All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding
danfabulich.medium.com
danfabulich.medium.com
If you say browser developers need money from the search giant to compete in browser development, you are saying that - right now - you can't compete in browser development without it.
That is a cartel.
We only have four major browsers because only four players can play on a fair playing field. There are people who have been paid millions to create and perpetuate this system. Web developers worrying about feature development without it is their KPI. None of this is a coincidence, none of this is a natural law.
Given that browsers are essential to access information, I think they shouldn't be developed behind a business model, but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.
There should be some independence guarantees in order to make that organization not have to bow to pressure from governments to sacrifice privacy due to funding threats.
Look to how the Linux kernel is developed, and look to its full history, including forks large and small, alternate releases for alternate reasons, alternate releases by different people and teams, and so on. It's not a hypothetical, it's the organization of one of the largest software projects in the world.
And it's a good thing we don't need a global fund, because trying to start at such a high level is basically asking for this to take the next 15 years to even get started. By contrast, anyone can start a new fork of Chromium or Firefox today... which, again, is not just me theorizing, but is a thing that has happened, several times over. Making it so "getting started" is something that can happen in a distributed fashion without having to get some "global" organization to sign off or be created is superior, which is sort of softballing it a bit because it's honestly the difference between possible and impossible.
If someday that develops into a "global organization" or some set of such, hey, that's fine. But trying to get "someone else" to start it at that level... and it has to be "someone else" since none of us could even hardly start doing that ourselves... is impractical to the level of impossible.
How do you ensure it’s not just laundering money with little or no work into the problem.
I think it’s messed up Google essentially funds all browsers but putting it in the hands of politicians isn’t going to help, would be better to try and have more companies funding it so at least the dependency on Google is less.
Sounds like a backdoor way to add a kill switch or censor filter to browsers from a central, unelected authority that does not respect the sovereignty and speech and media laws of the individual users' home countries.
No thanks, I'll take an open source, corporate controlled browser 10/10 times.
They're also completely blind deaf and dumb to modern society having never had to suffer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
I don't agree that the current situation in the browser market fits the definition of a Cartel, as I understand it! :-)
In an actual cartel or oligopoly, you'd expect at least the cartel members be relatively equal in power. But if the article is right, then Google has basically all the power to decide the course of web tech going forward, as the other browsers devs can't meaningfully deviate from whatever vision Google has for the web, without risking their funding.
It’s textbook.
Manifest v3 for example, and various standards that make fingerprinting easier.
Google has made sure that _nobody_ can implement a browser with hostile takeovers the "standards" committees and pushing the standards solely in the direction of corporate interests, bypassing consumer interests. The whole point was to make them so complicated it would be impossible for someone without an insane budget to implement one.
Proof of this is the whole advertising sandbox crap... what the hell does an HMTL Client "need" an advert sandbox for?
Breakups are painful. Ultimately they're better for everyone.
Instead this will put all browsers on a much more even playing field, and perhaps it will force governments and citizens to realise that free software takes someone to write it.
Or May be even a new standard that compiles into HTML / CSS / JS. A standard that fits most uses cases and is simpler to implement.
By propping up competitors, Google could always point and say "Look, there's the competition and they're thriving. How can we be a monopoly?"
It is a bit like calling a supermarket a cartel if it relies on local residents for 80% of its profits. No, the technical term is they are paying customers (although in Google's case it is complex and non-traditional because they are carrying the financial burden on behalf of the people who click on ads and there are a bunch of free riders). The odds are against a bunch of alternative customers hiding in the wings waiting to pop up; if they go away then they are just gone.
This comparison does not make sense?
So it monopolizes the distribution platforms for search engines.
The easier analogy here is an oil monopolist paying off all the tanker and rail and pipeline companies so nobody else can get oil to customers, and then splitting the massive profits with the shippers.
By the way this example actually happened and is the origin of the term “antitrust” which is the area of law that Google was found guilty of violating by multiple judges. So the analogy is right on the nose.
Some remember the time, when browsers existed before chrome as well .. and I am not a ware of a uniquie chrome feature, removing significant barriers.
But by developing the browser, they can
A) decide the direction where the web is heading
B) get direct control over peoples internet experience and their data
Not the fact that Google is the one doing the paying?
All for nothing, in the end even they had to give up and switch to white-label Chromium.
Wikipedia says:
> A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with each other[1] in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to outlaw cartel practices.
What you are alleging sounds bad, but it doesn't sound like a particularly good match for the term 'cartel'.
I earned my first money for "web developement" in '99, and as much I understand underlying dynamics, I - as a user but mostly as a developer - really enjoy the current phase and I really liked that brief period when IE was the browser.
This is absolutely true if you simply want a web browser to be a document reader.
Thankfully (in my opinion) the modern browser is realizing the dream to "reduce Windows to a buggy set of device drivers".
You all were impressed upon by the cartel you claim to hate to prop them up.
It’s electromagnetic geometry in the machine. Future hardware makers do not have an honorific obligation to validate developer illusions. They’re working on closed ecosystems that self manage their electromagnetic geometry through to the task at hand without the energy wasting ad hoc effort of human programmers.
Your real problem is nVidia and other chip companies who have no obligation to save jobs of American workers who are just going in circles repeating old memes like a fuzzy VHS.
Never heard of a cartel that gives its product (and the ingredients to make it) away for free to anyone including their direct competitors.
And who made the specs so stupidly complex in the first place?
Back in early 2000s you could visit pretty much every site using a KHTML-based browser and that was written by a handful of KDE devs.
Google pushes over 400 new web APIs per year, often with no true specs and with no input or consensus from other browser vendors.
So. Who is responsible for complexity?
If they do it, there would be no reason, other than administrative, for Google to hold this money back to only a handful of vendors.
I think that weakens the cartel argument.
Cambridge Dictionary: A cartel is a group of similar independent companies or countries that join together to control prices and limit competition. It involves restricting output, controlling prices, and allocating market shares.
Group of similar but independent companies (check) that join together to control prices (no, but they do join together to control the web in other ways), and limit competition (yes, by constantly adding features to HTML whilst market dumping they prevent competitors from arising). It involves restricting output (not in the literal sense, does apply if you consider the synchronized way they implement standards), controlling prices (yes, forcing them to zero instead of the natural market rate), and allocating market shares (yes, if you consider iOS browser restrictions).
Browsers used to be one of the most critical and insecure software. All the major security enhancement in terms of isolation, sandboxing, privilege separation happened IMHO due to a Google backed browser security research. This benefitted the community because other browsers either adopted Chromium as the base or implemented similar security improvements.
I think it’s not just the browser anymore, the core building blocks like v8, blink etc. forms the foundation of modern web. It will be interesting to see the benefits of anti-monopoly laws when it comes at the cost of destabilising something foundational like Chromium.
And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.
Chromium was simply a continuation of innovation that had started before Google even existed.
But in parallel it was Firefox that broke the Internet Explorer monopoly that made 3rd party browsers technically possible in the first place.
But all of that would have been irrelevant if it wasn’t from anti trust actions that prevented MS from doing the stuff they’re doing now (now that the antitrust probationary period is over) such as forcing their browser to be the default browser.
If it wasn’t for antitrust action against MS they would have taken these actions when they were much stronger and the other browsers were not as advanced and Chrome would likely have been nowhere to be seen.
Anyways, you’re wrong even with the idea that chromium has innovated the most. Most of the ideas that Chrome has today were implemented in other smaller browsers such as Opera well before Chrome ever integrated them.
I suspect if Chrome were to disappear tomorrow, browser technology would be far more innovative 2 years from now than it will be with Chrome as the dominant browser.
And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would still be a major player in the browser engine race today. Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser engine did.
Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.
It's like saying that a modern car is hitting more than a model T from 100 years ago.
Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.
V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.
Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.
Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.
Chrome would still have won because it was force pushed by google.com, every google service, every google software nad large part of 3rd party software had it as bundled (checked by default) install.
Google crippled ad blockers on their platform and ads are getting through with increasing frequency.
Stuff that really should be working on my browser or did before is now getting blocked because I apparently should be using a webkit browser. One example is my credit card is getting rejected more and more often lately. But things work fine when I open up Chrome and make a payment.
What things do I want improved? Popups/popunders still happen sometimes. There's still no real solution to block those annoying mailing list popovers either. The dominance of Chrome seems to have frozen the internet in time around 10 years ago. Nothing has really changed between then and now, while before there always seemed to be a feature to look forward to. I guess the last big thing was web assembly, and even that was released nearly a decade ago.
It’s all been downhill from there.
Lots of innovation has happened, don't get me wrong. And maybe the web browser as we know is "mature" and therefore lacking need to evolve.
But I'd argue (as I did in a sibling comment) that maybe this drying up of funds could pave the way for new innovation. The web, the creative parts of the web, and definitely the internet as well, didn't have monster budgets to drive its innovation originally. It had some (DARPA, et al), but not like today.
Sigh, yes, even keeping copy/paste working is problematic for the last several years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40886954
Luckily the top comment in that thread says "this is the process working" so I guess we're good
But then I think, what would it have been like without this investment. Maybe browsers would stay buggy and we'd have an internet with much more diversity in protocol. The internet of today is monotone and subservient to its web master.
I wonder if innovation stagnated because of the extensive (ab)use of the web. Granted, early on, Google's contributions have been more than just pioneering. Both on the backend and the frontend, we all owe them a pint.
But recently, it feels it's just been self-serving. And the monopolistic overtones plus the loss of "do no evil" has arguably hurt us in recent years.
That being said, if the web browser isn't funded so deeply, maybe this is a good thing? Maybe that will give birth to fresh cycles again. I kind of think like letting a corn field grow a new crop to let it regenerate. It could usher in new innovations.
edit: On a second thought, as a dev now, I look at React, Angular, all these mega frameworks... and wonder if we're just patching over problems big tech baked into the modern web. First point still stands tho.
It’s basically a statue of liberty made of ductape and chewing gum, then reinforced with formula-1 level engineering and novel materials research.
The building blocks and lessons learned could be used for something novel (nope not gonna happen it’s permanent now). WASM, json, Skia renderer, pretty awesome v8 virtual machine etc etc … all of that are pretty neat.
I guess the key thing is what is the value of browser now?
It’s the ui to bazillion networked business and government systems, productivity tools etc.
I would argue the sticky moat here is not the web interface, though, but the data and the familiar usage patterns. _Theoretically_ the ux is portable to any system with vector graphics renderer and the data itself should be (a long stretch right) independent of the client ui.
We simply don't know how browsers would have developed in the past years if Google did not have a monopoly. However, we know that monopolies are almost never good for consumers. Therefore, there is a high chance that in an alternative timeline, where one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world did not have a monopoly on browsers, we as consumers, would have been better off.
Browsers used to try new ideas like RSS, widgets, shared and social browser sessions. Interfaces to facilitate low-friction integration with the rest of your life, and to multiplex data sources so that it's not a hassle to have many providers for [news, entertainment, social] experiences.
Likely no coincidence that this innovation languished once monopolies started pumping money into the ecosystem.
I would call it one of the most important innovations of the last 20 years. Name another true write-once-run-anywhere universal VM that is installed in billions of consumer devices and costs nothing. It doesn't exist. The only way the entire modern software ecosystem is even possible is because of the web as a platform. Literally everything else is a non-portable closed proprietary stack.
The web doesn't need standards evolving at the speed of light, it's only happening because Google's strategy with Chrome has always been to set a pace that others can't follow, not about designing things right.
the benefits have already been contributed to chrome, and is easily available even if funding is cut today.
However, google didn't give chrome and their money away altruistically. They wanted something back - control of the browser market, and ability to dictate certain aspects of the web. I do not believe they should have this ability. Taking away monopolistic practises with the browser market can help with this aspect.
Just because an entity happen to output also some positive social impact doesn't mean its current global influence on society is overall extremely toxic. Pablo Escobar is classic example.
Some people think innovation mostly happens in startups, but Big Corp monopolies have a unique and important role to play. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC did stuff no startup has the money for.
Indeed. And since there has been nothing but bad changes to HTTP and HTML in the last decade, all centered around turning the web into just a means of transporting javascript applications, we know who to blame. I'm still upset that Google and Microsoft agents within the IETF managed to openwash and push QUIC/udp through as HTTP/3.
It's a status quo that definitely needs changing if we're going to have a web usable by human persons and not just corporate persons.
Everything in the early 2000s was insecure and critical.
It's true that Google 'got there first' on a lot of stuff and that groups like Project Zero do incredible work but the idea that we'd be nowhere without Google is a bit silly.
[1]: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
I am not suggesting that browsers would not evolve without Google. I am looking at the impact on web today. Perhaps new technologies will emerge, perhaps browser development will adopt different model or perhaps native apps will get a boost.
Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
And if those cash starved tiny companies that develop Safari and Edge lose their Google bribes, I'm sure they'll manage alright.
By the way who funded KHTML? Before everyone except Firefox took that code to make a browser...
Why the hell would they?
Mozilla does all the "harebrained" stuff to make money. Especially to diversify their income and rely on Google less. Developing Firefox is a net loss of money.
They won't, and in fact those harebrained moonshots at desperately acquiring scalable revenue will only increase. The money from selling the default search actually directly incentivizes Mozilla to make the browser good to increase the value of the ad space.
Absolutely not. As you say, harebrained schemes would go, also it'd change the browser ecosystem considerably.
In time that might force browsers to adopt a minimum connectivity standard for all browsers that would be simper than those in use today. That would have many upsides for users which I posted about earlier.
It was the other way around. Other product like VPN, MDN Plus, Pocket was a way to diversify revenue which could be channeled to Firefox, although the problem is Mozilla isn't the best company at making money.
Again, the whack-a-mole myth that simply won't die. I have asked people about this over and over and over again over I'm gonna say like the past year and a half and at this point I feel pretty confident that this was kind of a mass-hallucinated myth. If you try to be objective and actually look at the numbers and you look at the time period over which Firefox lost browser share and you look at their budgets in the time period over which they engaged in side bets, the math just doesn't add up. None of the side bets ever occurred at prohibitive development costs, and they did not occur over a time period over which Firefox's browser share crashed. There's no such thing as a missing browser feature which Firefox was unable to implement because they didn't have access to resources due to those resources being siphoned away by sidebeds. And people seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually like make a real argument about these things before simply claiming it.
There is a kinda-sorta real version of the argument, which is that around 2016 or so, before Firefox released quantum, the quality of the browser was lagging behind alternatives, and they were investing significant resources in Firefox OS. That's the closest to a real thing that this argument can attach to. But no one making this claim even knows that no one making this claim has looked at their budget, how much it costs to run a VPN, or made any cause and effect connection between that and other things. This is a myth that kind of got hallucinated into existence by hn comment sections.
I do think the critique of straying from a commitment to privacy is a real thing, but the narrative that they wasted time and resources on side features while the core browser experience deteriorated, attempts to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between that and market share is not backed up by any facts. And if you look at my comment history, it's practically a year of pleading with people to cite any example whatsoever that would substantiate this argument.
Firefox spending money on harebrained schemes like FirefoxOS is a good thing (even if it failed), it's how you find black swans that everyone has to copy from you. Otherwise you're always playing catch-up.
How much money does Firefox waste on harebrained non browser initiatives, compared to the Firefox browser?
They'd fork the open source of Chrome and get to work. After a while, they'll start taking the market share (they can afford to hire back the whole team).
Couple of years later are we in the same position? Maybe, maybe not. I'm curious to see how it plays out.
Probably not a bad thing if you you believe in "antifragility". The technology will improve as it should.
I would consider KHTML as a technology. Much like v8 and blink. I have no doubt the open source technology community is capable of producing great technologies with or without big tech funding. But will it be able to "productize" them and drive large scale adoption? I have my doubts but time will tell.
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.
People say HTML/CSS/JS/WASM is complex, but the Ladybird team is proving that a very small team can make a working browser in a few years. Thanks to the efforts of dedicated developers behind browsers, most of the web API, including rendering algorithms and such, has been painstakingly written out in detail.
Most people don't need insane levels of backwards compatibility or intense PWA support. That's just cruft that slows everything down and increases the attack surface for, to the user, no real gain.
Perhaps what we need is a lot of lightweight general-use browsers (based on a small number of engines) and then some heavyweight power-user browsers that can WASM to their hearts' content.
This might not be cheap to serve, but it’s cheap to build, and it makes you wonder about the intersection and inflection of those cost curves. And of course we haven’t spent decades optimizing for it.
Don't get me wrong.. REST APIs, HTTP, HTML5, all wonderful. But as a user, the cost/benefits of ubiquitous JavaScript in depth simply to win interactivity and single page apps at the cost of um, everything wrong with the web (and by extension much of the world economy via surveillance capitalism) are a bit suspect.
Browser complexity is made more tractable by Wasm, not less. Maybe remove JS now that Wasm exists.
Practically at this point it’s configuring a Skia render context. This gives a known api to target for the graphics stuff.
There is near 0 value for designers to pain themselves over this.
The design interface should be 85% graphical.
The implementation should be a runtime for a configurable context and it should be configurable with code.
The ui given to designers should be a graphical tool. There could be many, many such tools!
I’m writing this as a graphics engineer who has followed this for over 20 years. I would love to hear engineering based counter arguments to this pov.
We've gone too far. Give us back html homepages and executables you can run if you'd like something crazier
I dont think a browser being more complex than a person can grasp is an important aspect/problem that needs rectifying.
Absolutely! Looking at this objectively, most of the web and browser developments over the last two decades have been for the benefit of Big Tech and business—not typical web users.
These developments have been forced on users to allow that mob to sell us more stuff, confine what we do, and spy on us and collect our statistics etc. Moreover, complicated web browsers provide a larger surface/more opportunites for attack.
Everything I want to do on the Web I could do with a browser from the early 2000s.
I mostly run my browsers without JavaScript. That kills most ads and makes pages load so much faster (as pages are much, much smaller). Without JavaScript I often see a single webpage drop from over 7MB down to around 100kB.
7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the hell do we users put up with this shit?
It seems to me if all that Google infrastructure were to be busted up and browsers went their own way then the changes in the browser ecosystem would eventually force lower common denominator standards (more basic APIs, back to HTML, etc.).
With simper web tech being the only guaranteed way of communicating with all Web uses this would force the sleazeballs and purveyors of crap and bad behavior to behave more openly and responsibly. Also, users would be able to mount better defenses against the remaining crap.
In short, the market would be less accessible unless they reverted to lower tech/LCD web standards, and that'd be a damn good thing for the average web user.
The real problem, of course, is backwards compatibility.
I want an America where competition thrives again.
Clearly you’re not doing much front line web development.
Web browsers are incredibly capable and all the features they add are making browsers better and life easier for developers and experience better for users.
This is the sort of comment that back end developers make, who hate front end development.
I will concede the features are very useful for developers to push algorithmic slop and walled gardens onto us.
2) You're being facetious if you're saying Firefox is much worse. Feature sets and performance are very similar. Most people would not notice the difference if reskinned
2.1) ditto for Safari or any of the chromium browsers.
3) a monopoly is good for noone (even the monopoly)
I don't think most of the innovation has done very much. I realise this is deprecating the sunk wow factor and deprecating the future wow factor, but in the end, its HTML mostly for me.
In fact, if the primary function of code work for the next 5-10 years was to remove code, I'd be pretty much in favour.
The web is now a competitor for native apps. That would never have been possible without the fast pace of innovation. Don't knock it.
I was last a "web developer" almost two decades ago, but dipping back in on a few occasions I am always appreciative of how much innovation has happened since then.
The world before the huge investment in browser technology was dark. Tables and spacers for meaningful layout and flash or shockwave for anything interactive.
I remember a time when css based drop down menus were seen as some sort of state of the art.
The main point that we could derive from this is that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, and all the more when geopolitics is involved. But still it's fun and sometime inspiring.
It most certainly is not. Web apps still suck ass compared to native. It's just that users are willing to accept even the crappiest solutions because they don't have very significant needs.
1. New web standards related changes
2. shiny new service integration(like AI, vpn etc)
3. UI & UX enhancements
4. Bug fixes
5. Security fixes
I believe changes related to 1 and 2 (to an extent) are primarily driven by Google.So, if Chrome changes hands and development slows down I think it would give alternative browsers time to focus on 3 & 4 instead of playing catchup. It might turnout good for the overall browser ecosystem in the long run.
True green-field standards work is roughly one-fifth of effort, with Safari and Firefox currently leading in CSS & media-query adoption, Chrome in new JavaScript/DOM APIs.
Eye-catching integrations (VPN, local AI summariser, etc.) stay single-digits because the core browser still has to do the unglamorous work of being correct and secure.
You could argue that Tauri exists, but I doubt that it would gain large-scale corporate adoption, as storage consumption was never their concern, development time and cost are.
Chromium: the base of Chrome, which is opensource - is developed in part by google and many other companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Brave, and dozens of others who depend on the chromium ecosystem. Google is not "financing" these companies, they are contributing to and benefiting from opensource bidirectionally and the ecosystem benefits from compatibility streamlining. 94% of commits to chromium from Google is also cherrypicked, many are automated commits to update libraries and pull in code from other repos and projects, and they do have a google/chromium handle on them as reviewers and signoff. It is true that they are the primary stewards and that most code in chromium passes through google hands before arriving there - but a good amount is chromeOS/android commits. Most downstream projects prune a ton of this "clank" out - claiming that commits in those directories are supporting 3rd party browsers is bunk. Google’s own docs say any code “that isn’t written by Chromium developers” must live in //third_party, this is enormous: v8, Skia, ANGLE, FFMPEG, ICU, OpenSSL - codecs, llvm... keeps on going. When a new upstream tag is imported, the roll commit is stamped with a Google email, throwing off this number considerably. The committer field shows the Google engineer or CQ bot, not necessarily the external engineer who produced the diff.
Google Search contracts: it is true that Mozilla and Apple receive large royalties in order to have Google be the default search engine in those browsers - in addition to android vendors and other platform partners. I don't think this amounts to 80% of "funding" on those browsers.
The second part is far more dangerous than the first - some care needs to be made rolling these claims together.
Everyone else could jump on quantum/gecko if they really felt like it was critical to their business to not use google-centric codebases.
Linux is a project spanning many decades with thousands of contributors and is not owned by any company. The BSDs are similar. I do not see why something similar cannot be accomplished with the web; a group of FOSS developers, and eventually, perhaps full-time developers at all manner of companies, could support a modern web browser. This seems to work fine for Linux - many companies pay developers to work on Linux because their business depends on it, so it is a good investment for them. The same applies for web browsers - many companies’ businesses depend on it, so funding a browser is the cost of doing business.
They might (I'm assuming based on usual foundation policies) own or enforce the trademark, but Linux is owned collectively by everyone who ever contributed to it at all -- there's no copyright assignment in the project whatsoever.
Additionally, Linux was a large, successful commercial project LONG before LF existed.
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.
EDIT: For that, see Horse - but that's still Chromium derived: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853708
Do you really think the users are going to pay for browsers?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Such a deeply weird outlook.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The web shouldn't be this hard.
>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.
— 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.
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!
The sheer number of cool things that got posted on HN in recent years leveraging these APIs.
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.
Ah, but this is something, and therefore, it must be done [1].
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.
As one possibility, the remedies could include Google paying reperations to Mozilla for the damage their anti-competitive behavior has done to Firefox, without Mozilla being obligated to use Google as the search engine, to give Mozilla more time to find alternative funding. I'm not sure that is necessarily the best option, but I'm sure they could come up with something that doesn't leave Mozilla high and dry.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
And which browser doesn't support html, forms and why would we want to use sockets?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 propping up the competition to be just enough to be considered competition, but not really interfere with them milking their internet domination.
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.
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)
“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.
Government should not tell private business how to run, and let people decide for themselves what they want to use.
The horror!
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 expect rise in Goanna/Pale Moon's popularity by the end of this year.
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.
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.
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.
Widevine is arguably less of monopoly lever than money, still prevents competition from creating any new web browser ecosystem
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.
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.
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).
You want to pay for a skin that’s fine. Doesn’t change the underlying problem.
Google could still pay browsers to make Gemini the default AI.
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?
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:
I agree with him that software engineers should be making the decisions in Mozilla.
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.
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.
It just shows how easily corruption can take hold of an organisation. The amount of dev time you could buy with half a billion…
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.
Google succeeding where Microsoft failed.
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.
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.
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.
Revenue != profit. $18 billion for something they have to maintain anyway is 100% profit.
This loss of funding will be good for them, they can focus on a browser instead of stupid things.
downvote if you want - if it happens, my prediction will age like fine wine.
Currently, it's ceded to a country hostile to mine. Great.
Will we ever get wireless-USB-for-smells?
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?
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.
I don't understand. If Google is paying 80% of Mozilla browser development, how could stopping those payment not affect Mozilla funding decisions?