All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding
273 comments
·April 28, 2025devnullbrain
roenxi
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.
shafyy
> 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?
secondcoming
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?
lazide
Maybe we can finally reduce some of the absurd complexity then?
nottorp
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...
madeofpalk
> 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?
hilbert42
"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.
kubb
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.
izabera
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.
kubb
We'll have buggy, unsafe, slow browsers with diverging standards and we'll like it.
nottorp
"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.
concinds
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).
ytpete
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.
kubb
Firefox is working pretty swell for me.
DonHopkins
> 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.
hilbert42
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.
ohgr
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.
wetpaws
[dead]
abhisek
> 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.
matheusmoreira
> 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.
atoav
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.
Spivak
> 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.
abhisek
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.
hshdhdhj4444
> 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.
jupp0r
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.
makeitdouble
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.
Sander_Marechal
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.
eitland
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.
pizza
You raise some good points but re: codecs, I was quite unimpressed with how they handled JPEG-XL.
nottorp
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.
mordae
webrtc is awful, though
croes
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.
Morizero
> 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
TiredOfLife
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.
forgotoldacc
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.
cosmic_cheese
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.
abhisek
> 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.
taftster
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.
taftster
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.
photonthug
> 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
fsckboy
>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!?
shafyy
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.
taftster
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.
mickelsen
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.
robin_reala
Oh, that’s definitely revisionism. The iPhone killed Flash, and ActiveX (outside of South Korea / Silverlight) and applets were already dead at that point.
taftster
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.
fsloth
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.
6510
The winning (marketingwise) systems couldn't get sandboxing to work. You couldn't simply download software and run it.
Waterluvian
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.
psychoslave
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.
grishka
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.
chii
> 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.
null
thowawatp302
Wait which innovations were these?
sitkack
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.
erikerikson
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?
JumpCrisscross
> 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.
akdor1154
> 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.
sebmellen
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.
postepowanieadm
We may need to ask some hard questions like: do browsers really need wasm in the first place?
melodyogonna
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.
AndyKelley
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.
photonthug
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.
taftster
Going back to gopher as a starting point maybe. Let's innovate from there.
yjftsjthsd-h
That's a thing, in the form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
fsloth
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.
hyperhopper
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
chii
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.
yjftsjthsd-h
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.
swiftcoder
> 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
codr7
Having more options would certainly be nice, and the barrier to entry these days is pretty high.
Apocryphon
That logic is applied to operating systems, that's why SerenityOS has garnered so much interest.
hilbert42
"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.
int0x29
This will just gut funding to fix exploits
Brian_K_White
Features that don't exist don't have exploits.
socalgal2
Yea, so instead people make native apps which pown your machine. Great progress!
mistercheph
it will also gut funding for the production of vulnerable code, in what ratio things will go is what it all depends on
dismalaf
Reducing features just makes the web less competitive versus native apps, handing control of personal computing back to the MS and Apple duopoly.
layer8
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.
hdjrudni
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.
ilrwbwrkhv
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.
dismalaf
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.
andrewstuart
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.
devnullbrain
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.
r0m4n0
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.
godelski
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)
thayne
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.
bigiain
Yeah, but we'll end up with Palantir owning Chrome, not Yahoo...
dsnr
Chromium is open source, you can fork it to death while Terrible Company inc. is busy destroying chrome.
awesome_dude
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 :\
ggm
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.
stickfigure
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.
hereonout2
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.
mediumsmart
> 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
graycat
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.
Jach
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.
peacebeard
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.
psychoslave
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.
hattmall
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.
cuu508
Building GUI apps in Delphi was awesome.
asadotzler
So, just let native proprietary platforms take over? It's fine to plow massive investment into Android and iOS but the web is undeserving?
psychoslave
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.
bobajeff
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.
Seattle3503
I like having an open platform for app development, even if it's got some rough edges.
bobajeff
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.
socalgal2
Um, no? Electron is insecure. Apps made with it can do far more harm to your machine then a webpage.
mcfedr
Do you even remember the IE6 days? - this opinion seems quite widespread but the open web is great for all of us.
viraptor
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!
bruce511
>> 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.
devsda
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.
mushufasa
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.
maxloh
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.
fguerraz
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.
tasuki
> 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?
fifilura
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?
wkat4242
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.
jillesvangurp
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.
gloosx
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.
xiphias2
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.
gloosx
Lack of will is a lack of purpose, and the purpose of these companies is profit, easy to follow.
errantmind
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.
mrweasel
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.
lioeters
With the reduced funding, Mozilla can fire the overpaid/underperforming executives; and re-hire the tech-focused people who were actually developing the browser.
andrewstuart
So when Mozilla fires vast numbers of people that will be progress for Firefox?
Such a deeply weird outlook.
gitaarik
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.
0dayz
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.
null
TiredOfLife
Mozilla has squandered billions on irrelevant crap.
bl4kers
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.
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.