opinion) the modern browser is realizing the dream to "reduce Windows to a buggy set of device drivers".
You all were impressed upon by the cartel you claim to hate to prop them up.
It’s electromagnetic geometry in the machine. Future hardware makers do not have an honorific obligation to validate developer illusions. They’re working on closed ecosystems that self manage their electromagnetic geometry through to the task at hand without the energy wasting ad hoc effort of human programmers.
Your real problem is nVidia and other chip companies who have no obligation to save jobs of American workers who are just going in circles repeating old memes like a fuzzy VHS.
Never heard of a cartel that gives its product (and the ingredients to make it) away for free to anyone including their direct competitors.
And who made the specs so stupidly complex in the first place?
Back in early 2000s you could visit pretty much every site using a KHTML-based browser and that was written by a handful of KDE devs.
Google pushes over 400 new web APIs per year, often with no true specs and with no input or consensus from other browser vendors.
So. Who is responsible for complexity?
If they do it, there would be no reason, other than administrative, for Google to hold this money back to only a handful of vendors.
I think that weakens the cartel argument.
Cambridge Dictionary: A cartel is a group of similar independent companies or countries that join together to control prices and limit competition. It involves restricting output, controlling prices, and allocating market shares.
Group of similar but independent companies (check) that join together to control prices (no, but they do join together to control the web in other ways), and limit competition (yes, by constantly adding features to HTML whilst market dumping they prevent competitors from arising). It involves restricting output (not in the literal sense, does apply if you consider the synchronized way they implement standards), controlling prices (yes, forcing them to zero instead of the natural market rate), and allocating market shares (yes, if you consider iOS browser restrictions).
Browsers used to be one of the most critical and insecure software. All the major security enhancement in terms of isolation, sandboxing, privilege separation happened IMHO due to a Google backed browser security research. This benefitted the community because other browsers either adopted Chromium as the base or implemented similar security improvements.
I think it’s not just the browser anymore, the core building blocks like v8, blink etc. forms the foundation of modern web. It will be interesting to see the benefits of anti-monopoly laws when it comes at the cost of destabilising something foundational like Chromium.
And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.
Chromium was simply a continuation of innovation that had started before Google even existed.
But in parallel it was Firefox that broke the Internet Explorer monopoly that made 3rd party browsers technically possible in the first place.
But all of that would have been irrelevant if it wasn’t from anti trust actions that prevented MS from doing the stuff they’re doing now (now that the antitrust probationary period is over) such as forcing their browser to be the default browser.
If it wasn’t for antitrust action against MS they would have taken these actions when they were much stronger and the other browsers were not as advanced and Chrome would likely have been nowhere to be seen.
Anyways, you’re wrong even with the idea that chromium has innovated the most. Most of the ideas that Chrome has today were implemented in other smaller browsers such as Opera well before Chrome ever integrated them.
I suspect if Chrome were to disappear tomorrow, browser technology would be far more innovative 2 years from now than it will be with Chrome as the dominant browser.
And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would still be a major player in the browser engine race today. Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser engine did.
Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.
It's like saying that a modern car is hitting more than a model T from 100 years ago.
Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.
V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.
Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.
Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.
Chrome would still have won because it was force pushed by google.com, every google service, every google software nad large part of 3rd party software had it as bundled (checked by default) install.
Google crippled ad blockers on their platform and ads are getting through with increasing frequency.
Stuff that really should be working on my browser or did before is now getting blocked because I apparently should be using a webkit browser. One example is my credit card is getting rejected more and more often lately. But things work fine when I open up Chrome and make a payment.
What things do I want improved? Popups/popunders still happen sometimes. There's still no real solution to block those annoying mailing list popovers either. The dominance of Chrome seems to have frozen the internet in time around 10 years ago. Nothing has really changed between then and now, while before there always seemed to be a feature to look forward to. I guess the last big thing was web assembly, and even that was released nearly a decade ago.
It’s all been downhill from there.
Lots of innovation has happened, don't get me wrong. And maybe the web browser as we know is "mature" and therefore lacking need to evolve.
But I'd argue (as I did in a sibling comment) that maybe this drying up of funds could pave the way for new innovation. The web, the creative parts of the web, and definitely the internet as well, didn't have monster budgets to drive its innovation originally. It had some (DARPA, et al), but not like today.
Sigh, yes, even keeping copy/paste working is problematic for the last several years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40886954
Luckily the top comment in that thread says "this is the process working" so I guess we're good
But then I think, what would it have been like without this investment. Maybe browsers would stay buggy and we'd have an internet with much more diversity in protocol. The internet of today is monotone and subservient to its web master.
I wonder if innovation stagnated because of the extensive (ab)use of the web. Granted, early on, Google's contributions have been more than just pioneering. Both on the backend and the frontend, we all owe them a pint.
But recently, it feels it's just been self-serving. And the monopolistic overtones plus the loss of "do no evil" has arguably hurt us in recent years.
That being said, if the web browser isn't funded so deeply, maybe this is a good thing? Maybe that will give birth to fresh cycles again. I kind of think like letting a corn field grow a new crop to let it regenerate. It could usher in new innovations.
edit: On a second thought, as a dev now, I look at React, Angular, all these mega frameworks... and wonder if we're just patching over problems big tech baked into the modern web. First point still stands tho.
It’s basically a statue of liberty made of ductape and chewing gum, then reinforced with formula-1 level engineering and novel materials research.
The building blocks and lessons learned could be used for something novel (nope not gonna happen it’s permanent now). WASM, json, Skia renderer, pretty awesome v8 virtual machine etc etc … all of that are pretty neat.
I guess the key thing is what is the value of browser now?
It’s the ui to bazillion networked business and government systems, productivity tools etc.
I would argue the sticky moat here is not the web interface, though, but the data and the familiar usage patterns. _Theoretically_ the ux is portable to any system with vector graphics renderer and the data itself should be (a long stretch right) independent of the client ui.
We simply don't know how browsers would have developed in the past years if Google did not have a monopoly. However, we know that monopolies are almost never good for consumers. Therefore, there is a high chance that in an alternative timeline, where one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world did not have a monopoly on browsers, we as consumers, would have been better off.
Browsers used to try new ideas like RSS, widgets, shared and social browser sessions. Interfaces to facilitate low-friction integration with the rest of your life, and to multiplex data sources so that it's not a hassle to have many providers for [news, entertainment, social] experiences.
Likely no coincidence that this innovation languished once monopolies started pumping money into the ecosystem.
I would call it one of the most important innovations of the last 20 years. Name another true write-once-run-anywhere universal VM that is installed in billions of consumer devices and costs nothing. It doesn't exist. The only way the entire modern software ecosystem is even possible is because of the web as a platform. Literally everything else is a non-portable closed proprietary stack.
The web doesn't need standards evolving at the speed of light, it's only happening because Google's strategy with Chrome has always been to set a pace that others can't follow, not about designing things right.
the benefits have already been contributed to chrome, and is easily available even if funding is cut today.
However, google didn't give chrome and their money away altruistically. They wanted something back - control of the browser market, and ability to dictate certain aspects of the web. I do not believe they should have this ability. Taking away monopolistic practises with the browser market can help with this aspect.
Deleted Comment
Just because an entity happen to output also some positive social impact doesn't mean its current global influence on society is overall extremely toxic. Pablo Escobar is classic example.
Some people think innovation mostly happens in startups, but Big Corp monopolies have a unique and important role to play. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC did stuff no startup has the money for.
Indeed. And since there has been nothing but bad changes to HTTP and HTML in the last decade, all centered around turning the web into just a means of transporting javascript applications, we know who to blame. I'm still upset that Google and Microsoft agents within the IETF managed to openwash and push QUIC/udp through as HTTP/3.
It's a status quo that definitely needs changing if we're going to have a web usable by human persons and not just corporate persons.
Everything in the early 2000s was insecure and critical.
It's true that Google 'got there first' on a lot of stuff and that groups like Project Zero do incredible work but the idea that we'd be nowhere without Google is a bit silly.
[1]: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
I am not suggesting that browsers would not evolve without Google. I am looking at the impact on web today. Perhaps new technologies will emerge, perhaps browser development will adopt different model or perhaps native apps will get a boost.
Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
And if those cash starved tiny companies that develop Safari and Edge lose their Google bribes, I'm sure they'll manage alright.
By the way who funded KHTML? Before everyone except Firefox took that code to make a browser...
Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
But then both were rotten and massively over spend.
What? I know the browser is a complex piece of software but considering at least part of the development is done by volunteers isn't this a bit too high?
Maybe at least they should move a part of the operation outside of HCOL areas in the US?
Why the hell would they?
Mozilla does all the "harebrained" stuff to make money. Especially to diversify their income and rely on Google less. Developing Firefox is a net loss of money.
They won't, and in fact those harebrained moonshots at desperately acquiring scalable revenue will only increase. The money from selling the default search actually directly incentivizes Mozilla to make the browser good to increase the value of the ad space.
Absolutely not. As you say, harebrained schemes would go, also it'd change the browser ecosystem considerably.
In time that might force browsers to adopt a minimum connectivity standard for all browsers that would be simper than those in use today. That would have many upsides for users which I posted about earlier.
It was the other way around. Other product like VPN, MDN Plus, Pocket was a way to diversify revenue which could be channeled to Firefox, although the problem is Mozilla isn't the best company at making money.
Again, the whack-a-mole myth that simply won't die. I have asked people about this over and over and over again over I'm gonna say like the past year and a half and at this point I feel pretty confident that this was kind of a mass-hallucinated myth. If you try to be objective and actually look at the numbers and you look at the time period over which Firefox lost browser share and you look at their budgets in the time period over which they engaged in side bets, the math just doesn't add up. None of the side bets ever occurred at prohibitive development costs, and they did not occur over a time period over which Firefox's browser share crashed. There's no such thing as a missing browser feature which Firefox was unable to implement because they didn't have access to resources due to those resources being siphoned away by sidebeds. And people seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually like make a real argument about these things before simply claiming it.
There is a kinda-sorta real version of the argument, which is that around 2016 or so, before Firefox released quantum, the quality of the browser was lagging behind alternatives, and they were investing significant resources in Firefox OS. That's the closest to a real thing that this argument can attach to. But no one making this claim even knows that no one making this claim has looked at their budget, how much it costs to run a VPN, or made any cause and effect connection between that and other things. This is a myth that kind of got hallucinated into existence by hn comment sections.
I do think the critique of straying from a commitment to privacy is a real thing, but the narrative that they wasted time and resources on side features while the core browser experience deteriorated, attempts to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between that and market share is not backed up by any facts. And if you look at my comment history, it's practically a year of pleading with people to cite any example whatsoever that would substantiate this argument.
Firefox spending money on harebrained schemes like FirefoxOS is a good thing (even if it failed), it's how you find black swans that everyone has to copy from you. Otherwise you're always playing catch-up.
How much money does Firefox waste on harebrained non browser initiatives, compared to the Firefox browser?
Maybe you're happy that sites have started to only work properly in Chrome, but I'm not.
Do you know when that last happened? When they only worked in Internet Explorer. I fail to see the difference.
At least with less money they'll be able to fuck everything up slower.
Dead Comment
They'd fork the open source of Chrome and get to work. After a while, they'll start taking the market share (they can afford to hire back the whole team).
Couple of years later are we in the same position? Maybe, maybe not. I'm curious to see how it plays out.
Probably not a bad thing if you you believe in "antifragility". The technology will improve as it should.
I would consider KHTML as a technology. Much like v8 and blink. I have no doubt the open source technology community is capable of producing great technologies with or without big tech funding. But will it be able to "productize" them and drive large scale adoption? I have my doubts but time will tell.
Lately my feeling is more and more people realize why open technology in the hand of the people is important (it is a lot about trust), but I am not too optimistic that it will break that dynamic.
Hopefully not. There shouldn't be a "dominant" browser in the "market", there should be a huge mess of choices available. If there is a "dominant" browser, corporations will cut corners and target it directly. They shouldn't be able to get away with that. Browser diversity means they cannot afford to single out users as irrelevant and unworthy of support. They should have no choice but to support them all.
Right now, if you were to take away Google's money, Firefox would not be able to compete with Chromium and Safari.
Those 'harebrained' initiatives are attempts to find a source of revenue aside from Google and are necessary to Firefox's survival. So saying
> stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser
completely misses the point.
Unless we want Firefox to die, we should understand their situation and encourage this exploratory process, not hate on it.
Dead Comment
People say HTML/CSS/JS/WASM is complex, but the Ladybird team is proving that a very small team can make a working browser in a few years. Thanks to the efforts of dedicated developers behind browsers, most of the web API, including rendering algorithms and such, has been painstakingly written out in detail.
Most people don't need insane levels of backwards compatibility or intense PWA support. That's just cruft that slows everything down and increases the attack surface for, to the user, no real gain.
Perhaps what we need is a lot of lightweight general-use browsers (based on a small number of engines) and then some heavyweight power-user browsers that can WASM to their hearts' content.
This might not be cheap to serve, but it’s cheap to build, and it makes you wonder about the intersection and inflection of those cost curves. And of course we haven’t spent decades optimizing for it.
Don't get me wrong.. REST APIs, HTTP, HTML5, all wonderful. But as a user, the cost/benefits of ubiquitous JavaScript in depth simply to win interactivity and single page apps at the cost of um, everything wrong with the web (and by extension much of the world economy via surveillance capitalism) are a bit suspect.
Browser complexity is made more tractable by Wasm, not less. Maybe remove JS now that Wasm exists.
Dead Comment
Practically at this point it’s configuring a Skia render context. This gives a known api to target for the graphics stuff.
There is near 0 value for designers to pain themselves over this.
The design interface should be 85% graphical.
The implementation should be a runtime for a configurable context and it should be configurable with code.
The ui given to designers should be a graphical tool. There could be many, many such tools!
I’m writing this as a graphics engineer who has followed this for over 20 years. I would love to hear engineering based counter arguments to this pov.
We've gone too far. Give us back html homepages and executables you can run if you'd like something crazier
I dont think a browser being more complex than a person can grasp is an important aspect/problem that needs rectifying.
Absolutely! Looking at this objectively, most of the web and browser developments over the last two decades have been for the benefit of Big Tech and business—not typical web users.
These developments have been forced on users to allow that mob to sell us more stuff, confine what we do, and spy on us and collect our statistics etc. Moreover, complicated web browsers provide a larger surface/more opportunites for attack.
Everything I want to do on the Web I could do with a browser from the early 2000s.
I mostly run my browsers without JavaScript. That kills most ads and makes pages load so much faster (as pages are much, much smaller). Without JavaScript I often see a single webpage drop from over 7MB down to around 100kB.
7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the hell do we users put up with this shit?
It seems to me if all that Google infrastructure were to be busted up and browsers went their own way then the changes in the browser ecosystem would eventually force lower common denominator standards (more basic APIs, back to HTML, etc.).
With simper web tech being the only guaranteed way of communicating with all Web uses this would force the sleazeballs and purveyors of crap and bad behavior to behave more openly and responsibly. Also, users would be able to mount better defenses against the remaining crap.
In short, the market would be less accessible unless they reverted to lower tech/LCD web standards, and that'd be a damn good thing for the average web user.
The real problem, of course, is backwards compatibility.
I want an America where competition thrives again.
Clearly you’re not doing much front line web development.
Web browsers are incredibly capable and all the features they add are making browsers better and life easier for developers and experience better for users.
This is the sort of comment that back end developers make, who hate front end development.
I will concede the features are very useful for developers to push algorithmic slop and walled gardens onto us.
2) You're being facetious if you're saying Firefox is much worse. Feature sets and performance are very similar. Most people would not notice the difference if reskinned
2.1) ditto for Safari or any of the chromium browsers.
3) a monopoly is good for noone (even the monopoly)
I don't think most of the innovation has done very much. I realise this is deprecating the sunk wow factor and deprecating the future wow factor, but in the end, its HTML mostly for me.
In fact, if the primary function of code work for the next 5-10 years was to remove code, I'd be pretty much in favour.
The web is now a competitor for native apps. That would never have been possible without the fast pace of innovation. Don't knock it.
I was last a "web developer" almost two decades ago, but dipping back in on a few occasions I am always appreciative of how much innovation has happened since then.
The world before the huge investment in browser technology was dark. Tables and spacers for meaningful layout and flash or shockwave for anything interactive.
I remember a time when css based drop down menus were seen as some sort of state of the art.
The main point that we could derive from this is that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, and all the more when geopolitics is involved. But still it's fun and sometime inspiring.
It most certainly is not. Web apps still suck ass compared to native. It's just that users are willing to accept even the crappiest solutions because they don't have very significant needs.
1. New web standards related changes
2. shiny new service integration(like AI, vpn etc)
3. UI & UX enhancements
4. Bug fixes
5. Security fixes
I believe changes related to 1 and 2 (to an extent) are primarily driven by Google.So, if Chrome changes hands and development slows down I think it would give alternative browsers time to focus on 3 & 4 instead of playing catchup. It might turnout good for the overall browser ecosystem in the long run.
True green-field standards work is roughly one-fifth of effort, with Safari and Firefox currently leading in CSS & media-query adoption, Chrome in new JavaScript/DOM APIs.
Eye-catching integrations (VPN, local AI summariser, etc.) stay single-digits because the core browser still has to do the unglamorous work of being correct and secure.
You could argue that Tauri exists, but I doubt that it would gain large-scale corporate adoption, as storage consumption was never their concern, development time and cost are.
Chromium: the base of Chrome, which is opensource - is developed in part by google and many other companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Brave, and dozens of others who depend on the chromium ecosystem. Google is not "financing" these companies, they are contributing to and benefiting from opensource bidirectionally and the ecosystem benefits from compatibility streamlining. 94% of commits to chromium from Google is also cherrypicked, many are automated commits to update libraries and pull in code from other repos and projects, and they do have a google/chromium handle on them as reviewers and signoff. It is true that they are the primary stewards and that most code in chromium passes through google hands before arriving there - but a good amount is chromeOS/android commits. Most downstream projects prune a ton of this "clank" out - claiming that commits in those directories are supporting 3rd party browsers is bunk. Google’s own docs say any code “that isn’t written by Chromium developers” must live in //third_party, this is enormous: v8, Skia, ANGLE, FFMPEG, ICU, OpenSSL - codecs, llvm... keeps on going. When a new upstream tag is imported, the roll commit is stamped with a Google email, throwing off this number considerably. The committer field shows the Google engineer or CQ bot, not necessarily the external engineer who produced the diff.
Google Search contracts: it is true that Mozilla and Apple receive large royalties in order to have Google be the default search engine in those browsers - in addition to android vendors and other platform partners. I don't think this amounts to 80% of "funding" on those browsers.
The second part is far more dangerous than the first - some care needs to be made rolling these claims together.
Everyone else could jump on quantum/gecko if they really felt like it was critical to their business to not use google-centric codebases.
Linux is a project spanning many decades with thousands of contributors and is not owned by any company. The BSDs are similar. I do not see why something similar cannot be accomplished with the web; a group of FOSS developers, and eventually, perhaps full-time developers at all manner of companies, could support a modern web browser. This seems to work fine for Linux - many companies pay developers to work on Linux because their business depends on it, so it is a good investment for them. The same applies for web browsers - many companies’ businesses depend on it, so funding a browser is the cost of doing business.
They might (I'm assuming based on usual foundation policies) own or enforce the trademark, but Linux is owned collectively by everyone who ever contributed to it at all -- there's no copyright assignment in the project whatsoever.
Additionally, Linux was a large, successful commercial project LONG before LF existed.