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That's the point.

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.

Having worked in the non-profit space my whole career, I've always thought having government funding for OSS would be a great use of money. It's a really underutilised resource.

States invest in cultural production, e.g. by film grants, software grants would be a great way to attract talent and solve problems.

This is a very sensible proposal, that would guarantee essential tools, and would cost a very small fraction of the respective countries economies.

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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.

There's too much money on the line if there is a lack of standardization and rendering/features are all over the place. I don't think it will turn that way as most users will converge on a small number of browsers.

If there is no global infra fund, there will be some type of ad-hoc board composed of some independent entities, but a lot of entities backed by large businesses. If not US then other countries as in many countries there are large tech companies aligned with government interests.

>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.

Maybe ask the Linux Foundation how they do it?

The Linux Foundation is funded by a large number of companies for which Linux is very critical to them. These companies themselves have their own developers.

For lots of companies (most?), web browsing is critical to them. Amazon could fund browser companies. Brave exists. Is Opera still around?

or W3C

> 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.

I'm not exactly sure why I should find a corporate entity any less centralized or unelected or not respectful of rights than a government

> I'm not exactly sure why I should find a corporate entity any less centralized or unelected or not respectful of rights than a government

Because corporate entities and government entities operate under radically different frameworks.

The domain of government is force. This isn't a bad thing, it is necessary. Government is the recognition that we, as human beings, can interact with each other in two fundamental ways: force or reason/diplomacy. That when reason/diplomacy is chosen life flourishes. People create, produce, trade, freely associate and basically build civilization. When force is chosen you get war, destruction, poverty, misery.

Government's primary role in society, in my opinion, is to remove the element of force from civil existence so that all interpersonal relations are consensual (there are edge cases - the parent/child relationship or the extremely ill etc. but I need to scope cap somewhere).

The concept of rights derives directly from this concept. They are the recognition that rational people can cooexist peacefully if certain aspects of the human experience are recognized and protected. Those aspects being that in order to survive as a human being your tools are reason and action; you need to be able to think freely and you need to be able to act in accordance with your rational judgements. The infringement of a person's rights is fundamentally interference in either the ability to think (freedom of expression / conscience) or the ability to act (freedom to own and acquire property, freedom to travel, freedom of association etc.)

This means that government's entire domain is force. It is the entity that gets to determine the rules around when the application of force is allowed. It is the entity that gets to step in when you and I can't agree on what the definition of "assault" is and one of us calls the cops.

Businesses ought to exist entirely outside of the domain of force. Business is what happens when you remove force from society and people are able to think, create, develop, produce and trade freely without gangs and thieves and thugs interfering.

Where things get blurry is when you marry government and business. But always remember that business operates under the rules that government creates. The more incentive there is for business to care about political policy, the more lobbyists and corporate interest groups you will create but that's the framework you're creating. Government forces it through laws. Business is just playing by the rules that you voted for.

Governments are elected every now and then by large sums of people as a package deal for handling a number of issues, and only one is in place. Products and companies exist in multiples and regardless of how big they are, they're still more targeted, and you the consumer get to choose directly and every day.

Is there any model or example where this "global digital infrastructure fund" exists?

Depending on how you define "global", https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund might qualify:

> With the Sovereign Tech Fund, we invest globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate.

Not globally funded, but does invest globally.

However, they say:

> The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in open digital base technologies that are vital to the development of other software or enable digital networking. We invest in projects that benefit and strengthen the open source ecosystem. Examples include libraries for programming languages, package managers, open implementations of communication protocols, administration tools for developers, digital encryption technologies, and more. (...) We are currently not looking for user-facing applications, such as messaging apps or file storage services. If this changes, we will announce it here.

So, a browser wouldn't qualify, but an HTTP(S) library does, and perhaps even a browser engine would..?

There are several other programs like STF funded by the EU (often mediated via NLNet), and for example Servo gets some amount of its funding via NGI (an EU Commission initiative): https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/

Edge exposes its engine to be used in other programs like Skype.

Edge no longer has its own engine, it's based on Chromium now. When it did, it also wouldn't qualify for STF funding because it wasn't open source.

But yes, a browser engine is potentially an embeddable library, so an open source one might qualify :)

You ever noticed how the majority of Linux desktop related companies are european?

That’s not an accident. So yes, there’s precedence

If we're talking about commercial desktop products, is it really a majority?

Canonical is UK-based.

I can think of Suse but even that changed hands several times through a bunch of US companies.

Red Hat/Fedora, PopOS, Chrome OS etc. all are not european

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.

Could it possibly be that governments are perfectly ok with restricting and controlling browsers as this allows them far greater control?

Sure, but they're not doing that either?

It's Google that's in control of Chrome and sponsors it's competitors, not the government.

How separarate do you think google are from the governance system? Are you aware that their early funding was from in-q-tel?

Okay, given your theory that Google control equals government control... Wouldn't the anti trust now be against their interest of controlling the browsers?

You seem to have a very contradictory opinion

I'm not privy to the plan, but what was right at one stage (funding a company to gain a monopoly position on search) need not be right at a later stage. Perhaps now a different strategy is unfolding. Perhaps it is obvious that government and corporations work in tandem, and the optics require that it appears that government acts against monopolists to regain confidence.

You have to admit (in the U.S.) companies have significant power over the government.

As far as I can see, nobody said anything that could conceivably be interpreted to imply otherwise, so sure?

I am really unsure what your argument even is, gymbeaux - and how it relates to verisimi's previous point. You're not trying to argue that it was Google's masterplan all along to get the anti-trust ruling, right?

"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."

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! :-)

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.

The more appropriate term is an oligopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

Or perhaps even racketeering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering

Not sure I agree. The “price fixing” aspect could be about ads, after all- and none of the major browsers are neutral in this.

Manifest v3 for example, and various standards that make fingerprinting easier.

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.

It’s textbook.

Alternative stance:

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.

I have been wondering if we could have a much much simpler subset of HTML / CSS and JS.

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.

How about SVG+WASM?

It sounds to me that Google started this payment scheme precisely to avoid anti-trust legislation.

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'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.

> All for nothing, in the end even they had to give up and switch to white-label Chromium.

How is that a loss? All Microsoft wants is a controlled space to push their own products/services. Google gave them a tool to do just that for free. Microsoft would absolutely be writing its own (probably worse) browser if Google wasn't so generous to give them on without Microsoft having to incur any development cost.

I am not sure they had to give up, but my initial experiences with Edge weren't great. There are some interesting claims of bad behavior on Google's part, but I wasn't only seeing problems on Google properties. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

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.

> It is a bit like calling a supermarket a cartel if it relies on local residents for 80% of its profits.

This comparison does not make sense?

Yeah, have read the segment multiple times. Can not fathom a logical coherent meaning for that sentence.

Nor does calling browsers dependent on Search funding a cartel.

People expect web browsers to be provided for free, which heavily complicates funding.

There is nothing stopping someone from making a new browser. The base of Chrome is open source, you don't even have to do the hard part. And distribution worldwide is relatively easy, if you can give people a reason to use your browser.

The point I'm trying to make is that we've identified the prime customer of web browser development - it is Google.

That is like identifying the prime customers of a supermarket - people who live nearby.

Having customers who are particularly keen or invested for whatever reason does not make an enterprise a cartel.

What makes Google a cartel (or rather, monopoly) in this case is that they own > 80% of the browser market. Not that they pay other companies so that they appear as the default search engine.

I think that is a mistaken view, but rather than argue that I'll put a more interesting question. If you believe that there is a cartel here and the result is that we the plebs get high quality products for free, do you think cartels are a bad thing? Because it seems to be all upside for pretty much everyone. If this is a cartel (which, again, I don't see it), we should be looking to get cartels involved in food and housing.

Breaking up this 'cartel' is literally going to mean that the best 4 web browsers won't get quite as much development effort directed towards them. The plan seems to be to choke them of so much development that even dodgy hobbyist projects can complete. That is a low-quality bar.

But we don't get the high quality products for free. Google is using Chrome to strenghten their market dominance in other markets, such as advertising. Furthermore, they are using their market power in browsers to push through standards and protocols that mostly benefit them.

Just ask yourself this: Google is one of the largest and most profitable companies on Earth. They are a for-profit, capitalistic company. Legally, their main duty is to maximize shareholder profit. Why would they give away somehting for free, if in the end, it does not benefit them more than not giving it away for free?

Competition is always better for consumers, unless you believe in a "benevolent dictator" situation (which, as reality shows, also never ends well).

How did the developement of chrome made more people use the internet?

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

There are alternate histories where the web stagnated as an app development platform in favor of other ecosystems.

MS development slowed around IE6 after winning browser war against Netscape.

Apple's mobile ecosystem competes successfully with web, but could have gone further.

Chrome and Android have helped keep the web more relevant.

At its core, the ideals of the Web as an interoperable, nearly universal platform are extremely promising. I highly doubt people would prefer completely split ecosystems where programs could only be accessed on specific platforms.

You could not watch Netflix on Linux until Chrome came along.

You also didn't have very good security from browser exploits until Chrome.

Chrome also made the web significantly faster to use.

Chrome was critical in unblocking the use of Linux on desktop.

I've been using exclusively Linux on the desktop for almost 10 years now. If there was an unblocker, it was wine/Proton, or for laptops, NetworkManager (I remember having a bit of difficulty configuring wpa_supplicant for my university in 2008). I don't even have Chrome/Chromium. Linux on the desktop is enough of a niche/bubble still that it wouldn't surprise me if a large number of other users don't have Chrome either (e.g. I don't use or care about services with DRM, and have it disabled in my browser). Honestly besides flexbox and TLS updates I'm not sure I know of anything useful that's been added to browsers in the last 20 years.

"Honestly besides flexbox and TLS updates I'm not sure I know of anything useful that's been added to browsers in the last 20 years."

Wasm and webgl/webGPU are really useful for anything performance related.

Easily over 99% of what I use a browser for are essentially static pages, so wasm and especially webgpu strike me as extremely niche. Like it's cute that you can run quake in a browser, but I can also just open my start menu and launch quake. For actual web usage (looking up information, shopping, paying my bills, bank transfers, stock trades, etc.), simple, static html is the high performance approach.

Google maps or other map applications are a pretty mainstream feature.

In a browser/on the desktop? I would think everyone would use a dedicated application, probably on their phone. For Linux users in particular, I would be unsurprised if they use OsmAnd. Maps also shouldn't require webgpu or wasm. e.g. XForms made something like a scrollable map application trivial to develop years before wasm was a thing[0]. That shows what could have been a browser improvement if W3C standards were still relevant. Google maps of course predates those things by over a decade.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yYY7GJAbOo

If I want to use google maps, or find a new home - I am not browsing maps with my phone. I use a big screen.

With the browser.

And most real estate sites also do have a map for example.

That still sounds relatively niche/doesn't really disagree with my statement that easily over 99% of web usage is not something like that. How often are you finding a new home? Map widgets also shouldn't really be a performance concern; they were doable 15-20 years ago (i.e. with much weaker hardware and no webasm/webgpu).

Something like improved forms with validations and databinding would be useful for actual easier document authoring. Built-in charts (line graphs, pie charts, etc. with baked in support for legends and axes) would also be generically useful in the way that tables were. Flexbox was useful for layouts, but otherwise we instead got pushes for more scripting performance to cover up the impact of mass surveillance and more ways to leak data about the underlying system to conduct that surveillance.

"How often are you finding a new home?"

Too often.

" Map widgets also shouldn't really be a performance concern"

Have you ever build one?

I hate those stuttering ones build by suckers and enjoy those that just run smooth GPU accelerated.

Also I frequently encounter maps on various sites.

The tracking service for my package. The shop showing me the nearest stores. A map with points of niche interest ..

And they've been working quite well with not all that much in ways of improvement for years, if not decades. What's the last huge improvement in maps thats been noticeable to users in the last 5 years?

Yeah - I think the big problems are solved, and then you start moving into more and more niche cases. I really love being able to flash firmware on ESP32 devices with webserial!

The use of USB authentication devices (FIDO2) is also interesting.

+1 for Wine, I didn’t bother with Linux until Wine showed up.

Uh, Wine showed up in June of 1993[1], a full month before the first official release of Windows NT. Not necessarily in a usable form, mind you, but even now the usability is heavily dependent on what specific software you are trying to emulate.

[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/commit/2c25c3e9442c69b...

"Chrome was critical in unblocking the use of Linux on desktop."

Sure, but it was about more people using the internet in general.

The very small minority using linux desktop (hello, I am among them) could and did use the internet before chrome.

And from a technical point of view, I do love chrome dev tools. But that is besides the point.

Isn't Android Linux based? The development of chrome on desktop Linux have any benefits for mobile Linux?

The other way around.

"development of chrome on desktop Linux have any benefits for mobile Linux?"

Android is the big market, that gets prime support.

Otherwise android and linux desktop just share the kernel (and not even the same one).

So the developement of chrome on android probably makes it a bit easier to target linux desktop, but not much.

(I still don't have WebGPU on my linux desktop but since quite a while on my old android phone)

Dolphin Browser was the go-to in the late 2000s for Android.

Al Capone did a lot of good on his neighborhood...

Chrome didn’t murder anyone

Neither did Al Capone

Now that’s a mic drop moment

> 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?

I'm wondering which local residents didn't eat food before supermarkets existed.

The vast majority since according to Wikipedia the first supermarket was in the 1930s, and thus very few were born before that. I know that I personally have never lived someplace where most of my food didn't come from a supermarket.

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.

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.

> That is a cartel.

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'.

Classic nitpick to be fair it's almost a cartel but because it is not fitting 100% it's not. Do you work at one of these companies by any chance?

Not all things we dislike are the same. The same in politics: people there often have the tendency to call everyone they dislike either a Nazi or a communist. Totally ignoring that there are many, many different and exciting varieties of bad.

I used to work for Google for a few years for what it's worth.

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.

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?

I read of a lot of complaints that web standards are too complicated.

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".

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.

> That is a cartel.

Never heard of a cartel that gives its product (and the ingredients to make it) away for free to anyone including their direct competitors.

Pretty sure that Opera and most likely e.g. Vivaldi also has this kind of deal.

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.

Three. Edge is a chrome rebadge, it's not actually different in the way webkit (somewhat) and gecko (very) are.

How is this a cartel?

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).

I remember that apple, google, ms had some anti-poaching agreements in place, while not directly related it seems that that is also pattern of cartels to have informal agreements that hinders competition.

But they are not joining together in any way. In fact they have transactional relationship which is opposite of cartel.

They all have contracts with Google, work on the same shared specifications and in the case of most browser companies, work on the same shared codebase. That would count as a joining together for the purposes of cartel law.

Can anyone tell me a browser that does not depend on being funded by google?

Orion from Kagi is not bad, but it has enough quirks that I only use it for personal browsing, not work (dev-related) stuff.

Thanks, it is still in beta as well, but I will give it a try.

Orion by Kagi

Edge.

Safari. Servo. Ladybird. Flow.

Apple gets money from Google for the default search engine.

Apple monetizes safari but it’s certainly not reliant on Google for its continued existence.

Is it a cartel or is it a fact that writing a fully specs-compliant browser is a huge undertaking due to the complexity of everything?

> Is it a cartel or is it a fact that writing a fully specs-compliant browser is a huge undertaking due to the complexity of everything?

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.

We did.

I certainly peacock every time the new latest greatest [thing] is added to the spec, and am certainly not shy about using those features. There is a handful of misses, but it feels a little dishonest to point the finger squarely at Google when HN in particular lights up like a Christmas tree with every new feature.

Want me to link to our discussion(s) about the new browser DateTime library - Temporal? Or what about Streams, Pattern Matching, Subgrid, Container Queries, color-mix, et al. We ask for this stuff, and we're thrilled when it arrives. Seems hypocritical to then turn around and complain that they're making the browsers "too complicated."

Well, HN isn't really of a unified opinion on the matter - you'll find as many people complaining about browser complexity as people who love these features. The thing is, only one choice between having them or not would make it harder to create new browsers.

>would make it harder to create new browsers.

Blink and v8 are open source. You don't even need to implement the spec yourself. New browsers can piggy back off open source (which is what Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc also did) to help making a browser easier.

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.

Hardly cartel behaviour then

At what point does the complexity of the browser cross a line to being anticompetitive?

With sufficient funding and scope creep, everything is a huge undertaking.

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.

I think Google basically _is_ the standards committees, at this point. Not in the sense of having majority control just by themselves, but in the sense of (1) the cartel being argued over here (browsers funded by Google) having that or close to it, and (2) Chrome being the main source of new features getting implemented, so that the job of the standards committees is mostly to play catch-up with Chrome.

A lot of the complexity stems from backwards compatibility.

Also I seriously doubt there is any conspiracy here!

(opinions are my own)

It is not necessary a conspiracy. It's just google had (and still has) no incentives to keep web ecosistem simple and accessible to browser developers, while making it harder perfectly aligns with google's interests.

Maybe we can finally reduce some of the absurd complexity then?

> due to the complexity of everything?

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?

Yeah, I'm not even a web dev, but even I can see that Google wants to make the web stack ever more complicated and is has been good at getting what it wants.

I always thought they do that to make it more expensive for anyone to compete with them. E.g., want to introduce a new operating systems for phones? No one will use it unless it has a web browser. So you have to hire a thousand expensive developers to create and maintain the browser (or maybe somehow induce Mozilla to port Firefox to it, which would probably also be expensive).

Sounds very similar to the practice of "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".

They also do it depending on who wins internal turf wars. When Chrome/ChromeOS wins, we get a hundred hardware APIs.

When ads win (they always win) we get FLOC and other bullcrap.

etc.

I don't think there would be demand for extraneous web APIs if the native ones were a good enough replacement. Kinda feels like the fault of OEMs for driving people to the web for good content.

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.

> it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable

Which incidentally also made it much more complex to implement, giving Google control over the web.

This is so important to look at, when we talk about this topic. I was there, 3000 years ago, when browser where kind of simple software. We could go back to that state and would loose almost nothing. All the complexity that is now in browsers was in the operating systems at that time. The millions of fronted-devs of today would just be "normal" devs three decades ago. I know, that that will not happen. But it helps looking through all the bullshit that Google has created, where they've build and control the platform (the web with chromium), that Microsoft and Apple used to control (their oses).

FWIW i have a feeling (and it is just a feeling, not something i can confirm) that the entirety of Windows 95 was simpler than Firefox or Chrome today :-P.

This is very likely true.

By LOC: Windows 95 is estimated to have 10-15 million LOC, Chrome 30-40 million.

By binary size: Windows 95 took about 50 MB, Chrome 200-300 MB.

By architecture design: the codebase of Windows 95 is fairly shallow and monolithic, while Chrome is very modular (think V8, Blink, WASM, sandboxes...) and uses other dependencies.

-1: this writes down the billions Google invested over many years.

It's like saying that a modern car is hitting more than a model T from 100 years ago.

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.

> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.

Not really. That was done more by the greed of the MPEG alliance.

Back in the days when <video> was first proposed, VP8 was required to be supported as a codec by all browsers. This was removed as a requirement after Apple stated they were never going to support it, but the other browsers still implemented VP8 because it was codec free. Then Google implemented H.264 in Chrome. Mozilla only implemented H.264 in Firefox after it became clear that Google's announcement that they were going to rip H.264 out of Chrome was a bald-faced lie, making H.264 a de facto codec requirement for web browsers.

Having won, then the MPEG Alliance got greedy with their next version. H.265 upped the prices on its license agreement, and additionally demanded a cut of all streaming revenue. It got worse--the alliance fragment, and so you had to pay multiple consortia the royalties for the codec (although only one of them had the per-video demand).

It was in response to this greed that the Alliance for Open Media was created, which brought us AV1. I don't know how important Google is to the AOM, but I will note that, at launch, it did contain everybody important to the web video space except for Apple (which, as noted earlier, is the entity that previously torpedoed the attempt to mandate royalty-free codecs for web video).

Not supporting H.264 was arguably what caused the downfall of Firefox usage. Unfortunately Mozilla didn't listen.

The finer point is where these tens of billions came from.

All of it was ad money, and a lot of these innovations were also targeted at better dealing with ads (Flash died because of how taxing it was, mobile browsers just couldn't do it. JavaScript perf allowed these ads to come back full force)

The net balance of how much web technology advanced vs how much ad ecosystems developed is pretty near 0 to me, if not slightly negative.

Isn't webrtc broken in Chrome? Or did they finally fix that? It used to be that everyone supported Chrome's broken implementation, leaving Firefox users with the correct implementation out in the cold.

If you are referring to the standards-based "Unified Plan" vs. the Google proprietary "Plan B" for handling multiple media tracks in SDP, I believe that "Plan B" was finally phased out in 2022.

You raise some good points but re: codecs, I was quite unimpressed with how they handled JPEG-XL.

> VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and

and paved way for Google monopoly. They literally threatened to pull their support from devices if devices don't implement AV1 in hardware.

And refuse to support JPEG-XL

They are now no different to Microsoft with Windows Media.

Let's play devil's advocate:

> Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.

Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.

> 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.

No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.

> Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.

That's useful but only because the bloatware above. If you didn't give code running in the browser that much power you wouldn't need sandboxing.

> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.

Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.

> 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.

It's also a binary protocol that cannot be debugged/tested via plain telnet, which places a barrier to entry for development. Perhaps enhances Google's market domination by requiring their libraries and via their control of the standard.

> > Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.

> Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.

They were not the only contributor (I was the technical lead for Mozilla's efforts in this space), but they were by far the largest contributor, in both dollars and engineering hours.

> No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.

Well that's just biased. Saying application is bloated (which is often not true) is the result of an entire ecosystem, has something to do with an interpreter, is ridiculous. Any qualified software engineer can see the fault in such a comment. You probably know that as well.

So I consider your comment trolling.

>Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.

>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.

>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.

So should we not deliver advanced sandboxed cross platform applications for any platform, and instead deliver unsandboxed native code for all possible platforms? ActiveX called, it wants to say thanks for the endorsement and that it told you so.

And no more zoom meetings because somebody's Mac might not go to sleep? I'm with you on that one, brother!

> ActiveX called

You do not need to "deliver" inside a bloated VM you know.

Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these days.

> And no more zoom meetings

Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.

>You do not need to "deliver" inside a bloated VM you know.

>Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these days.

Then Java applets? Oops, that's a bloated VM too.

And how is an M4 emulating x86 code or jitting WASM code not also a bloated VM? Bloated VMs are here to stay.

>> And no more zoom meetings

>Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.

Yay, we've found common ground! Want to chat about it on zoom? ;)

I can read and write just fine thank you, want o chat about it on irc? :)

IRC and other simple tech are the real losers in the modern tech ecosystem.

webrtc is awful, though

And then they removed

Don‘t be evil.

At some point the stopped improving the browser for the users and changed to improving the browser for Google.

Maybe they were actually lying when they originally said "Don't be evil," and removing it was only being more truthful?

There actions back then fitted the Don‘t be evil motto.

That’s what mattered.

>There actions back then fitted the Don‘t be evil motto.

Disagree with that. All the privacy issues people have problem with now were already a problem in 2007. But being the media darling along with Submarine PR Google didn't get much bad press.

There were lots of other things too, including their site breaking Firefox as well as Chrome, their promise not to make another browser.

They never removed it.

> V8

Great we have fifty bloated front-end frameworks powered by ten bloated back-ends written by novice devs who need to use left-pad dependencies

Of all the things you've mentioned, the only one that genuinely stands out to me as a positive contribution from Google—something that wouldn’t have happened had Chrome never existed—is the codec situation. They leveraged their scale and influence for good in that instance.

That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether Chrome has actually steered the browser ecosystem in the wrong direction, while simultaneously eroding a lot of the diversity that once existed.

> That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation

Honestly I can't believe that anyone who was around when Chrome came out would say this. IE7 was around, and terrible. Firefox was trying hard, as was Opera, but web tech has become infinitely better with Chrome around, and Google funding it. Without Google funding Firefox as well, Firefox would be nowhere near what it is today.

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.

It’s all been downhill from there.

I wonder if it's only downhill once you have reached your own point of enlightenment. For me, that wasn't late 00's, but more like late 90's and early 00's. Maybe that was my coming of age.

To me, it's been downhill pretty much before it got started. I'm always feeling "behind" having missed the fun at any stage.

In the late 90's, I attended a talk by Ted Nelson, the guy who coined the term Hypertext. To him, things started going downhill with HTML, and the URL. The gist of his complain is that he wanted links to be bi-directional.

In the 80's, telecom operators were complaining that TCP/IP and packet transmission was a regression over circuit commutation.

So it looks like the internet has progressed through perpetual regression.

The internet is 30-40 years old, and has brought an entirely new paradigm to the world. It has abolished distances, disproportionately increasing the reach of a few.

I'd love to share your optimism that things will keep improving in the long run, but I don't see what you're basing that off.

I like the late 00s/10s because it represents a particular level of refinement and balance of functionality in contrast to earlier eras. As much as I enjoyed the web of the 90s and early 00s, it was still quite nascent and in some ways a bit too basic for my taste.

90s web was fun in a wild west kind of way. Sites were small, but the net in general was slow.

00-10 had a lot of forums in which I remember being very fun. At the same time it brought in the age of popups and ads everywhere.

10+ brought in the age of large social media and the feeling everything was trying to scam you. A lot of the forums that felt special and interesting started disappearing for multiple reasons, but mostly their userbase had moved to FB or something else huge. Then those large sites started moderating anything interesting away.

> Furthermore, devs hadn’t normalized feature chasing and so any modern browser worked correctly

What you are saying seems much larger than the web itself. I don't think Chromium or for that matter "technology" is responsible for that. I think it has more to do with massive capital in funding technology startups building on every random idea which in turn led to the tremendous demand for platforms with the promise of "shipping fast" at the cost of short sighted technical decisions.

That’s definitely a consideration, but alongside the rise of Blink within the web dev sphere there’s also been a growing culture of sitting on the bleeding edge of new features regardless of how necessary doing so is, which influences both hobby and production projects alike.

On other platforms it’s still much more the norm to stick to proven tech for anything non-trivial and to only adopt new APIs when there’s high adoption and adequate justification for doing so.

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.

> zero improvement this past decade. In fact, stuff seems to be worse.

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

>Copy and Paste context menu entries are sometimes disabled when they should not be

they should never be disabled. If I want to copy the letters from the OK/Cancel buttons—which you also tried to eliminate—or the keyboard keycaps you are displaying, I should be able to; what's it to you what I want to do?

How much do you love it when you are using a PDF of a scanned ancient text or a cellphone snapshot you just took of a streetsign, and your device lets you copy the text? This is what computers are for, to be our servants, not to be Google's overseer.

step 1: HN, make article titles selectable. wtf!?

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.

Oh, that’s definitely revisionism. The iPhone killed Flash, and ActiveX (outside of South Korea / Silverlight) and applets were already dead at that point.

The iPhone was undoubtedly the deciding factor, I agree - but interestingly Netflix used to rely on Silverlight for DRM [1] until Google introduced video DRM to Chrome in ~2013 [2]. iPhone netflix users had to use an app.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-26-netflix-finally-brings-w... [2] https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-at-netflix-721d1f143...

Yeah, true. I forgot that, even Steve's letter on why they wouldn't put flash on the iPhone.

That was the final blow, yup. But the web was still a clunky mess of plugins, broken standards, and browser-specific hacks.

Google pushed to make the web better. And through Chrome they helped bring WebKit to multiplatform: I still remember I couldn't even get rounded edges or nice typography support across platforms, only in Safari.

It wasn’t until Chrome took off that the rest started paying attention.

Why was ActiveX dead? Why didn't it succeed when MS launched it at a time IE had 90%+ user share?

Because it required Windows in a time that iPhones were storming the market.

Also the ActiveX security model was pretty horrific.

I mean, I don't disagree with you. I think we needed Google and needed their investment to push forward past Applets, ActiveX, and Flash.

But now, we're stagnating again. So maybe drying up those funds will be part of the cure.

I think Apple also forced the world to move on from Flash. The iPhone didn't have Flash.

All the other plugins were dying on their own (for whatever reason). But Flash was a stubborn virus, to be sure.

Yes, it definitely took the big slap from Apple to kill Flash once and for all.

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.

The winning (marketingwise) systems couldn't get sandboxing to work. You couldn't simply download software and run it.

Sure, but back then people were used to downloading and running random exe files (even from really untrusted sources such as torrent sites, eMule, etc.)

imho, there are no trusted sources nor should we need them. One can have a good track record for as long as it lasts.

I can see what you’re getting at but I think the monotonous, sterilized nature of the Web is really business driven, not technology driven.

Sounds like Stockholm Syndrome to me.

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.

> Name another true write-once-run-anywhere universal VM that is installed in billions of consumer devices and costs nothing. It doesn't exist.

Java certainly meets your criteria and exists. But much like the person you are replying to, I consider the "modern software ecosystem" to be utter garbage. Web browsers are just a terrible user experience for applications compared to the desktop. We have regressed greatly in user experience, not progressed.

>Java certainly meets your criteria and exists

It does not. Nothing about Java provides a sandboxed runtime environment.

You don't need a VM for a "write once run anywhere" environment at all. That's the whole point of high level programming languages like C and Fortran. The innovation of having a VM to run everything in is to be able to compile once and run anywhere, which is only valuable to people wishing to hide the source code from the people running their software (malware authors).

I argue that such a thing as a "true write-once-run-anywhere universal VM that is installed in billions of consumer devices" is not needed in this form. It creates more problems than it solves.

> 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.

> Browsers used to be one of the most critical and insecure software.

Everything in the early 2000s was insecure and critical.

Wait which innovations were these?

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.

Firefox isn't built over Chromium.

> 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.

Apple doesn't invest sufficient resources in Safari even with Google's competition and support[1].

[1]: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...

That would be because they aren’t meaningfully competing here. They both profit tremendously by the status quo and so do not step on each other’s toes.

As of 2023 Apple had done very little of this to iMessage, a far simpler app than a browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425007

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.

But is that a bad thing?

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.

> firefox is not remotely able to bring in enough cash to justify its current development costs

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

Yes, and you can't donate specifically for Firefox development.

I don't want my donations to support the latest fashion, I want them to go directly to the browser.

100%, those hare brained schemes are Mozilla frantically trying to find another revenue stream to fund Firefox so they're not reliant on Google

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.

If only they had set aside some funds to serve as an endowment for the future.

> $260M spent on software development,

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?

Aside from a handful of individuals the only volunteers doing a modicum of serious volunteer work are retirees/ people that don’t need to work anymore or companies directing their employees to make contributions for their own motivations

You seriously underestimate the complexity of a browser if you think it’s a hobbies maintained thing

There are almost no volunteers working on web browsers anymore.

1800 ish devs from the last figure I could find. 700 ish on Firefox.

Now there is no way 700 people actually work on Firefox code. Throw in team leads, QA, dev tools, UI, specialized developers like WebRTC and that number makes a little more sense. But still seems inflated.

Most of Mozilla is already remote.

I mean Mozilla and Firefox should survive. But I do imagine we’ll lose Thunderbird and anything not Firefox related. And dev will drop heavily. CEO salary of almost 7 million will need to go as well.

It may be good for Mozilla to return to a streamlined company. Rather then a bloated one as it is now.

Thunderbird is (amazingly) funded entirely by donations from users. The money is hypothecated for that purpose. There are so few good email clients now they get enough donors.

Source: someone I know who works there

Wait, you can donate for Thunderbird specifically?

You can! Thunderbird lives in a separate entity outside the main Mozillasphere called MZLA. I've given a few times in the past and use it for personal use, but my workplace recently banned Thunderbird.

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/

Almost nothing noticeable has changed with Firefox for years. A couple of minor features here and there, and just keeping up with standards. It does seem pretty excessive. Definitely seems that Mozilla has become massively wasteful and misguided over the past ~15 years.

That’s actually the point. An army of people are keeping up with standards so things just work. I’m curious as to what it looks like when only certain browsers are maintained.

New standards do not get adopted that easily? One can dream...

That's one of the main problems with Google controlling not only the top browser but also the rendering engine behind most of the competition. They don't have to care about standards at that point. When they do, it's mostly to put a veneer of openness over their operations.

> 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.

From their own report [0], in 2023, they made 494M from 'Royalties' and 64M from 'Subscription and Advertising Revenue".

If I read it correctly, 'Royalties' is mostly just Google paying them to be the default search engine. 'Subscription and Advertising Revenue' is what people on HN refer as harebrained projects, like Mozilla VPN.

Notably both numbers declined in 2023, and it's not clear how much these subscription and advertising projects cost. So we don't really know if they made a profit.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

"But is that a bad thing?

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.

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.

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.

>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.

> Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser

How much money does Firefox waste on harebrained non browser initiatives, compared to the Firefox browser?

They refuse to say don’t they?

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?

I for one strongly prefer to be told how colors shape the world, rather than fixing big longstanding things in the issue tracker.

I was wondering what this refers to, and apparently it's this:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/independent-voices...

We'll have buggy, unsafe, slow browsers with diverging standards and we'll like it.

"diverging standard" is better than Google's standard.

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.

That comparison has always been nonsense. People can't keep pretending like ActiveX was the same thing as, say, WebMIDI, or that stuff like WebMIDI is Chrome's "moat". Chrome simply has superior, less buggy support for basic, uncontroversial web APIs, the kind that every browser maker agrees on. Look at the massive gap in Interop 2025, possibly the most conservative Interop yet (due to Apple's constant behind-the-scenes vetoing). It's not magic. Google invests more in their browser, and the Chromium codebase attract more contributions from a wider variety of companies. And Firefox has exponentially fewer issues than Safari anyway (which is deliberate, Apple wants to cripple the web and favor its App Store monopoly).

> Apple wants to cripple the web and favor its App Store monopoly

While I agree that this is probably true at the BOD level, the people working on the browser itself go in the opposite direction. They spend a lot of effort trying to actually develop a robust standard. Jen Simmons has been kicking ass since she went to work on Safari and I'm here for it. If she leaves or is forced out, I will be much more skeptical about the pushback offered by Apple.

The Interop 20XX projects are a great first start and I'm hopefully that feature parity will continue to increase over the next few years.

I like the work and advocacy of Jen Simmons too, but without the large infusion of cash (on the order of $20B) from Google, why wouldn't Apple downsize the Safari team and force her out?

I worry about the jobs of all browser devs in fact. The pace of innovation in web and browser technologies will significantly slow down. All browser teams are likely to be downsized.

Ever hear of NaCl? Presumably not.

> Chrome simply has superior, less buggy support for basic, uncontroversial web APIs, the kind that every browser maker agrees on.

You write this with a straight face after giving WebMIDI as an example.

It last happened with Safari when it was the overwhelming majority of mobile traffic market share. That was even a meme for a while in the web developer community around 2010-2015 or so: "Safari is the new IE."

It took years for Android's growth to make it a credible second browser for mobile devs to care about, and to pressure Apple to catch up to web standards faster.

> ...pressure Apple to catch up to Google's web standards faster.

Ftfy.

Safari is the only brake we have in this rush towards complex and unmaintainable web, with Google (the only company which can afford to play this game) at the helm. So no, Safari not supporting some random new feature is not a bad thing.

Firefox is working pretty swell for me.

Firefox has been my goto browser for years but recently I've noticed it screwing things up, most notable when viewing source code in github. The text highlighting gets broken somehow.

Then it’s GitHub fault, because hihglighting works everywhere else. When has it becomes the default to blame the platform because some program have bad code?

Yes, for me as well, but once a year I will encounter some web page thst won"t do what it is meant to unless you use chrome.

In half of those cases, changing your user agent to Chrome magically solves all the issues.

This is literally some browsers' solution. They have an internal domain list and use the chrome UA for those

> I fail to see the difference.

You don't see any difference between Internet Explorer and Chrome?

Did you actually ever try developing anything with IE, or are you just failing to see the difference between something you do see and something you failed to see?

It think it's pretty safe to say that Chrome is objectively better than IE. Even Microsoft saw that.

If you want to talk about what their differences are, or how important it is that they're different, then go right ahead, but if you fail to see the difference, I don't think you have much to contribute to this conversation from your willfully self blindfolded perspective.

Obviously they are not talking about the difference between the two browsers, but between the two situations. Your post looks like you chose the least charitable interpretation in order to pick a fight.

The two situations are also totally different: Chrome has been far better for the Web than IE ever was, and the reason Firefox is still keeping up is that it got that money from Google.

If we decide that Web innovation is done in the browser, and it all has to move to Javascript libraries again, the way we did when browser innovation stalled in the 2000s and we got jQuery, so be it, I suppose.

Chrome is IE, but in reverse: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...

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.

Good. Force a return to native apps.

When is the last time you heard of someone getting pwned on w3m

I fail to see how that is different to the situation today?

At least with less money they'll be able to fuck everything up slower.

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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.

AFAIK they would be forbidden from entering the browser market for some years

I think they might start from scratch as this gives them the chance to nuke all the legacy code

Would be ironic if Google make the a 100% Rust browser before Mozilla.

Servo?

Servo is a rendering engine with a pretty rough reference browser chrome around it. It's also not Mozilla's even though it started there.

> But is that a bad thing?

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.

I read your comment to mean:

> There should be a huge mess of choices available because it increases the cost of web development.

If the cost of web development goes up, either websites will be more expensive, or they’ll just have to be less complicated. We’re hoping for the latter.

Well, one way to read "forced to not cut corners" is "forced to increase cost" :-P

> all those harebrained non browser initiatives

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.

> 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.

They will be forced to stop working on the browser and let the open source community do it for free.

I keep seeing comments on HN that misunderstand what's happening with Mozilla and it's kind of frustrating.

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.

Not that bad of a thing if you don't mind Mozilla closing shop or pivoting to promotion of crypto scams and sports betting.

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

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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.

> Most people don't need

No, what you mean is 'most greenfield web dev projects don't need...'.

Most people do need those things, because assuming there's no civilisation spanning project to literally rewrite 90% of the web, without them their sites would break.

> Most people do need those things, because assuming there's no civilisation spanning project to literally rewrite 90% of the web, without them their sites would break

Sites most people visit do not require backwards compatiblity. And aside from like Google Docs, I doubt most folk are doing anything with WASM (outside plugins).

Look, in a world where Google subsidises browser development, this isn't an issue. We don't need to compromise. But if that funding stream disappears, you do have to compromise. And I'd argue a simple browser doing away with some of the more-complicated stuff would be (a) maintainable and (b) popular enough to pay itself back.

Maintainable, maybe. Popular, no. A browser where a good chunk of the web doesn't work is a browser that almost no-one will use.

> browser where a good chunk of the web doesn't work is a browser that almost no-one will use

I think it could—it’s sort of the case on mobile—but it’s not a view I hold with the strongest conviction.

Rewriting everything seem to have been regular exercise in general... So I don't see problems with doing it once more. How many sites are actually say older than 5 years. And how much work would they need?

Well ok, we can stuff browsers in vms for archival purposes. That doesn't mean we need to support existing sites with future browsers.

We use WASM in web apps that are used by a very large number of “regular” consumers. It would be stupid to kill that off.

Who said we have to kill off Wasm, Wasm (minus SIMD) is extremely simple and allows the user (the webdev) to ship the complexity, and not build the complexity into the browser itself.

> We use WASM in web apps that are used by a very large number of “regular” consumers. It would be stupid to kill that off.

Large numbers of users use lots of features. That doesn't change that most of them use none of them. WASM would continue to exist. It just doesn't need to be in every browser.

I never advocated for removing Wasm, Wasm itself allows the webdev to subsume complexity that would normally be built into the browser.

Browser complexity is made more tractable by Wasm, not less. Maybe remove JS now that Wasm exists.

We may need to ask some hard questions like: do browsers really need wasm in the first place?

WASM came about as a result of demand, not because people had too much free time.

Browsers were being used for more complex things, which resulted in companies adopting hacky solutions to enable more performance.

WASM is seeking to develop a consistent standard for these use cases.

I would ask the question the other way around: do browsers really need JavaScript?

It's a lot easier to maintain a WebAssembly engine than a JavaScript engine.

Really interesting to hear you say that — Thanks for the WASM impl in Zig!

On the do-browsers-need-js point, you might be interested in:

https://github.com/wasi-gfx/webidl2wit

iirc WASM bytecode closely resembles V8 IR. If you're writing a JS engine, might as well provide a more direct frontend to it... I don't think it adds much.

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.

Going back to gopher as a starting point maybe. Let's innovate from there.

That's a thing, in the form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

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The crazy complexity is stupid. It’s mostly lasagna engineering where the effort is spent to fix the design mistakes in earlier levels.

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.

Web browsers that are so complex a person in their basement can't implement them are a sickness.

We've gone too far. Give us back html homepages and executables you can run if you'd like something crazier

But why isn't the same logic applied to an operating system then?

I dont think a browser being more complex than a person can grasp is an important aspect/problem that needs rectifying.

If we had as many browsers as OSs - somewhat interoperable but genuinely independent - then I would feel much better about the web. Compare NT/Darwin/*+Linux/(Net|Free|Open|Dragonfly)BSD/illumos (to say nothing of the long tail; you can in fact use Haiku for a lot) against Gecko/Blink/WebKit.

If you consider the BSDs and Illumos to be operating systems, you might as well consider Lynx/Ladybird/Servo/Netsurf/Trident as browsers.

For 97% of the world, there are four operating systems: Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS. There are three browsers: Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The rest is an irrelevant sidenote that only hobbyists and developers care about, existing at the grace of the megacorporations that sponsor them.

I have daily driven OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and I have tried to use anything that isn't Gecko or Blink. I feel comfortable saying that the OS situation is much better than the browser situation. I'm interested in technical merit / feature completeness, not popularity. The situation is likely to improve with Ladybird and maybe Servo, granted.

Agreed, and I would argue that it's even worse on the browser side. We have Chrome and Safari on iOS, the rest is essentially irrelevant. With regards to web standards, Edge is just another Chrome-reskin. When Apple sooner or later looses the WebKit monopoly on iOS, it will all be Chrome...

> why isn't the same logic applied to an operating system then?

It absolutely should be. And arguably, is - there are multiple tiny OS projects that are somewhat useable

and there's plenty of somewhat usable browsers out there too.

But the OP's implication is that there ought to be a fully working browser (that satisfies the standards of the day), but creatable from someone in their garage.

That hasn't been true for cars, appliances or any modern equipment for ages. And the same phenomenon being applicable to software isn't really that unimaginable (nor a problem).

> That hasn't been true for cars, appliances or any modern equipment for ages.

Personally, I don't see that as progress. I don't need touch screens and surveillance everywhere in every major purchase I make. I fail to see what we have gotten in exchange for all the increased complexity.

Having more options would certainly be nice, and the barrier to entry these days is pretty high.

That logic is applied to operating systems, that's why SerenityOS has garnered so much interest.

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.

"We've gone too far. Give us back html"

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.

> 7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the hell do we users put up with this shit?

That's mostly due to insane web "frameworks" like React, and developers who (systematically) overuse and misuse them, and then test their websites on WiFi/5G and iPhones with superfast chips so they don't notice (their users do). The solution is to increase the capabilities of "native" Javascript and CSS, and put in massive effort into interoperability so web devs stop feeling the need for frameworks as "compatibility shims" (looking at you, IE and Safari). Those solutions are exactly what browser makers (sans Apple) have been focusing on lately.

The solution you recommend would have the exact opposite effect of what you intend.

"The solution you recommend would have the exact opposite effect of what you intend."

It depends on how one works and what one has to do and or wants to achieve. I've pretty much worked the Web without say JavaScript since it was first released. In fact, I even used to turn off the 'scripts' setting in Internet Explorer it's that long ago.

Over that time I've become addicted to the raw speed of page rendering sans JS, similarly the lack of annoying 'jitters' and hesitations in page rendering that it causes. Same goes for the absence of ads, etc. In fact, I've rarely had need to recourse to ad-blockers as I see so few ads without JS enabled.

Is working without or with very limited JS use an impediment? For many it clearly it is because Big Tech and vested interests have forced the tech down the throats of users in places where its use is not essential. For me however the Web mostly sans JS is not a problem. I've used the Web since its inception and I do everything I want, and that's always been so.

Occasionally, I'm forced to use JS when purchasing something so I'll first determine what I want sans JS then clear caches etc. And sometimes I even switch browsers to make the purchase—I see no need to give these snoopers more data than absolutely necessary, I expect the same privacy online as I'd get from walking into a retail shop and paying cash. So should everyone.

Sites that force JS I back out of faster than entering them—there are plenty more fish in the sea so to speak—more than I can ever consume in my lifetime. For example, on news sites that force JS and block access there are others running the same stories that do not, only neophytes aren't aware of that.

I cannot think of one instance where I've been locked out of such info and not found an alternative source for not having used JavaScript.

Enabling and disabling JS is dead easy on my browsers, my JS icon is red when it's off and green when on. A single click changes the state and a page refresh reloads the page in whatever state I want, it's dead easy to work this way.

Same happens on my phones, when I buy a new phone it takes me some while before I even insert the SIM as I first have to delouse it of all the Google and vendor shit—there's not one Google service I use or have need to use, there are many alternatives, NewPipe, F-droid, etc., etc.

I've nothing against JS, only the way it's used and much abused. What's desperately needed are JS browser engines that allow users to manage its functionality, what it's allowed to do—to kill access to user data by default or as specified, and or supply randomized crap data back to snoopers and so on so that users can take back control of their Web browsing.

Your point is only valid if the user wants certain enhanced features which is not always the case. For example, information sites and government services etc. that convey essential information do not need JS, likewise they don't even need CSS.

Look at it this way: written text contains the same information whether it's displayed in system typeface fonts, courier monospace or Garamond. Sure, Garamond looks much nicer and fancier but it's not essential to convey information. Same goes for much of the other overrated and much abused internet standards.

Of course, that statement will cause you apoplexy if you're a web developer for two reasons, likely your income depends on it, and second it's a notion so foreign to and removed from internet developers' thinking/daily experience that it's inconceivable to them. Well, enough of us outside that circle are now thinking this way not to let the notion die. Perhaps also you're not old enough to remember when everything was simple and we got our information in system or courier typefaces. Those limitations did not stop users from doing the essentials. The new generation of Web developers either have never known that or have conviently forgotten the fact.

There are no satisfactory reasons why such websites (or all websites for that matter) cannot recognize browsers with only limited facilities available such as those having only HTML, or HTML/CSS sans JS and then automatically issuing pages that support those modes—that is, other than commercial/vested interests. And in a nutshell, that's the key problem.

The Web has become so dysfunctional, operationally stereotyped and so commercialized because of these vested interests that many now consider it broken and are calling for it to be fixed. Moreover, unlike the early Web, it's now so important that the mess it's now in cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely, thus government intervention will eventually be necessary to regulate it to ensure that all users have access (ensuring minimum connectivity standards etc. to allow all browsers—even text-only ones—to have access essential information) in the same way governments have had to regulate other essential services and utilities in the past.

…And regulation is not new to world history, it goes back centuries. Long ago, snail-mail was initially regulated by governments and then regularized by international convention, same with rail guages with most of the world now running on standard gauge. Then there are motoring regulations, it took many decades but most of the rules and road signage across the world are now very uniform because of government intervention then later strengthened through international conventions/agreements. Same with many other matters, weights and measures, the ISO, etc.

Right, in the past that LCD conformity took many years to achieve. That said, the internet/Web is only a few decades old, it also now exists in a world that's highly connected which makes it much more capable of adapting to a fast-changing world.

The only reasons why most internet and Web techies are hostile and or are horrified by the notion of tighter regulations are that they've grown up in an environment sans regulations, taking away freedoms always hurts, especially for those unscrupulous people who rort the system, steal user information, etc.

The railway barons of the 19th Century thought the same but every country now has strict regulations governing railways from technical and safety requirements to rules governing ownership—and many of these regulations came into existence because operators/owners abused their privileges.

We're now seeing consumers (and thus lagging governments) catching up, and that's about time. Unfortunately, the internet took off quickly and it dazzled everyone, and we're only now coming to our senses—back down to reality. Another tragedy was that it was built on software which meant minimal physical resources/materials were needed. This allowed companies like MS, Meta, Apple etc. to exploit the fact and become the biggest and richest corporations in history. When companies can become that large and so rich in so very little time it doesn't require Einstein to determine something is very wrong with commerce and its regulation thereof.

Sooner or later the big correction will come.

This will just gut funding to fix exploits

Features that don't exist don't have exploits.

Yea, so instead people make native apps which pown your machine. Great progress!

Those at least have to be downloaded and installed by the user, which indicates a high level of intent/consent and is difficult to do accidentally. In the browser environment, malicious content can be navigated to without any user intent or consent whatsoever, which when combined with holes punched in browser sandboxes for the sake of fancy features makes for danger with a dramatically larger scope.

Right now, most untrusted code runs in the browser's sandbox, and that's great - outside of the realm of fancy 0 days, the damage is limited.

But if downloading apps becomes the norm again (like every online store asking you to get their app and an extra app for a discount program), I expect that socially engineering less technical users into downloading malware will become much easier.

Yes. Native apps are 9000x prefferrable to the browser having to be a shitty os.

I guess Linux Desktop will die off then.

Maybe it should if in 30 years it has not reliably solved native apps.

Been using them for 30 years already. I suspect if I heard whatever your definition of "solved" is, I would find it silly.

funny, it seems to me that a great many native apps exist, and works fine

Honestly, the end of everything being a chrome-based app and people making actual native desktop apps that run at 10x the speed with 1/10th the energy usage would be excellent. I really hope that does happen.

"that run at 10x the speed with 1/10th the energy usage"

How many current developers optimize their products for speed and energy usage?

I can see the very opposite happening: half-baked apps, whose massive portions were written using free-tier AI output, hogging gigabytes of RAM and four processor cores while the cursor is idly spinning and the laptop is becoming hot.

Compared to the past (and my memory goes back to Netscape Navigator 3, old person that I am), modern browsers seem to be technologically fine.

I'd say it's really hard to write a native app, however unoptimized, to be a bigger memory hog than Electron apps.

it will also gut funding for the production of vulnerable code, in what ratio things will go is what it all depends on

Reducing features just makes the web less competitive versus native apps, handing control of personal computing back to the MS and Apple duopoly.

Reducing complexity doesn't necessarily mean reducing features. It can mean providing the features in a simpler, more sensible way.

The real problem, of course, is backwards compatibility.

Aside from a few rushed features, all the things that have been coming to web are really lovely. I'll be very sad if this all slows down. We were just about at feature parity with native mobile apps.

"Almost at parity" in feature set, maybe.

But practically? How many sites actually offer an innovative and/or mobile-first version of their website anymore?

There was definitely a time when we had websites delivering various layouts based on the viewport size of the user agent. CSS media queries, flexible layouts, etc. were all very important innovations for a very short lived period of time.

Now, every serious web presence has moved on to offering their own mobile app, pushing users that direction. The browser was stubborn and erred on the side of privacy. So it didn't quite offer all the integrated (ahem, intrusive) means to interact with the user's device in order to bleed every penny and every bit of data mined from your usage and behaviors.

So I don't see anything lovely in the current situation at all. The traditional web -- you know the one where you surf with a web browser to discover the world -- has been dying for quite some time. It might even be dead and we just don't realize it yet.

We don't need web browser parity with mobile apps. We just need the web to be what the web is good at. It's a lost cause thinking that the web browser will ever integrate with a portable device quite the same as a native app. Those days are gone.

>Now, every serious web presence has moved on to offering their own mobile app, pushing users that direction.

If Apple didn't do everything in their power to slow down the adoption of PWAs you might have seen it take off by now. They still won't allow you to easily install a PWA to your homescreen, you basically have to be a power user (a reader here, and maybe not even then) to know about it.

And that's why they should be broken up too and their app stores should be completely open so that any apps can be installed.

I want an America where competition thrives again.

That would be nice but up to now there's been no real consequences for Apple, the operators of the biggest walled garden. MS has also been a pretty bad actor in many ways, although their platform is slightly open, for now.

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)

1) all those forks are soft fork that rely on Google's maintenance of chromium. So unless they are willing to invest a LOT more into development, or someone else does a hard fork and puts enough resources into it, whoever buys chrome will inherit a lot of power over those forks.

2) Without the funding from google search, Firefox's future is very much in question. Unlike Apple and MS, Mozilla doesn't really have other funds to pull from to maintain a browser.

Yeah, but we'll end up with Palantir owning Chrome, not Yahoo...

Chromium is open source, you can fork it to death while Terrible Company inc. is busy destroying chrome.

People can do that right now, but don't.

Instead we have endless complaints about what Google does with Chrome, and how complex it is :\

?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browser...

There are forks but they're very limited in how far they can deviate from what Google wants. The Manifest v3 discussions show this. Extension APIs aren't a big part of browsers compared to all the other things they do, and there was clearly demand to keep Manifest v2 alive, so you'd expect at least one or two forkers to differentiate by doing that.

In practice the rebasing costs are so high that everyone shrugged and said they had no choice but to go along with it.

Chromium is open source, but not designed for anyone except Google to develop it. Nothing malicious about it, it's just that building a healthy contributor community is a different thing to uploading some source code. If you've ever worked with the Chromium codebase you'll find you have to reverse engineer it to work things out. The codebase is deliberately under-architected (a legacy of the scars of working on Gecko), so many things you'd expect to be well defined re-usable modules that could be worked on independently of Google are actually leaky hacks whose API changes radically depending on what platform you're compiling for, what day of the week it is, etc. Even very basic things like opening a window isn't properly abstracted in a cross platform manner, last time I looked, and at any moment Google might land a giant rewrite they were working on in private for months, obliterating all your work at a stroke.

There are reasons for all of this... Chrome is a native app that tries to exploit the native OS as much as possible, and they don't want to be tied down by lowest-common-denominator internal abstractions or API commitments. But if you view Chrome as an OS then the API churn makes Linux look like a stroll through a grassy meadow.

> The codebase is deliberately under-architected (a legacy of the scars of working on Gecko), so many things you'd expect to be well defined re-usable modules that could be worked on independently of Google are actually leaky hacks

I'm guessing you're specifically referring to Gecko's early over-use of XPCOM, which the Gecko team itself had to clean up in a long process of deCOMtamination [1].

I'm hopeful that if Servo ever gets enough funding to become a serious contender among browser engines (hey, KHTML was once an underdog too), that it might walk a middle path between overuse of COM-ish ABIs and what you described about Chromium. Servo is already decomposed into many smaller Rust crates; this provides a pretty strong compile-time boundary between modules. Yet those modules are all statically linked, and in a release build, that combined program gets the full benefit of LTO. Of course, where trait objects are used, there's still dynamic dispatch via vtables, but the point is that one can get strong modularity without using something COM-ish everywhere.

Incidentally, the first time I built Chromium (or more specifically, CEF) from source in late 2012, I was impressed as I watched hundreds of static libraries being linked into one big binary. Then as I studied the code (though not deeply enough to learn the things you described), I saw that Chromium didn't use anything COM-ish internally (though CEF provided a COM-ish ABI on top). That striking contrast with Gecko's architecture (which I had previously worked with) stuck with me. I wonder how much the heavily reliance on static linking and LTO (meaning whole-program optimization), combined with the complete lack of COMtamination, contributed to Chrome's speed, which was one of its early selling points.

[1]: Mozilla used to have a dedicated wiki page about deCOMtamination, but I can no longer find it.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:DeCOMtamination perhaps?

I mean, a perusal of the comments on this page are very much evidence of what I was saying.

This is such a weird outlook.

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.

Comparing this site (that you choose to comment on) to what Reddit has done with those features, I'm not convinced.

I will concede the features are very useful for developers to push algorithmic slop and walled gardens onto us.

I don't think HN and reddit are really representative of what the web is or what it's capable of

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.

Yep it's an odd take!

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.

> I remember a time when css based drop down menus were seen as some sort of state of the art.

They still are on mobile for navigation - full screen sans js

Yes, presenting a large catalog of products (a few hundreds), for discovery purpose an efficient menu is still a big challenge in term of UX and technical implementation all the more when portability, accessibility, and cross-devices is taken into account.

Things that definitely look like trivial banality at shallow level often end up to need a lot of attention on many concurrent details.

Uh, a guess is that 1+ billion people are already good at using "drop down menus" along with check boxes, radio buttons, single line text boxes, multiline text boxes, push buttons, links. So, when those user interface controls are sufficient for the purpose, using something else might reduce the collection of happy users. The Web site of my bank stays close to such now classic controls.

Maybe this misses the point slightly?

I'm talking about a time when investment in browser development and web standards was so lacking that being able to achieve things like this blew everyone's mind:

https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/menus/demo.html

Hackernews, were it around back then, would've gone as crazy for this post as we do the latest AI model today.

It shocks me that I remember css/edge so well after all these years.

> Maybe this misses the point slightly?

Maybe! My thoughts were, say, tangential or incidental.

A guess is that a central issue is how much in new features should we develop and use?

I see a dilemma: (A) I mentioned the old controls that go back to early Windows and even IBM's 3270 terminals. An advantage of these controls is that lots of software tools implement them and billions of people already understand them. (B) Being too happy with the old stuff or even the present risks progress that is possible and worthwhile.

Your post seemed to illustrate (B).

But generally in the industry, with smartphones, laptops, desktops, Apple, Google's Android, Windows, browsers, apps and extrapolating, we could have an explosion of new features that would complicate work for everyone and fragment the industry.

Ah, maybe Darwin would explain: Lots of mutations with only the best lasting??

For my work, I'm thrilled with the tools and technology available now that I get to exploit.

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.

God forbid we go back to native apps and have ownership of our data & software

> God forbid we go back to native apps which are strictly controlled by two giant megacorps.

Fixed that for you.

I'm pretty happy not to have "submit to Apple for meticulous review and approval" in my deployment cycle.

That's what got us where we are, the same thing will happen to web platform over time.

> The web is now a competitor for native apps.

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.

Having a corporate monopoly controlling the web is a pretty steep price to pay for flexbox.

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.

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.

I've never understood the hate for table layouts. They literally just make sense. And now all they advanced css frameworks have basically just recreated table layouts via divs with row and column classes. I get the need for responsive designs but I still think we could have gotten there with tables.

It's like people got mad that tables were being used to for something other than strictly tabular data, so they recreated the idea behind table as a layout tool with "css grid" and made it 50x more complicated.

I wish web design could follow like woodworking where the most focus is on using the base tools very effectively. The introduction of new tools is mostly frowned upon. Of course that's all because of the inherently dangerous nature of using power tools. Regardless of tech stack you aren't to likely to lose a finger from coding.

Layouts implemented with tables make sense when you need to place elements once, and not a ton of them at once. Making even slight changes to your tables within tables within tables is such a nightmare, that throwing out all of your code and starting from scratch might just be preferable. Tables are not a basic tool for this task, it's a severe misuse of the tooling, caused by a lack of alternatives at the time.

The move from table layouts to divs+css was based on the idea that mixing markup and layout/styling was bad. Then a few years later as everyone moved to React et al. it was good again.

Sigh.

I understand the sentiment, but disregarding the nuance does the situation a disservice. HTML/CSS serves two separate but related use cases: a document layout and display language, and as a display layer for applications. I remember Pete Hunt's talk "React: Rethinking best practices" [1] explaining in 2013 why the styling separation of concerns for document display doesn't make sense for applications. Has opinion on best practice se-sawed back and forth? No, we've merely gone from web content being document centered to being massively application centered, and the discourse on best practices follows that proportional shift.

Would it be better if there was a different web application display technology, not retrofitted on top of HTML/CSS? Like maybe, but HTML/CSS is... fine. Even separated from the success of Javascript, it's an archetypal example of "worse is better" [2] leading to market success.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Yeah, a switch in mode between "make an XML document and then make something else to present it" (I think suffered massively from never actually being completely achievable with CSS, let alone comprehensible) and "just make a UI toolkit for javascript" (where in a full webapp world, the underlying documents are usually JSON and the presentation layer is javascript using HTML+CSS to talk to a layout and rendering engine).

Building GUI apps in Delphi was awesome.

I feel like the native apps and native GUIs back in the day were great! So many possibilities and customisation.

So, just let native proprietary platforms take over? It's fine to plow massive investment into Android and iOS but the web is undeserving?

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.

I like having an open platform for app development, even if it's got some rough edges.

I love the web as an application platform too. However I don't believe it's right to continually hang all of the complexity of a application runtime on what should be a relatively simple client for things that people actually use it for such as forums, watching videos and reading articles. The costs are just too high.

Um, no? Electron is insecure. Apps made with it can do far more harm to your machine then a webpage.

Do you even remember the IE6 days? - this opinion seems quite widespread but the open web is great for all of us.

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!

>> There's a huge gap between ie6 and what's happening now.

Yes. The fast paced development, and rich environment we see now is sooooo much better than the stagnation of IE6.

Cutting funding essentially returns us to the IE6 monoculture with no progress.

I, for one, am not advocating a return.

> Cutting funding essentially returns us to the IE6 monoculture with no progress.

1. It doesn't return us to monoculture - Monoculture of ie6 gave us multiple browsers, which recently all merged into Chrome. We already have a monoculture which will now lose funding.

2. We're not losing any of that progress. Actual documented standards exist now, all players implement the same basics, and you can create most websites without browser specific quirks. That's not going away.

3. We've had so much progress that Electron is its own massive OS now. We could do with a bit less progress and a bit more "how do we make this mess maintainable".

IE 6 gave us web apps with XMLHttpReques. IE 6 was amazing and developers loved it. It kicked the pants off of Netscape and earlier IEs.

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.

Correction: Apple neither uses nor contributes to Chromium. They have WebKit, which Chromium (Blink) was forked from in 2013.

Yes that is correct, substitute Apple for Samsung or Electron I suppose.

What does belief have to do with it? You can literally look those numbers up, and then go "...wow, no, that 80% is pretty damn close".

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.

Isn't that exactly what chromium is, or were supposed to be, companies invest in it, the problem is that google simply invest more

Linux is owned by Linux Foundation.

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.

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.

Counting bullets just counts bullets not time spent laboring over those bullets

Yeah, just counting bullets does not convey the work involved in defining a new standard prior to implementation.

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.

If Google is forced to stop the funding of competitors, I don’t quite understand why they also have to exit the market/stop working on Chromium/Chrome?

There’s the leveling of the playing field, each competitor has to fund their own products, but then why also do they have to be kicked out of the game?

I feel like consumers should ultimately make the decision of who wins and has the better product. The fact Google has found the best way to get value out of “free” browser use, shouldn’t be held against them. If consumers choose to use a browser that’s highly connected to Googles paid services, then perhaps that’s what the consumer wants. I view it as the other competitors job to lure those customers away from Chrome with their own product enhancements.

This is great news! Browser editors will finally have to consider their users as their customers again, not their product.

Mozilla is especially guilty of it, their foundation still doesn’t accept donations for browser development. It’s time that people can pay for their browser if they want to, that’s the only way they’ll get respect.

> Browser editors will finally have to consider their users as their customers again, not their product.

Do you really think the users are going to pay for browsers?

Yes. We had that business model for Orion browser since day one.

Web browser is is the most important, most intimate piece of software on your computer. It is astonishing that ad-tech has convinced us for so long that someone else should be paying for our browser.

I haven't been following Chrome/Google news closely, but a few weeks back on HN there was a blog by a prominent Chrome dev who had been suddenly and inexplicably laid off.

I wonder if Google have read writing on a wall somewhere and are quietly preparing for large organisational changes (up to complete divestment) for how Chrome is managed.

I don't see what the problem with this ruling or forced divestiture is.

Starting a new browser today is a massive, nearly impossible task made harder by the fact that the few browsers we do have continue to push through new specs and features. Sure that's good for consumers, but its bad for competition.

If those new specs and features are only possible because Google is artificially propping up the few browsers we do have, that reeks of an antitrust violation.

We will almost certainly see a slowdown in improvements to the web and browsers if this goes through, but we'll also see the door finally open to potential competitors that want to start a new browser engine rather than just put some paint on chromium and call it a browser company.

> Sure that's good for consumers, but its bad for competition.

So we want competition that's bad for consumers?

I have to admit I get the logic of the remedy being proposed, but something seems off to me and I can't put my finger on it. It seems different from the days of Microsoft, not just technically but in terms of the economics and consumer choice.

There's definitely stagnation in search, but I'm not convinced it has anything to do with Google paying browsers per se.

Part of me feels like there's kind of a shadow competition (in terms of browser market) that's really between Apple and everyone else, that's not being recognized by the DOJ in this. It's not this browser vs that browser, it's how you access the internet in mobile versus another way of doing so, and who controls that.

Maybe. I can't quite figure out what I think about all of this.

I could have clarified there. Google propping up a few browsers is good for consumers in the short term.

In the long term I'd argue that less competition will be a bad thing, and that we have already seen that when it comes to browsers.

For years Google made a habit out of ignoring the spec process in favor of designing their own web specs and shipping them in Chrome. That's ultimately bad for developers who have to code for different browsers like we're back in the IE days, and it being bad for developers leads to it being bad for users.

More importantly, the few browser vendors we do have can take all this Google money and use it to subsidize features that are bad for privacy, or further anticompetitive behaviors in related fields like AI. Without the Google funding we could end up with new browser competitors that are at least on a more level playing field.

All that said, I'm not actually a fan of government intervention and am torn on that front. If we do have a government tasked with protecting markets from anticompetitive behavior, though, they should enforce it.

> Sure that's good for consumers, but its bad for competition.

It may be good for consumers on the short term, but the lack of competition is bad for consumers on the long term.

So no, it's not good for consumers unless the competition aspect is fixed somehow.

Maybe I'm naive but isn't the only difficult task the JavaScript part? I'd argue that JavaScript is mostly where we went wrong.

The web shouldn't be this hard.

Implementing a spec compliant CSS renderer seems like a huge challenge as well, especially when it needs to be comparably performant.

Let’s be honest: neither Apple needs $18 billion a year, nor does Mozilla need $450 million annually to develop a web browser. Microsoft or Apple could afford 100 lives of browser development without a Google penny. And Mozilla corp was already making millions in “Royalties” 20 years straight.

Yes, Mozilla would probably lose those royalties, but at this point browsers are good. Not a single browser needs a billion $ development budget each year to keep working – it is stable, fast, feature-complete. No one’s asking for major changes anymore. Keeping them running doesn’t require billion-dollar budgets, and we can probably use latest Chromium build for free forever even if random asteroid destroyed the whole Google HQ tomorrow.

But of course — we are devastated. A few corporate bozos lost billions, others now need to figure out where to burn them next. Very sad. Not a dry eye in the house.

The main inhibitor of browsers advancing was not lack of funding, but lack of will.

It would be relatively straightforward to make web browsers competitive with Java/Swift mobile apps, but 2 specific companies would lose a lot of money on it.

Google has actively developed an entire UI framework for mobile applications that compiles directly into HTML+WASM. They want the browser to be competent, because a competent browser can attract money iOS users would otherwise spend on App Store fees.

I don't see how it would be "relatively straightforward" to make web browsers competitive if Chrome barely manages to keep up. There's a _lot_ of money going into making Chrome an alternative to the Android/iOS/macOS/Windows SDK, to the point where modern GUI applications have thrown out native controls and just render everything to a browser window instead.

Maybe you are right, but sone things I really dislike are:

- Getting rid of native SQLite in Chrome (Firefox was forced to follow), with the main reason is that ,,there are no 2 different implementations, all browsers use the same''.

- While there is file system implementation, there's no mmap, so there is no fast app start (just have SQLite with mmap, nothing fancy).

- No file system persistency guarantee, the OS can just wipe out the data

- All the persistent page APIs are just super hard to use compared to simple HTML/javascript/css as they are in a different process and need communication...it's overcomplicated instead of embracing a simple page as an app as an option as well.

You are right that WASM is a great improvement, and file system API is slowly coming back (still I'm not sure about mmap API which is crucial for fast app startup), but I'm talking about what was possible 10 years ago then reversed.

> Getting rid of native SQLite in Chrome (Firefox was forced to follow), with the main reason is that ,,there are no 2 different implementations, all browsers use the same''.

You have that backwards, it was Mozilla arguing against WebSQL (and never implementing it in Firefox in the first place) and Google was arguing for it.

I agree with your point about file system persistence, that is probably the biggest limitation in web apps compared to native apps today. However again it was Google arguing in favor of the File System Access API (letting web apps read/write normal files) and Mozilla/Apple arguing against it and only supporting a neutered version (fake hidden files that the browser can delete whenever it wants).

Great, thanks for correcting me on the details

Lack of will is a lack of purpose, and the purpose of these companies is profit, easy to follow.

The ecosystem was already destabilized because of the funding. It was just malignant. I feel no sympathy for Microsoft or Apple not pulling their weight. They're the ones harming consumers. Apple's likely intentionally doing it too. Pushing users towards apps so they can control discovery and earn commissions.

How will this help? If the web stagnates, it's even more reason to install an app instead.

By supporting lightweight browsers and markups that are a lot safer and more sustainable.

Recently, the browser has become this great unifying environment where we can build complex cross-platform experiences available to anyone on demand and not locked into any walled garden. Just off the top of my head:

— WebCodecs. You don’t need ffmpeg; encode in the browser.

— Web Audio. An advanced modular synth graph in the browser.

— WebRTC. P2P communication between browsers. Calls, collaboration, etc.

— WebGPU. Run shaders in the browser.

— File System API & File System Access extensions. Read/write very large files without having to put the entire contents in RAM.

All of this required significant amount of resources to spec and implement. With 80% of funding cut, I struggle to see how it can be maintained. Would be sad to see this rot with bugs.

> we can build complex cross-platform experiences

Sounds good for the developer but as a user who gives a shit? I miss my native desktop applications! They were faster and used less memory!

In this case, good for the developer is good for the user. As users, we get 1) tons more of those (since they’re easier to build, with one codebase that runs on literally every modern computing device, from phones to tables to laptops) 2) without being locked into a walled garden 3) fairly securely (heavily sandboxed, unlike desktop apps).

The sheer number of cool things that got posted on HN in recent years leveraging these APIs.

Sounds good for the user, but as a developer who gives a shit? I'm not porting my webapps to your tinker-toy OS for marginal return on my investment. That's redundant work that I'm not being compensated for, it doesn't matter how lickable the buttons are or how much of your 16gb of RAM I'm wasting.

As someone who has used Firefox since 1.0 (~20 years ago), I fully support returning Mozilla's sole focus to its users. Huge amounts of 'free' money has a tendency to de-focus organizations.

I use and love Firefox, but Mozilla screwed up badly in their funding model and now it's to late to fix it.

Mozilla should have take a large chunk of their yearly income and put it in an endowment, as Wikipedia does. Yes, yes I know Wikipedia bad, rich bastards begging for money, but they have a point. You can't expect money donations and income levels to remain stable forever, you need to plan for the future. Mozilla could easily have had a billion dollars in the bank and if invested semi-wisely that could have generated a steady continual income for decades to come.

Mozilla apparently made no good long term plan for how they'd deal with search engines cutting their funding. They tried becoming a services company, but they are not a company (I mean they are on paper, but they are an open source project more than anything).

You're right money was plentiful and without people to sensibly guide them they lost focus.

Mozilla has been trying to come up with a profitable business model for years. VPNs, privacy masking services, their own mobile OS, feed readers, you name it. Nobody is interested, new attempts at making money turn into cost centers, and the next attempt is burdened by the early shutdown of previous attempts.

Every time they try something, the open source crowd cries out in pain because money isn't going towards their three preferred bugs instead, and the mainstream doesn't care about anything Mozilla does.

They have made stupid decisions to be sure, and the money squandered at the top is definitely infuriating, but no amount of incentives or donations is going to replace the money Google is handing Mozilla to get out of the antitrust laws.

With the reduced funding, Mozilla can fire the overpaid/underperforming executives; and re-hire the tech-focused people who were actually developing the browser.

So when Mozilla fires vast numbers of people that will be progress for Firefox?

Such a deeply weird outlook.

Well, most of the money isn't going into development anyway. It's mostly just deals that make a few people rich.

This change will force browsers to rethink their profit strategy, forcing them to become more independent. I think that is a good and healthy thing.

Right so you took a look into Mozillas yearly report? And saw that most of the monet just goes to a few rich folks?

This all sounds like how people talks about tariffs, you don't know about how it work yet is so confident that you do know.

Mozilla has squandered billions on irrelevant crap.

Examples?

These payments were an ugly hack by google to get around monopoly lawsuits anyway.

I do want FF to succeed - it’s my main browser - but that whole setup was an artificial unhealthy construct that needs to end even if it is painful

Similar the whole chromium situation is problematic too. See google moving android to closed source

>It’s obviously illegal for Google to prop up Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari as if they were co-equal competitors to Chrome. And Chrome itself is the biggest “search-engine deal” of all, which is why the DoJ is so focused on forcing Google to divest from Chrome.

>The laws intended to foster competition will inadvertently destabilize the foundational tools millions rely on to access the internet

It sounds like, if anything, the problem lies in letting this “obviously illegal” setup become the statu quo.

The current situation is terrible, and something should be done about it. But cutting off the funding for something as critical as web browsers without a solid plan for how to replace that funding is irresponsible.

> something should be done about it

Ah, but this is something, and therefore, it must be done [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism

As a corollary:

If you are a company that wants to have control over the browser market and ensure that it doesn't get taken away, you should contrive to have the funding depend on you continuing to control it.

The current situation is not an accident.

"Cutting off the funding" is the most insane framing of the situation. It makes the DOJ sound like the wrongdoers or ones responsible here. This "funding" should never have happened in the first place. It totally distorts the economics of web browsers while also giving Google undue influence over the whole ecosystem. But sure, some browser developers will no longer be receiving some income, so let's allow it. Makes zero sense.

I personally am excited to see what changes. Who cares if it costs more money for Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft. There are real costs to browser work that they should be feeling. Even if it slows down feature development, so what? I don't see how this can be worse than the status quo that got us here.

First of all, I absolutely agree it shouldn't have been allowed to happen in the first place, but it did. And I absolutely think there should be meaningful repercussions for Google.

And really, I don't care if Microsoft and Apple stop getting paid for google search. My concern is Mozilla and Firefox. The google search money was Mozillas main source or revenue. They have been trying for years to find another way to make money, but have generally been unsuccessful, I'm doubtful they'll be able to figure out a way to replace that income now. What if this leads to Mozilla going out of business, Firefox being abandoned, and there being less competition? As a Firefox user, I might be biased but that seems like a worse outcome to me.

Perhaps Mozilla will spend money more effectively now? I'm not sure and frankly I don't care. For sure, it will be a sad day if Firefox formally goes under[1]. Still, it wouldn't change the validity of the decision to forbid these payments, spin off Chrome, etc.

[1] I think Firefox will survive. Orion browser, which has been my main browser for maybe a year now, was developed with far less money than the Firefox budget and something like only two people. Is this a fair comparison? I have no idea.

> Is this a fair comparison?

Is this a serious question? Orion uses WebKit which practically speaking is like 80% of what people know as "a browser" and where an insane amount of the effort and money goes. There are like 30 various WebKit-derived zero-features 1-man browsers out there on GitHub, they even show up here sometimes. Firefox maintains its own entire engine called Gecko, it's completely incomparable. The actual development cost of your browser is subsidized almost entirely by Apple (and Kagi's VC money), make no mistake about it.

> Orion Browser is a browser developed by Kagi Inc. that is based on the WebKit engine

So a skin for chrome.

WebKit is Safari. Blink would be Chrome.

I admit I've not been following the Chrome saga, but what does the DoJ mean by Google divesting from Chrome? Will they have to sell the Chrome brand? Will they have to get rid of all Chrome developers? If not, what would prevent Google from keeping all the devs and just rebranding the browser to something else based on Chromium?

I truly don't understand how you could force someone to divest from an open source project. Why would they not simply prevent Google (or any company) from paying broswers to limit our choice of search engine?

Maybe we'll be able to pay for our browser again? I used to pay for Opera, and I'd be happy to pay for a good browser like Firefox, too. Just like I pay for my Kagi search engine. If the browser is worth something to you, then it's worth paying for.

The complexity of the web specs is out of control.

It is a form of regulatory capture from Google & Apple to prevent new players from entering the space. Just look at the devellopment hell of Servo & Ladybird.

Maybe the future is in lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini.

If I were working at Mozilla, I'd be refreshing my CV right now.

The Firefox team is in an unenviable position. They need money to pay their staff, they're reliant on a single source that's about to dry up, and their userbase is as far as I can tell heavily biased towards techy types who don't want integration with Pocket and similar.

I'd personally like to see something like Supermium gain market share, especially for 'techies' - built on Chromium but (if possible) keeping support for Manifest V2.

This is so alarmist. Whatever company buys chrome would have incentives to keep investing in it.

Similarly if Google can’t bid for search engine placement, someone else will.

While Chrome has done great things for the web ecosystem, neither Google or Apple have released a browser that can truly produce apps that rival native experiences. If the keepers of the web didn’t have their own app stores, would that change?

Mozilla gets paid half a billion per year and they still can’t produce anything of value?

It just shows how easily corruption can take hold of an organisation. The amount of dev time you could buy with half a billion…

Fairly misleading wording with such lines like "Most of the funding for all of the major browsers is going away"... it makes it sound like it goes directly towards the individual browser budgets. That might be true of Mozilla since they don't make that many products tbh, but with Apple and Microsoft, there's no evidence Google's payments don't just go straight into a general fund.

I support this. Especially the Google selling Chrome / Chromium part. If it's so important, then Google should relinquish (cede) control over it to the community, and just keep writing the checks.

Honestly, I have no compassion for Apple or Google. I'd be willing to endure a lot of headaches in the name of costing those two companies influence over our society.

Can we get "HTTP 402 Payment Required" working now?

I don't get it. Can someone explain this so a child could understand?

I can understand how Google has used their dominant search engine position to push Chrome. A lot has been said about that. Also in the Microsoft case for setting IE as default browser in Windows.

But I don't understand why it should be forbidden for Google to pay other browser vendors for directing searches to them. That just seems like well functioning market economy.

Is it for paying extra to be default? Is that worth 5x the money in the contract? Or is it just that they are paying too much - more than it is worth - to allow the competition to stay, in order to not become a monopoly?

I think it's the latter. I don't think Google really cares about the default search engine. Microsoft didn't take the money and have their own stuff but it doesn't make any dent in Google's popularity (even now that Google is terribly enshittified and pretty much everything else is now better)

I think it's propping up the competition to be just enough to be considered competition, but not really interfere with them milking their internet domination.

Good, let it crash and burn to the point where chrome/chromium is recognized as the monopoly it effectively already is.

Both Chromium (used for chrome, edge, brave, etc.) and Firefox are open source. They can be forked and many people/companies do that. And even Safari is based on Webkit (a fork of KHTML). And Webkit continues to be open source and provides a more or less complete browser engine that can be adapted for use in other browsers (and has been). There are a few other browser engines out there but most of them don't register in usage statistics as anywhere near significant. Fractions of a percent market share basically. But most of those are also open source. So, the good news is that essentially all browsers are mostly based on open source code bases. Those aren't going to go away.

The difference between the top three and those other engines: Google funding. Google pays for access to the user via search and advertising. And for influence over standardization. Because you don't bite the hand that feeds you.

What happens if that flow of money stops is going to be interesting. I think there are probably going to be many companies, users and developers interested in seeing development of the thing they use, depend on, or work on every day continue. And it opens up the doors for other companies with commercial interests on the web to step up and sponsor some of this stuff. Companies paying for developers is how development for a lot of widely used OSS software works after all. I'm not too worried about all this grinding to a halt just because Google is forced to stop trying to own and control all browser development and related standardization. And people forget that especially Chromium and Mozilla get a lot of external contributions to their source code from developers that aren't paid by Google.

I think it wouldn't be bad for some fresh blood in this space. Including fresh funding from other companies. Apple and MS would probably step up their funding. They have plenty of vested interest and the means to do so. As do many other companies that depend on the web for their revenue. There's plenty of money out there that hasn't been tapped into simply because Google was paying all the bills. More diverse financing will make the web more robust. It also means a more diverse set of commercial interests. And a more level playing field. Maybe there's more than just advertisement driven click bait to be had. Even Mozilla might finally stumble on a more sustainable business model than just taking Google money and wasting it mostly on things that don't matter to browser users.

Is Dan fabulating that 18 billion is 80% of Safaris yearly funding? Surely it’s much less than that. A browser needs at least 50 billion per annum to stay on top of things. Nice try :)

Finally, the time for independent browsers has come.

I expect rise in Goanna/Pale Moon's popularity by the end of this year.

Apparently a controversial take:

Government should not tell private business how to run, and let people decide for themselves what they want to use.

The horror!

> The laws intended to foster competition will inadvertently destabilize the foundational tools millions rely on to access the internet.

So where is the contradiction? Did the author forget that "stabilization" of an anti-competitive market dynamic does not foster competition? And destabilizing anti-competitive is pro-competitive?

I remember paying for Opera 6.11 back in the day. If you can't offer a browser for free, charge for it. But as long as google uses its money it extorted from business to offer a browser for free, you can't compete with a browser that costs.

Presuabmly the browsers will still get paid by other search engines to set default? This could ultimately help DuckDuckGo, Bing and Kagi quite a lot. And the revenue won't fall completely.

Doesn’t seem like competition when the standards are, do what Google says.

Some of that funding has been used for DRM, tracking, etc.

Some things have turned out good though.

Seems like it will be a tough time for browsers to find alternate funding sources.

The headline could also be that the browser market is finally opening up to competition again.

OpenAI would be happy to buy it's way into the default search for Firefox and the other browsers.

I already made it my default search engine. It makes Google look old and shows just how much Google search is turned into a marketplace search.

Does this also mean Google will be forced to provide widevine to competing browsers on fair terms?

Widevine is arguably less of monopoly lever than money, still prevents competition from creating any new web browser ecosystem

I hope this encourages more third-party non-tech-giant compitition like the Arc and Brave browser.

Both based on chromium.

I think the 80% argument exactly demonstrated why intervention is needed. This is no longer a productive competitive market. It's a monopoly with sockpupets propped up as 'competitors'.

The irony is that Google pays this money in order to prevent being seen as a (browser) monopoly, but instead it seems the DOJ is using their status as a search monopoly as justification for stopping the funding (and selling Chrome) even though it will just create the same browser monopoly all over again.

Ostensibly.

I think the main reasons are to sabotage Firefox and to increase their partnerships with the other FAANGs.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Of course, monopolists and their toadies don’t acknowledge all of their dirty behavior.

Sabotage Firefox? They've literally been keeping Firefox afloat for what, a decade? Longer?

Google's been paying Mozilla for search traffic for more than 20 years, just like the other major browsers. It's not out of kindness any more than paying Apple for Safari traffic is out of kindness. It's literally payments for search traffic and reported to the IRS by Google as "traffic acquisition cost" or TAC. Google doesn't do it for "keeping Firefox afloat," it's about Google grabbing even more search traffic and dissuading browsers from sending their traffic to alternatives, or creating their own search engines, and always has been.

But Google was a mostly reasonable partner to browser makers until they got into the business themselves. After Chrome shipped, Google properties started mysteriously becoming slower or broken in Firefox in ways that had no good technical support and that consistently siphoned large numbers of Firefox user over to Chrome before being addressed. It happened over and over on major Google properties like Gmail and Docs all through the 2010s. Jonath's Twitter thread is gone but the reporting isn't https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

And they did it to IE and Edge too, until MS finally capitulated and jumped on Google's tech to escape the sabotaging. There's reporting on that too https://www.neowin.net/news/former-edge-intern-says-google-s...

> Google's been paying Mozilla for search traffic for more than 20 years

Well, and Mozill gladly accepted the deal, being passive and without even trying to be self-sustainable. The (only) culprit here isn't Google. Mozilla's mismanagement has played a big role.

Mozilla had 10 engineers a total team of about 20 and about $1M in the bank and a few dollars in donations coming in when we made the Google search deal. Take that deal away in late 2004 and Mozilla dies by 2026. It seems like you don't actually understand any of this and are just bluffing.

> Take that deal away in late 2004 and Mozilla dies by 2026

Run a team of 10 engineers for 20+ years on $1m? Wow that's a bargain!

(I assume you meant dies by 2006 :D)

If you're implying that Mozilla has not been horribly mismanaged for decades, I think many would disagree with that.

[dead]

Afloat like Weekend at Bernie's. I lived through multiple efforts to prop up the corpse while making sure it would never ever be as good as Chrome.

Depends on your definition of "good". To me it's impossible not to be as good as Chrome, as I define good as not being run by google.

Maybe it's time for ISPs to start endorsing small donations to Mozilla and others, for a good cause. But in the jacked up world we're living in, nobody would do this.

ISPs are a commodity business and can't afford to donate money. This really hits at the core of the contradiction here. People want the incredible public good of a modern web browser -- without the monopoly that can and has an incentive to pay for it.

Why doesn't DuckDuckGo fund Firefox? A lot of their missteps stem from trying to diversify revenue.

Billions on a web browser. So many billions. I am trying to grasp that.

If Google sold search business to private equity, then this problem could be solved.

Google could still pay browsers to make Gemini the default AI.

If Google hired a PR firm to lobby and protect their interests with chrome, this is exactly the kind of article they'd be placing in the media to achieve this aim.

I'm just hoping Mozilla/Firefox survives this. I'm not sure that any other mature, non-chromium based web browser exists.

What you're looking for is Pale Moon/any other Goanna-based browser. They'll probably the only ones which will survive in this fight.

They die the minute Firefox developers stop feeding them security fixes on the regular. They are not developing, they're packaging. If real development stops at Mozilla, if Gecko dies at Mozilla, there isn't a volunteer project on the planet that could keep it alive in Pale Moon or any other Mozilla derivative.

They're not using Mozilla's security fixes or browser engine. Pale Moon is a hard fork, so it is developed, and developed independently from Mozilla's Firefox.

Also check out this page - https://www.palemoon.org/info.shtml.

Goanna has been rebased over Gecko several times because they keep falling behind, hasn't it? So it's more of a periodically-hard fork.

They didn't "rebase" it though - just some code from Gecko was merged into it. And as I understand from https://www.palemoon.org/history.shtml, there were two merges - first with Firefox 38 ESR, and second with Firefox 52 ESR.

Thanks for the details! I was speaking from memory, but I see the last merge was quite a while ago. That somewhat increases my trust on the project then, although I'm not sure I'd ever trust a minor browser fork without further security assurances.

What I'm unclear about is whether the remedies would block any payment for search queries, or just the ones tied to default placement.

Next year those pop ups that tell grandma to install an iOS critical update might actually do something!

Microsoft and Apple can afford to keep developing a browser. Hopefully FF can get money from another knowledge discovery company e.g. Anthropic? OpenAI?

Apple has no incentive to develop a browser.

Makes me think of the horse browser (https://gethorse.com), namely the fact that unlike pretty much all other browsers it's a paid, subscription product. You actually have to pay $60 a year in order to use it.

Sounds absolutely ridiculous when you consider that you haven't had to pay for a browser since Netscape, and even then I think you only had to pay once for it (it was before my time, might need some help on this statement from people actively using Netscape in its heyday), but this whole Google antitrust thing has made me appreciate just how fragile the current browser status quo happens to be. Safari and Edge are fine, but I don't particularly like using either, and to be frank the reasons for using an open-source browser besides Firefox or Chrome are largely ideological.

It just might be the case where if you want an actually good browser, you'll have to start paying for it.

As far as I recall, the Netscape browser was free. There may have been a paid one (for enterprise), but I'm pretty sure we had a free one.

They did charge OS makers to bundle it (via support contracts) but the biggest market there (Windows) wrote their own. By IE5 Netscape was basically gone, IE6 had no competition (and hence no development) until Firefox came along.

Netscape Navigator was sold to consumers as boxed software at retail. IIRC it was around $60.

Horse charges $60 a year and it's still nothing more than a skin over Chromium. I saw the recent surge in paid-for browsers, but none of them seem to actually do any engine work themselves, they all grab Chromium or WebKit and throw a layer of UI on top.

Of course, people are paying for browsers, even if they don't know they are. WebKit and Edge are maintained by companies in a way similar to how Chrome is maintained by Google. It's just the alternatives to those two that are now in danger, and all of their derivatives (Electron, Tauri, and anything built on top of that).

Is horse a skin for WebKit or gecko?

You want to pay for a skin that’s fine. Doesn’t change the underlying problem.

Their website says Electron, so Chromium.

Google pays Mozilla and Apple to make Google Search the default search engine for Firefox and Safari. Google pays Apple about $18 billion each year, and pays Mozilla about $450 million each year.

“In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue.”

OP just made one the best arguments in favor of breaking up Google's monopoly.

Hopefully Google will keep sending half a billion a year to Mozilla (now with no strings attached). It was a good arrangement for everyone, especially for us. (Mozilla's not without controversy these days but hey, that's not on Google). I don't get why so many people are using fancy logic to argue, implicitly, that Firefox would be better with less funding. It won't be.

But it was very trashy of Apple to rent-seek off of their market power. $20 billion a year, to adopt a search engine that Apple insists, in court, they would have used anyway for free, is pure rent-seeking. Profiting off of the fact that Safari is preinstalled and has a high market-share floor (since other browsers have very limited competitive advantages on iPhone compared to Windows/Mac). Companies should be forced to compete for every dollar they earn.

What's going to happen is that we are going to see browser forks from places we never imagined ... like China.

Edge is not a white label. It has lots if cool features that chrome doesn’t

I guess let's wait for Mozilla Search being a wrapper around Google

Will there be an appeal? How finalized is this?

Why do we have Linux but not the browser equivalent? It’s been far more important than an OS for most people for a long time now.

We do have an open source browser, it dates back to 2002.

It's has higher desktop use than Linux - 15% of desktop browsers according to wikimedia compared with 7% for linux (about half of which is chromebooks)

Chromium? I'm dreaming of something without a giant corp behind it. A project that, at it's core, would always and forever, celebrate uBlock Origin, and things like it, instead of making up "security" issues to thwart it's power.

https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...

Firefox is 13%. Not great - it's down from 18% in 10 years, but it's good enough for me.

If you want to complain that it's eventually funded by google, I have bad news for you about who pays for linux developers.

Thanks everyone for making ChromeOS a reality, time to update those CVs from Web developer to ChromeOS developer.

Google succeeding where Microsoft failed.

This is a good thing. It's time for a big change. Some contenders are:

1. A lighter browser that goes back to the early 90s, supporting HTML, forms, sockets, a handful of codecs, and nothing more. The newer modern features have added disproportionate security risk. There are so many exploited zero-days in modern browsers that no modern browser is safe.

2. A chat system limiting to what AI can directly infer (in a rendered sense). Usually this content is limited to markdown/text/HTML and images/video, but no scripts. The AI's internal representation does not render a script like a browser does. Sockets can be simulated by message updates.

Konqueror still works, as does IE11. You don't need modern browsers. Most people just want them.

> There are so many exploited zero-days in modern browsers that no modern browser is safe.

Interesting suggestion. Do you know how many of those zero-days are related to modern features? Most of them seem to be coming from "browsers are still made in C(++)" and "Javascript/CSS performance optimisalisations gone wrong" that has been a risk for decades now. There was that time Apple accidentally opened up part of local browser storage from any website to any other website, but the same bug might as well happen with something as basic as cookies; we were just lucky that the bug was in that weird web SQL thing from a decade and a half ago that nobody uses.

People don't want them. People want something that "just works" for them to browse the web. The web is a complex mess of standards that requires a complicated browser right now, but does it need to be?

There already are "browsers" from the 90s you can use.

And which browser doesn't support html, forms and why would we want to use sockets?

Wishful thinking. Fantasy.

Google will sell Chrome for 100 billion and fork Chromium to build Grome browser like MySQL and MariaDB. People will stop using chrome when it will start to alter webpage (like edge modify web content if you search chrome) and heavily track user activity to feed LLM (like perplexity's browser) to serve Ad.

> And the DoJ has also argued that Google should be forced to sell off Chrome, forbidding Google from paying for Chrome and Chromium.

Part of the DoJ's argument is that Google currently underinvests in chrome to keep the ecosystem locked in place. Particularly when compared to the insane amount of money that searches initiated from Chrome bring into Google.

They also believe it's an attractive business and will be easy to find a buyer for because of this. It's worth way more than Google would let you believe. Just look at what they pay Apple to _not_ be in the search market.

This article is misleading in three ways. First, it ignores the markets are the cause of this problem. Second, it falsely claims Google is responsible for the development of other companies' browsers. Third, it treats Google paying for their development as a good thing with antitrust action being evil.

There's countless companies that depend on web browsers. Most don't buy them or contribute to their development. The biggest companies that include browsers in their products or platforms have budgets to build their own browsers, esp starting with existing code. They don't purely due to selfishness which, for many, hurts them in the long run as 3rd parties dictate their requirements.

That brings us to Apple and Microsoft. These are among the richest companies in existence. Their strategy is to create lock-in to their platforms which heavily use browsers. They have their own browsers. If they don't invest in their browsers, whatever happens is their fault alone. Double true since, unlike most alternative browsers, they have the money to sustain the project.

Third point is that it's good that the business model is to hope Google keeps paying for two of them with their advertising revenue. While it's great that they do, let's not forget both the dangers of (a) monoculture centered on one, greedy company; and (b) that many of us thing Google's advertising practices, especially in search, are so horrible we're trying to avoid using Google. I'd rather the the projects be self-sustaining and independent even if Google is a major customer.

Which brings me to a point of agreement where the one, independent project... Firefox... could be really hurt by a loss of Google funding. That's a sad reality I'd like to avoid. Meanwhile, I'd like to see more non-Google funding for Firefox or products layered on it from Mozilla. There should be a really, strong push to make sure Google isn't necessary for their survival. Most of what I see Mozilla promoting isn't that.

IBM/Red Hat has plenty of cash, time for them to step up and support Firefox. IBM hates paying for anything these days.

A good example is OpenSSH, that is used by Red Hat and AIX but they give nothing to the OpenBSD Foundation. Even Microsoft sends a decent amount to OpenBSD, IBM, a fat 0.

The only concern I have with this is how security will be affected.

The author doesn't seem to know there's no "Safari" division at Apple. It's not like Apple depends on Google exclusively to fund Safari.

Apple's revenue last fiscal year was $391 billion dollars; I think they'll be okay without Google's $18 billion.

It's way more critical for Mozilla—Google's payment is what pays for Firefox.

Author here. I'm well aware that there's no "Safari" financial division. And, yes, Apple will be just fine without Google's $18 billion, but that's because Apple can and will be incentivized to focus their investments on their own proprietary platforms.

Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make money working on Safari?" the answer is really clear: "Google pays us $18 billion annually."

After that money is cut off, an executive at Apple has to ask the question: "Why should we keep investing in Safari, instead of SwiftUI and Xcode?"

I'm sure we'd all love the answer to be, "We have plenty of money, so we should invest heavily in both," but that's not really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This will be one of them.

but that's not really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This will be one of them.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple works. Nobody is debating whether they should keep working on Xcode or Safari; it’s both.

WebKit is one of the most important frameworks Apple makes; many of their own apps rely on it like Mail and the App Store.

And many thousands of 3rd party apps (Facebook, Twitter) rely on WebKit to render web content on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS and tvOS.

Does losing $18 billion mean some adjustments? Of course, but it’s probably something else that’s not mission critical, not something like Safari/WebKit that’s on over 2 billion devices.

I'm not sure the fact that a web view component exists means it gets priority.

Facebook, Twitter etc have no choice but to use what iOS provides.

It's not like they'd stop publishing iOS apps I'd apple decided to never update the WebView componemt again.

And the audience is captive, if they get a bad rendering in mail they won't think "bad apple" but "bad email sender", same way we all bend around Outlook's rendering.

Just to clarify that many thousands of 3rd party apps (Facebook, Twitter) are forced to* rely on WebKit

Apple has considered that same question for most other apps. Garage Band, for example, and Apple Mail.

I don't think you should listen to anyone's ideas about why Apple does what it does. But if you want to hear my unfounded speculation: Apple wants to control the out-of-the-box experience for its shiny hardware and therefore includes a variety of apps that >x% of the customers are presumed to use on the first day they have their new shiny hardware, where x is some number and "day" may mean "week" or… well, really, this is unfounded speculation, it doesn't have to be precise.

> Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make money working on Safari?"

It doesn’t need to make money. A good web browser is a standard part of an operating system these days. Apple can’t ship without one. You might as well ask how they monetise Finder or Notes.

A browser that is just good enough for people not to notice that web apps work better on a $50 android then on their $1000 iPhone is a standard part of an operating system these days.

Perhaps - but they could just do what Microsoft did: bundle a version of Chromium.

As I’ve mentioned previously, WebKit is a mission critical framework that many thousands of apps use, including Apple’s.

Strategically it makes no sense to not own something that important.

Remember: Safari was created when Apple’s 5-year deal with Microsoft that made Internet Explorer the default browser for MacOS X expired in 2003.

10 years later. Google forked WebKit to create Chrome.

Apple never fully owned WebKit in the first place - most certainly not back in 2003. There was an extremely public and messy divorce period with the KDE codebase[0], and to this day there's still KHTML/KJS-derived code in WebKit that has to be sublicensed under GPLv2 for redistribution purposes.

If we're going to split hairs over the whole "Blink is an inferior WebKit fork" brouhaha, we shouldn't forget who Apple sherlocked to get there. After all, turnabout is fair play.

[0] https://blogs.kde.org/2005/04/29/bitter-failure-named-safari...

Finder and Notes are artificially and arbitrarily designed to hook into iCloud first and refuse any convenient synchronization with other cloud platforms. It is pretty easily argued that these apps are designed like this to upsell Apple iCloud subscriptions, not because it's easier or smarter to do that way.

Similarly, Safari isn't clouds and rainbows either. It serves the same purpose IE did back in the day; furnish a "premium" experience that is deliberately irreplaceable and intertwined with the OS. We saw this with the push notification API, "Add to Homescreen" functionality and so many other places where Apple dragged their feet and refused a featureset that would enable competition with native apps. This is a hell of their own making, Apple can leave any time they want by acquiescing to app publishers the same way they did on Mac.

Seems clear they have not been investing much of that 18B on Safari. Wow, can you imagine what Safari would be if Apple had invested a large fraction of that income on Safari?

Yeah, it's a funny argument because while Apple has certainly put a lot of money into WebKit and JavaScriptCore over the years in absolute terms, they already don't prioritize Safari or treat web technologies as an alternative to native app development.

From the outside it looks to me like Apple started reinvesting in Safari in 2023 (starting with adding support for notifications for PWAs) when the EU started getting serious about regulating the App Store monopoly, and they see investment into Safari as fodder for negotiation with governments about "people can always use the web if they don't like the App Store"

At WWDC 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a "sweet solution" for developers who wanted to program the iPhone: web apps in Mobile Safari!

Developers, who wanted a real, native SDK, were greatly disappointed (to put it mildly), and in 2008 Apple introduced not only a native iPhone app SDK with developer tooling but an entire app store.

But Jobs wasn't entirely off base. Gmail had replaced dedicated email apps. Apple had implemented native-like widgets in Mobile Safari as well as touch input, javascript canvas support, and audio support. Today you can implement a video streaming client (Netflix), game streaming client (Amazon Luna), groupware client (Discord, Slack, Teams), or even a whole office suite (Office 365) in Safari. Even many "native" mobile apps are basically just shells on web apps.

I think you are probably right for other reasons

Safari has long lagged on other browsers, Apple would rather it didn't exist but have to keep it ticking over

With less competition they will likely be happy to lag behind even further again

Perhaps you haven’t noticed but Safari has shipped about 20 updates in the last 3.5 years.

If you check the Interop 2025 numbers, you’ll see Safari is neck and neck with the other browsers and has implemented the latest CSS features [1].

The WebKit team was first to crack the code on how to implement :has() that eluded browser teams for 20 years and was the first to ship it [2].

As for wishing that they didn’t have to maintain Safari, it’s a mission critical framework on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS… it’s the only thing saving the web from the monoculture of Chrome-based browsers; unfortunately Firefox is in the low single-digits as far as market share goes. Safari on iOS has about 25% market share.

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/16458/announcing-interop-2025/

[2]: https://webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/

> Safari has long lagged on other browsers

Apart from not implementing a handful of Google’s sneaky draft fingerprinting proposals (WebUSB, WebMIDI, etc), what is Safari actually lagging on?

I think it's important to keep in mind that this isn't the end of antitrust. The EU has already forced Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. They might force them to support PWAs on a similar level to native apps next. Chromium will be open source for the foreseeable future, no matter who buys the Chrome branding and userbase. This could be the very beginning of a much more competitive app landscape.

Or it could all go to shit. Hard to say.

What would you do? Would you keep the status quo or find a 3rd way?

I agree. Safari will be fine, and Microsoft has the resources to devote to browser development.

I wonder, though, about Firefox and a post-divestiture Chrome. Browsers are labor-intensive to develop due to their complexity, and the Web keeps changing. Moreover, people expect browsers to be free of charge; it’s been a long time since the days when people paid for Netscape Navigator and Opera. Without outright subsidizing development, Web browsers need to be either community-supported, ad-funded, or subscription-based in order to fund development.

> "Apple's revenue"

Revenue != profit. $18 billion for something they have to maintain anyway is 100% profit.

Was going to say this, I can't remember the exact figure but it was something crazy like 20% of net profit was from that deal.

TODO: find a link to the original article that mentioned it.

I’m aware of the difference between revenue and profit.

As a percentage of profit, the $20 billion was 17.5% of Apple’s operating profit in 2022.

I don’t think that has any material impact on something as established and as important as Safari.

That’s 18 billion in near 100% profit margin. Which will be painful to loose.

Mozilla wastes way too much money: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

This loss of funding will be good for them, they can focus on a browser instead of stupid things.

They are the crew of activists now, they can tell us that the stupid thing is the browser.

With current management, I doubt it.

They won't. They never really did. The OG firefox was a rebel creation that they latched onto, that then itself became the old guard. Firefox still has tone deaf usability bugs that are 10, 15 and 20 years old.

This will strongly slow down adoption of new rendering standards. I hope we don't get another IE6 era.

Good!

Bad. This will lead to a further push towards apps instead of websites.

The whatng cartel has only 3 web engines which can compile with only 2 c++ compilers:

The web engines are: - mozilla geeko - apple webkit - gogol blink (fork of webkit)

The compilers are: - gcc (MIT) - clang (apple).

Providing real-life alternatives to those are close to zero. Namely, the only real alternative is a regulated technical compatibility with orders of magnitude simpler computer languages, file formats and protocols.

For instance, for the web, where reasonable, it would mean noscript/basic (x)html (basic HTML forms can do wonders with proper HTTP redirects) and if really too alien to noscript/basic (x)html, some public web APIs or other protocols (IRC for instance). Secrets/keys setup would have to be easily available via some noscript/basic (x)html portal or some other easy means of identity verification, could be a very rate limited and constraint anonymous web API.

Keep in mind the obvious: most of the work for a service which is public on internet is keeping it safe and available, certainly not the GUI/protocol which have to stay minimal in order to maximize technical interoperability anyway and will mechanically easy the tasks to keep it safe and available.

What are the opportunities now for browser forks and browser development?

I think browsers are in the best state to slow down their development rate. They have come so far, it is the most uniquitous application ecosystem nowadays. Even though there are still great developments currently, they are rather niche and it would be way more damaging if it slowed down 10 years ago. Maybe financial constraints also have a positive side. TL;DR the web ecosystem has matured a lot.

Can we get one good one then ?

Good. Perfect time for Mozilla to convert into a democratically controlled worker-owned company and cut off the parasite C team.

Taking your suggestion in good faith, I'm intrigued by your concept of democraticly controlled, worker owned. Please explore this further.

I guess I'm wondering primarily what "democratically controlled" even means. Like everyone votes on every decision? Or we elect people to make decisions? Or we vote on "big decisions"? (Who defines "big"?

Most companies are democratic. In the sense that the shareholders appoint the decision makers. Shareholders -> Board -> management.

Your point about "worker owned" simply means the workers own the shares, and hence "democratic" would seem to be redundant. Unless you are suggesting that the democratic function is exercised in another way?

Now clearly Mozilla is a mix of non profit and for profit. A non profit doesn't really have shares (there's usually some other approach to appointing decision makers.)

So, I think you are suggesting that the voting rights move from "shareholders" to employees.

Naturally this opens the door to 51% attacks, or more specifically incentivises workers to coalesce into groups with mutual-support voting.

Given a reasonably high turnover in workers, we should therefore expect decision making to be mostly short-term not long term? (Simplistically, most people will vote to further their short term returns, ignoring long term goals because in the long run they're not here.)

In other words the company starts to behave a lot like a govt does. Regular elections promote short-term goals and results (don't start a project that will complete after you've left) at the expense of things like maintainence etc.

It also values political skills over say engineering skills. Being a good speaker counts for more than being competent.

Do you believe this structure will make a better browser? When funding runs low, will they make better decisions on which staff to cut?

He Is talking about a worker cooperative. You can search information about current ones if you are truly interested in how they work.

I agree with him that software engineers should be making the decisions in Mozilla.

Like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain.

https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/about-us/

> MONDRAGON is the outcome of a cooperative business project launched in 1956. Its mission is encapsulated in its Corporate Values: intercooperation, grassroots management, corporate social responsibility, innovation, democratic organisation, education and social transformation, among others.

> Organisationally, MONDRAGON is divided into four areas: Finance, Industry, Retail and Knowledge. It currently consists of 81 separate, self-governing cooperatives, around 70,000 people and 12 R&D centres, occupying first place in the Basque business ranking and tenth in Spain.

Or Scop-TI in France, a large worker cooperative in the IT and engineering sector.

This isn't anything new:

https://institute.coop/what-worker-cooperative

If everyone was relying on Google, then that should come to an end. Browsers got WAY too bloated anyway, and frankly I think we can dramatically simplify the web too.

There should be some kind of open-source consortium that is in control of web standards, and then some open-source kernel for all Web Browsers to share, just like there are independent versions of Linux all sharing a common core.

So it's a good thing if Google loses control. I'm all for it. They have too much power.

searching for w3c... zero results.

so, people here are too young or forgetful.

the whole reason browsers are deemed unsafe was exactly because of google and Microsoft hold on standards. chrome only reason to exist as a cost center on google was to undermine Microsoft on these groups, the same way Microsoft was undermining google there with IE.

everyone here is saying how google saved the internet by coopting an existing open source project... and then holding back thinks like cookie isolation for another couple decades. sigh.

interesting that google draw the same uncritical fanboyism which used to be reserved for apple.

I mean everyone wanted Google to stop paying to make their search the default! As soon as there is a new angle, the same people will suddenly argue the opposite of what they believe! These same people in fact are likely opposed to monopolies too, but, if Trump is involved - CHANGE EVERYTHING.

yet another piece of technology we shall cede to china.

downvote if you want - if it happens, my prediction will age like fine wine.

Whereas if it doesn't happen nobody remembers your comment and you suffer no social consequences. Very +EV bet.

Currently, it's ceded to a country hostile to mine. Great.

I mean if the courts break it up and the funding goes away.

Then in a couple years after proper funding and less crazy austerity elsewhere, such as in China, there will be these nail-biting articles about how evil wicked China is getting ahead in the browser and we need good American USA browsers without ever reflecting on our own stupid yeehaw foot shooting behavior that created the situation.

Absolute psychotic madness

Yellow scare strikes again!

[dead]

[flagged]

Mozilla funneled shit ton of those money into nonsense, now they're having their reckoning. Cry me a river.

A lot of the nonsense has been increasinly desparate attempts at finding revenue sources beyond Google.

[dead]

This is a tragedy.

I closely follow browser development and love that the pace of innovation is so fast.

How can such an obviously bad decision be made?

If the big tech companies are so powerful then why is this happening?

Oh no, what a nightmare if browsers have to stop implementing zany new API-of-the-week and stabilize on a slow-moving web standard.

Will we ever get wireless-USB-for-smells?

Fuck it. Burn the boats.

Great news! Mozilla will finally disappear!

Hopefully

This article seems to fundamentally misunderstand how businesses fund development.

Google's payments to Apple have no direct impact on Safari funding decisions. It's just a revenue stream. Similarly for Mozilla. Microsoft... not even sure whether to begin with those claims.

I think the article touches upon some important truths about Google's code contributions to chromium and financial payments to Mozilla and Apple. But correlating those with product development funding is just entirely plainly wrong.

> Google's payments to Apple have no direct impact on Safari funding decisions. It's just a revenue stream. Similarly for Mozilla. Microsoft... not even sure whether to begin with those claims.

I don't understand. If Google is paying 80% of Mozilla browser development, how could stopping those payment not affect Mozilla funding decisions?