[HN Gopher] All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of...
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All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding
Author : dfabulich
Score : 573 points
Date : 2025-04-28 23:03 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (danfabulich.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danfabulich.medium.com)
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| mcfedr wrote:
| Do you even remember the IE6 days? - this opinion seems quite
| widespread but the open web is great for all of us.
| viraptor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >> 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Cutting funding essentially returns us to the IE6
| monoculture with no progress.
|
| 1. It doesn't return us to monoculture - Monoculture of
| ie6 gave us multiple browsers, which recently all merged
| into Chrome. We already have a monoculture which will now
| lose funding.
|
| 2. We're not losing any of that progress. Actual
| documented standards exist now, all players implement the
| same basics, and you can create most websites without
| browser specific quirks. That's not going away.
|
| 3. We've had so much progress that Electron is its own
| massive OS now. We could do with a bit less progress and
| a bit more "how do we make this mess maintainable".
| asadotzler wrote:
| IE 6 gave us web apps with XMLHttpReques. IE 6 was
| amazing and developers loved it. It kicked the pants off
| of Netscape and earlier IEs.
| bobajeff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I like having an open platform for app development, even if
| it's got some rough edges.
| bobajeff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Um, no? Electron is insecure. Apps made with it can do far
| more harm to your machine then a webpage.
| stickfigure wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| psychoslave wrote:
| Yes, presenting a large catalog of products (a few
| hundreds), for discovery purpose an efficient menu is
| still a big challenge in term of UX and technical
| implementation all the more when portability,
| accessibility, and cross-devices is taken into account.
|
| Things that definitely look like trivial banality at
| shallow level often end up to need a lot of attention on
| many concurrent details.
| graycat wrote:
| 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_.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| Maybe this misses the point slightly?
|
| I'm talking about a time when investment in browser
| development and web standards was so lacking that being
| able to achieve things like this blew everyone's mind:
|
| https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/menus/demo.html
|
| Hackernews, were it around back then, would've gone as
| crazy for this post as we do the latest AI model today.
| degamad wrote:
| It shocks me that I remember css/edge so well after all
| these years.
| graycat wrote:
| > Maybe this misses the point slightly?
|
| Maybe! My thoughts were, say, _tangential_ or
| _incidental_.
|
| A guess is that a central issue is how much in new
| features should we develop and use?
|
| I see a dilemma: (A) I mentioned the old _controls_ that
| go back to early Windows and even IBM 's 3270 terminals.
| An advantage of these controls is that lots of software
| tools implement them and billions of people already
| understand them. (B) Being too happy with the old stuff
| or even the present risks progress that is possible and
| worthwhile.
|
| Your post seemed to illustrate (B).
|
| But generally in the industry, with smartphones, laptops,
| desktops, Apple, Google's Android, Windows, browsers,
| apps and extrapolating, we could have an explosion of new
| features that would complicate work for everyone and
| fragment the industry.
|
| Ah, maybe Darwin would explain: Lots of mutations with
| only the best lasting??
|
| For my work, I'm thrilled with the tools and technology
| available now that I get to exploit.
| Jach wrote:
| 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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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.
| cuu508 wrote:
| Building GUI apps in Delphi was awesome.
| hattmall wrote:
| 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.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| The move from table layouts to divs+css was based on the
| idea that mixing markup and layout/styling was bad. Then
| a few years later as everyone moved to React et al. it
| was good again.
|
| Sigh.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Yeah, a switch in mode between "make an XML document and
| then make something else to present it" (I think suffered
| massively from never actually being completely achievable
| with CSS, let alone comprehensible) and "just make a UI
| toolkit for javascript" (where in a full webapp world,
| the underlying documents are usually JSON and the
| presentation layer is javascript using HTML+CSS to talk
| to a layout and rendering engine).
| code_biologist wrote:
| I understand the sentiment, but disregarding the nuance
| does the situation a disservice. HTML/CSS serves two
| separate but related use cases: a document layout and
| display language, and as a display layer for
| applications. I remember Pete Hunt's talk "React:
| Rethinking best practices" [1] explaining in 2013 why the
| styling separation of concerns for document display
| doesn't make sense for applications. Has opinion on best
| practice se-sawed back and forth? No, we've merely gone
| from web content being document centered to being
| massively application centered, and the discourse on best
| practices follows that proportional shift.
|
| Would it be better if there was a different web
| application display technology, not retrofitted on top of
| HTML/CSS? Like maybe, but HTML/CSS is... fine. Even
| separated from the success of Javascript, it's an
| archetypal example of "worse is better" [2] leading to
| market success.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| Layouts implemented with tables make sense when you need
| to place elements once, and not a ton of them at once.
| Making even slight changes to your tables within tables
| within tables is such a nightmare, that throwing out all
| of your code and starting from scratch might just be
| preferable. Tables are not a basic tool for this task,
| it's a severe misuse of the tooling, caused by a lack of
| alternatives at the time.
| Jaxan wrote:
| I feel like the native apps and native GUIs back in the day
| were great! So many possibilities and customisation.
| peacebeard wrote:
| 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.
| frainfreeze wrote:
| God forbid we go back to native apps and have ownership of
| our data & software
| stickfigure wrote:
| > God forbid we go back to native apps which are strictly
| controlled by two giant megacorps.
|
| Fixed that for you.
|
| I'm pretty happy not to have "submit to Apple for
| meticulous review and approval" in my deployment cycle.
| frainfreeze wrote:
| That's what got us where we are, the same thing will
| happen to web platform over time.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > The web is now a competitor for native apps.
|
| It most certainly is not. Web apps still suck ass compared to
| native. It's just that users are willing to accept even the
| crappiest solutions because they don't have very significant
| needs.
| sherburt3 wrote:
| Having a corporate monopoly controlling the web is a pretty
| steep price to pay for flexbox.
| asadotzler wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| alwillis wrote:
| The author doesn't seem to know there's no "Safari" division at
| Apple. It's not like Apple depends on Google exclusively to fund
| Safari.
|
| Apple's revenue last fiscal year was $391 billion dollars; I
| think they'll be okay without Google's $18 billion.
|
| It's way more critical for Mozilla--Google's payment is what pays
| for Firefox.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Apple 's revenue_"
|
| Revenue != profit. $18 billion for something they have to
| maintain anyway is 100% profit.
| 3vidence wrote:
| Was going to say this, I can't remember the exact figure but
| it was something crazy like 20% of net profit was from that
| deal.
|
| TODO: find a link to the original article that mentioned it.
| alwillis wrote:
| I'm aware of the difference between revenue and profit.
|
| As a percentage of profit, the $20 billion was 17.5% of
| Apple's operating profit in 2022.
|
| I don't think that has any material impact on something as
| established and as important as Safari.
| linguae wrote:
| I agree. Safari will be fine, and Microsoft has the resources
| to devote to browser development.
|
| I wonder, though, about Firefox and a post-divestiture Chrome.
| Browsers are labor-intensive to develop due to their
| complexity, and the Web keeps changing. Moreover, people expect
| browsers to be free of charge; it's been a long time since the
| days when people paid for Netscape Navigator and Opera. Without
| outright subsidizing development, Web browsers need to be
| either community-supported, ad-funded, or subscription-based in
| order to fund development.
| dfabulich wrote:
| Author here. I'm well aware that there's no "Safari"
| _financial_ division. And, yes, Apple will be just fine without
| Google 's $18 billion, but that's because Apple can and will be
| incentivized to focus their investments on their own
| proprietary platforms.
|
| Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make
| money working on Safari?" the answer is _really_ clear:
| "Google pays us $18 billion annually."
|
| After that money is cut off, an executive at Apple has to ask
| the question: "Why should we _keep_ investing in Safari,
| instead of SwiftUI and Xcode? "
|
| I'm sure we'd all love the answer to be, "We have plenty of
| money, so we should invest heavily in both," but that's not
| really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works.
| Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This
| will be one of them.
| Arnt wrote:
| Apple has considered that same question for most other apps.
| Garage Band, for example, and Apple Mail.
|
| I don't think you should listen to anyone's ideas about why
| Apple does what it does. But if you want to hear my unfounded
| speculation: Apple wants to control the out-of-the-box
| experience for its shiny hardware and therefore includes a
| variety of apps that >x% of the customers are presumed to use
| on the first day they have their new shiny hardware, where x
| is some number and "day" may mean "week" or... well, really,
| this is unfounded speculation, it doesn't have to be precise.
| alwillis wrote:
| _but that 's not really how the world works, and certainly
| not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what
| to prioritize. This will be one of them._
|
| This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple works.
| Nobody is debating whether they should keep working on Xcode
| or Safari; it's both.
|
| WebKit is one of the most important frameworks Apple makes;
| many of their own apps rely on it like Mail and the App
| Store.
|
| And many thousands of 3rd party apps (Facebook, Twitter) rely
| on WebKit to render web content on macOS, iOS, iPadOS,
| visionOS and tvOS.
|
| Does losing $18 billion mean some adjustments? Of course, but
| it's probably something else that's not mission critical, not
| something like Safari/WebKit that's on over 2 billion
| devices.
| riffraff wrote:
| I'm not sure the fact that a web view component exists
| means it gets priority.
|
| Facebook, Twitter etc have no choice but to use what iOS
| provides.
|
| It's not like they'd stop publishing iOS apps I'd apple
| decided to never update the WebView componemt again.
|
| And the audience is captive, if they get a bad rendering in
| mail they won't think "bad apple" but "bad email sender",
| same way we all bend around Outlook's rendering.
| isodev wrote:
| Just to clarify that many thousands of 3rd party apps
| (Facebook, Twitter) are forced to* rely on WebKit
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make
| money working on Safari?"
|
| It doesn't need to make money. A good web browser is a
| standard part of an operating system these days. Apple can't
| ship without one. You might as well ask how they monetise
| Finder or Notes.
| winstonewert wrote:
| Perhaps - but they could just do what Microsoft did: bundle
| a version of Chromium.
| alwillis wrote:
| As I've mentioned previously, WebKit is a mission
| critical framework that many thousands of apps use,
| including Apple's.
|
| Strategically it makes no sense to not own something that
| important.
|
| Remember: Safari was created when Apple's 5-year deal
| with Microsoft that made Internet Explorer the default
| browser for MacOS X expired in 2003.
|
| 10 years later. Google forked WebKit to create Chrome.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Apple never fully owned WebKit in the first place - _most
| certainly_ not back in 2003. There was an extremely
| public and messy divorce period with the KDE codebase[0],
| and to this day there 's still KHTML/KJS-derived code in
| WebKit that has to be sublicensed under GPLv2 for
| redistribution purposes.
|
| If we're going to split hairs over the whole "Blink is an
| inferior WebKit fork" brouhaha, we shouldn't forget who
| Apple sherlocked to get there. After all, turnabout is
| fair play.
|
| [0] https://blogs.kde.org/2005/04/29/bitter-failure-
| named-safari...
| bigyabai wrote:
| Finder and Notes are artificially and arbitrarily designed
| to hook into iCloud first and refuse any convenient
| synchronization with other cloud platforms. It is pretty
| easily argued that these apps are designed like this to
| upsell Apple iCloud subscriptions, not because it's easier
| or smarter to do that way.
|
| Similarly, Safari isn't clouds and rainbows either. It
| serves the same purpose IE did back in the day; furnish a
| "premium" experience that is deliberately irreplaceable and
| intertwined with the OS. We saw this with the push
| notification API, "Add to Homescreen" functionality and so
| many other places where Apple dragged their feet and
| refused a featureset that would enable competition with
| native apps. This is a hell of their own making, Apple can
| leave any time they want by acquiescing to app publishers
| the same way they did on Mac.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| A browser that is just good enough for people not to notice
| that web apps work better on a $50 android then on their
| $1000 iPhone is a standard part of an operating system
| these days.
| mcfedr wrote:
| I think you are probably right for other reasons
|
| Safari has long lagged on other browsers, Apple would rather
| it didn't exist but have to keep it ticking over
|
| With less competition they will likely be happy to lag behind
| even further again
| alwillis wrote:
| Perhaps you haven't noticed but Safari has shipped about 20
| updates in the last 3.5 years.
|
| If you check the Interop 2025 numbers, you'll see Safari is
| neck and neck with the other browsers and has implemented
| the latest CSS features [1].
|
| The WebKit team was first to crack the code on how to
| implement :has() that eluded browser teams for 20 years and
| was the first to ship it [2].
|
| As for wishing that they didn't have to maintain Safari,
| it's a mission critical framework on macOS, iOS, iPadOS,
| visionOS... it's the only thing saving the web from the
| monoculture of Chrome-based browsers; unfortunately Firefox
| is in the low single-digits as far as market share goes.
| Safari on iOS has about 25% market share.
|
| [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/16458/announcing-interop-2025/
|
| [2]: https://webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Safari has long lagged on other browsers
|
| Apart from not implementing a handful of Google's sneaky
| draft fingerprinting proposals (WebUSB, WebMIDI, etc), what
| is Safari actually lagging on?
| kalleboo wrote:
| From the outside it looks to me like Apple started
| reinvesting in Safari in 2023 (starting with adding support
| for notifications for PWAs) when the EU started getting
| serious about regulating the App Store monopoly, and they see
| investment into Safari as fodder for negotiation with
| governments about "people can always use the web if they
| don't like the App Store"
| musicale wrote:
| At WWDC 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a "sweet solution" for
| developers who wanted to program the iPhone: web apps in
| Mobile Safari!
|
| Developers, who wanted a real, native SDK, were greatly
| disappointed (to put it mildly), and in 2008 Apple
| introduced not only a native iPhone app SDK with developer
| tooling but an entire app store.
|
| But Jobs wasn't entirely off base. Gmail had replaced
| dedicated email apps. Apple had implemented native-like
| widgets in Mobile Safari as well as touch input, javascript
| canvas support, and audio support. Today you can implement
| a video streaming client (Netflix), game streaming client
| (Amazon Luna), groupware client (Discord, Slack, Teams), or
| even a whole office suite (Office 365) in Safari. Even many
| "native" mobile apps are basically just shells on web apps.
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| Seems clear they have not been investing much of that 18B on
| Safari. Wow, can you imagine what Safari would be if Apple
| had invested a large fraction of that income on Safari?
| dgreensp wrote:
| Yeah, it's a funny argument because while Apple has
| certainly put a lot of money into WebKit and JavaScriptCore
| over the years in absolute terms, they already don't
| prioritize Safari or treat web technologies as an
| alternative to native app development.
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| What would you do? Would you keep the status quo or find a
| 3rd way?
| bloppe wrote:
| I think it's important to keep in mind that this isn't the
| end of antitrust. The EU has already forced Apple to allow
| Chrome on iOS. They might force them to support PWAs on a
| similar level to native apps next. Chromium will be open
| source for the foreseeable future, no matter who buys the
| Chrome branding and userbase. This could be the very
| beginning of a much more competitive app landscape.
|
| Or it could all go to shit. Hard to say.
| ars wrote:
| Mozilla wastes way too much money:
| https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
|
| This loss of funding will be good for them, they can focus on a
| browser instead of stupid things.
| sitkack wrote:
| They won't. They never really did. The OG firefox was a rebel
| creation that they latched onto, that then itself became the
| old guard. Firefox still has tone deaf usability bugs that
| are 10, 15 and 20 years old.
| eimrine wrote:
| They are the crew of activists now, they can tell us that the
| stupid thing is the browser.
| thayne wrote:
| With current management, I doubt it.
| bushbaba wrote:
| That's 18 billion in near 100% profit margin. Which will be
| painful to loose.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| The irony is that Google pays this money in order to _prevent_
| being seen as a (browser) monopoly, but instead it seems the DOJ
| is using their status as a _search_ monopoly as justification for
| stopping the funding (and selling Chrome) even though it will
| just create the same browser monopoly all over again.
| benatkin wrote:
| Ostensibly.
|
| I think the main reasons are to sabotage Firefox and to
| increase their partnerships with the other FAANGs.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| Of course, monopolists and their toadies don't acknowledge all
| of their dirty behavior.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Sabotage Firefox? They've literally been keeping Firefox
| afloat for what, a decade? Longer?
| billiam wrote:
| Afloat like Weekend at Bernie's. I lived through multiple
| efforts to prop up the corpse while making sure it would
| never ever be as good as Chrome.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Depends on your definition of "good". To me it's
| impossible not to be as good as Chrome, as I define good
| as not being run by google.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Google's been paying Mozilla for search traffic for more
| than 20 years, just like the other major browsers. It's not
| out of kindness any more than paying Apple for Safari
| traffic is out of kindness. It's literally payments for
| search traffic and reported to the IRS by Google as
| "traffic acquisition cost" or TAC. Google doesn't do it for
| "keeping Firefox afloat," it's about Google grabbing even
| more search traffic and dissuading browsers from sending
| their traffic to alternatives, or creating their own search
| engines, and always has been.
|
| But Google was a mostly reasonable partner to browser
| makers until they got into the business themselves. After
| Chrome shipped, Google properties started _mysteriously_
| becoming slower or broken in Firefox in ways that had no
| good technical support and that consistently siphoned large
| numbers of Firefox user over to Chrome before being
| addressed. It happened over and over on major Google
| properties like Gmail and Docs all through the 2010s.
| Jonath 's Twitter thread is gone but the reporting isn't
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-
| has...
|
| And they did it to IE and Edge too, until MS finally
| capitulated and jumped on Google's tech to escape the
| sabotaging. There's reporting on that too
| https://www.neowin.net/news/former-edge-intern-says-
| google-s...
| EbNar wrote:
| > Google's been paying Mozilla for search traffic for
| more than 20 years
|
| Well, and Mozill gladly accepted the deal, being passive
| and without even trying to be self-sustainable. The
| (only) culprit here isn't Google. Mozilla's mismanagement
| has played a big role.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Mozilla had 10 engineers a total team of about 20 and
| about $1M in the bank and a few dollars in donations
| coming in when we made the Google search deal. Take that
| deal away in late 2004 and Mozilla dies by 2026. It seems
| like you don't actually understand any of this and are
| just bluffing.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > Take that deal away in late 2004 and Mozilla dies by
| 2026
|
| Run a team of 10 engineers for 20+ years on $1m? Wow
| that's a bargain!
|
| (I assume you meant dies by 2006 :D)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| If you're implying that Mozilla has _not_ been horribly
| mismanaged for decades, I think many would disagree with
| that.
| sitkack wrote:
| 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.
| int0x29 wrote:
| This will just gut funding to fix exploits
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Features that don't exist don't have exploits.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Yea, so instead people make native apps which pown your
| machine. Great progress!
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| Honestly, the end of everything being a chrome-based app
| and people making actual native desktop apps that run at
| 10x the speed with 1/10th the energy usage would be
| excellent. I really hope that does happen.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "that run at 10x the speed with 1/10th the energy usage"
|
| How many current developers optimize their products for
| speed and energy usage?
|
| I can see the very opposite happening: half-baked apps,
| whose massive portions were written using free-tier AI
| output, hogging gigabytes of RAM and four processor cores
| while the cursor is idly spinning and the laptop is
| becoming hot.
|
| Compared to the past (and my memory goes back to Netscape
| Navigator 3, old person that I am), modern browsers seem
| to be technologically fine.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| I'd say it's really hard to write a native app, however
| unoptimized, to be a bigger memory hog than Electron
| apps.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Those at least have to be downloaded and installed by the
| user, which indicates a high level of intent/consent and
| is difficult to do accidentally. In the browser
| environment, malicious content can be navigated to
| without any user intent or consent whatsoever, which when
| combined with holes punched in browser sandboxes for the
| sake of fancy features makes for danger with a
| dramatically larger scope.
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| Right now, most untrusted code runs in the browser's
| sandbox, and that's great - outside of the realm of fancy
| 0 days, the damage is limited.
|
| But if downloading apps becomes the norm again (like
| every online store asking you to get their app and an
| extra app for a discount program), I expect that socially
| engineering less technical users into downloading malware
| will become much easier.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Yes. Native apps are 9000x prefferrable to the browser
| having to be a shitty os.
| whatevaa wrote:
| I guess Linux Desktop will die off then.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Maybe it should if in 30 years it has not reliably solved
| native apps.
| redeeman wrote:
| funny, it seems to me that a great many native apps
| exist, and works fine
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Been using them for 30 years already. I suspect if I
| heard whatever your definition of "solved" is, I would
| find it silly.
| mistercheph wrote:
| it will also gut funding for the production of vulnerable
| code, in what ratio things will go is what it all depends on
| dismalaf wrote:
| Reducing features just makes the web less competitive versus
| native apps, handing control of personal computing back to the
| MS and Apple duopoly.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| taftster wrote:
| "Almost at parity" in feature set, maybe.
|
| But practically? How many sites actually offer an
| innovative and/or mobile-first version of their website
| anymore?
|
| There was definitely a time when we had websites
| delivering various layouts based on the viewport size of
| the user agent. CSS media queries, flexible layouts, etc.
| were all very important innovations for a very short
| lived period of time.
|
| Now, every serious web presence has moved on to offering
| their own mobile app, pushing users that direction. The
| browser was stubborn and erred on the side of privacy. So
| it didn't quite offer all the integrated (ahem,
| intrusive) means to interact with the user's device in
| order to bleed every penny and every bit of data mined
| from your usage and behaviors.
|
| So I don't see anything lovely in the current situation
| at all. The traditional web -- you know the one where you
| surf with a web browser to discover the world -- has been
| dying for quite some time. It might even be dead and we
| just don't realize it yet.
|
| We don't need web browser parity with mobile apps. We
| just need the web to be what the web is good at. It's a
| lost cause thinking that the web browser will ever
| integrate with a portable device quite the same as a
| native app. Those days are gone.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >Now, every serious web presence has moved on to offering
| their own mobile app, pushing users that direction.
|
| If Apple didn't do everything in their power to slow down
| the adoption of PWAs you might have seen it take off by
| now. They still won't allow you to easily install a PWA
| to your homescreen, you basically have to be a power user
| (a reader here, and maybe not even then) to know about
| it.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| 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.
| dsnr wrote:
| Chromium is open source, you can fork it to death while
| Terrible Company inc. is busy destroying chrome.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| 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 :\
| Apocryphon wrote:
| ?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Brow
| ser...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| There are forks but they're very limited in how far they
| can deviate from what Google wants. The Manifest v3
| discussions show this. Extension APIs aren't a big part
| of browsers compared to all the other things they do, and
| there was clearly demand to keep Manifest v2 alive, so
| you'd expect at least one or two forkers to differentiate
| by doing that.
|
| In practice the rebasing costs are so high that everyone
| shrugged and said they had no choice but to go along with
| it.
|
| Chromium is open source, but not designed for anyone
| except Google to develop it. Nothing malicious about it,
| it's just that building a healthy contributor community
| is a different thing to uploading some source code. If
| you've ever worked with the Chromium codebase you'll find
| you have to reverse engineer it to work things out. The
| codebase is deliberately under-architected (a legacy of
| the scars of working on Gecko), so many things you'd
| expect to be well defined re-usable modules that could be
| worked on independently of Google are actually leaky
| hacks whose API changes radically depending on what
| platform you're compiling for, what day of the week it
| is, etc. Even very basic things like opening a window
| isn't properly abstracted in a cross platform manner,
| last time I looked, and at any moment Google might land a
| giant rewrite they were working on in private for months,
| obliterating all your work at a stroke.
|
| There are reasons for all of this... Chrome is a native
| app that tries to exploit the native OS as much as
| possible, and they don't want to be tied down by lowest-
| common-denominator internal abstractions or API
| commitments. But if you view Chrome as an OS then the API
| churn makes Linux look like a stroll through a grassy
| meadow.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I mean, a perusal of the comments on this page are very
| much evidence of what I was saying.
| bigiain wrote:
| Yeah, but we'll end up with Palantir owning Chrome, not
| Yahoo...
| godelski wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| Having more options would certainly be nice, and the
| barrier to entry these days is pretty high.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| That logic _is_ applied to operating systems, that 's why
| SerenityOS has garnered so much interest.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > 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
| chii wrote:
| and there's plenty of somewhat usable browsers out there
| too.
|
| But the OP's implication is that there ought to be a
| fully working browser (that satisfies the standards of
| the day), but creatable from someone in their garage.
|
| That hasn't been true for cars, appliances or any modern
| equipment for ages. And the same phenomenon being
| applicable to software isn't really that unimaginable
| (nor a problem).
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| > That hasn't been true for cars, appliances or any
| modern equipment for ages.
|
| Personally, I don't see that as progress. I don't need
| touch screens and surveillance everywhere in every major
| purchase I make. I fail to see what we have gotten in
| exchange for all the increased complexity.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| If you consider the BSDs and Illumos to be operating
| systems, you might as well consider
| Lynx/Ladybird/Servo/Netsurf/Trident as browsers.
|
| For 97% of the world, there are four operating systems:
| Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS. There are three
| browsers: Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The rest is an
| irrelevant sidenote that only hobbyists and developers
| care about, existing at the grace of the megacorporations
| that sponsor them.
| filleokus wrote:
| Agreed, and I would argue that it's even worse on the
| browser side. We have Chrome and Safari on iOS, the rest
| is essentially irrelevant. With regards to web standards,
| Edge is just another Chrome-reskin. When Apple sooner or
| later looses the WebKit monopoly on iOS, it will all be
| Chrome...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I have daily driven OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and I have tried
| to use anything that isn't Gecko or Blink. I feel
| comfortable saying that the OS situation is _much_ better
| than the browser situation. I 'm interested in technical
| merit / feature completeness, not popularity. The
| situation is likely to improve with Ladybird and _maybe_
| Servo, granted.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" 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.
| concinds wrote:
| > 7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the
| hell do we users put up with this shit?
|
| That's mostly due to insane web "frameworks" like React,
| and developers who (systematically) overuse and misuse
| them, and then test their websites on WiFi/5G and iPhones
| with superfast chips so they don't notice (their users do).
| The solution is to increase the capabilities of "native"
| Javascript and CSS, and put in massive effort into
| interoperability so web devs stop feeling the need for
| frameworks as "compatibility shims" (looking at you, IE and
| Safari). Those solutions are exactly what browser makers
| (sans Apple) have been focusing on lately.
|
| The solution you recommend would have the exact opposite
| effect of what you intend.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" The solution you recommend would have the exact
| opposite effect of what you intend."_
|
| It depends on how one works and what one has to do and or
| wants to achieve. I've pretty much worked the Web without
| say JavaScript since it was first released. In fact, I
| even used to turn off the 'scripts' setting in Internet
| Explorer it's that long ago.
|
| Over that time I've become addicted to the raw speed of
| page rendering sans JS, similarly the lack of annoying
| 'jitters' and hesitations in page rendering that it
| causes. Same goes for the absence of ads, etc. In fact,
| I've rarely had need to recourse to ad-blockers as I see
| so few ads without JS enabled.
|
| Is working without or with very limited JS use an
| impediment? For many it clearly it is because Big Tech
| and vested interests have forced the tech down the
| throats of users in places where its use is _not_
| essential. For me however the Web mostly sans JS is not a
| problem. I 've used the Web since its inception and I do
| everything I want, and that's always been so.
|
| Occasionally, I'm forced to use JS when purchasing
| something so I'll first determine what I want sans JS
| then clear caches etc. And sometimes I even switch
| browsers to make the purchase--I see no need to give
| these snoopers more data than absolutely necessary, I
| expect the same privacy online as I'd get from walking
| into a retail shop and paying cash. So should everyone.
|
| Sites that force JS I back out of faster than entering
| them--there are plenty more fish in the sea so to speak--
| more than I can ever consume in my lifetime. For example,
| on news sites that force JS and block access there are
| others running the same stories that do not, only
| neophytes aren't aware of that.
|
| I cannot think of one instance where I've been locked out
| of such info and not found an alternative source for not
| having used JavaScript.
|
| Enabling and disabling JS is dead easy on my browsers, my
| JS icon is red when it's off and green when on. A single
| click changes the state and a page refresh reloads the
| page in whatever state I want, it's dead easy to work
| this way.
|
| Same happens on my phones, when I buy a new phone it
| takes me some while before I even insert the SIM as I
| first have to delouse it of all the Google and vendor
| shit--there's not one Google service I use or have need
| to use, there are many alternatives, NewPipe, F-droid,
| etc., etc.
|
| I've nothing against JS, only the way it's used and much
| abused. What's desperately needed are JS browser engines
| that allow users to manage its functionality, what it's
| allowed to do--to kill access to user data by default or
| as specified, and or supply randomized crap data back to
| snoopers and so on so that users can take back control of
| their Web browsing.
|
| Your point is only valid if the user wants certain
| enhanced features which is not always the case. For
| example, information sites and government services etc.
| that convey essential information do not need JS,
| likewise they don't even need CSS.
|
| Look at it this way: written text contains the same
| information whether it's displayed in system typeface
| fonts, courier monospace or Garamond. Sure, Garamond
| looks much nicer and fancier but it's _not_ essential to
| convey information. Same goes for much of the other
| overrated and much abused internet standards.
|
| Of course, that statement will cause you apoplexy if
| you're a web developer for two reasons, likely your
| income depends on it, and second it's a notion so foreign
| to and removed from internet developers' thinking/daily
| experience that it's inconceivable to them. Well, enough
| of us outside that circle are now thinking this way not
| to let the notion die. Perhaps also you're not old enough
| to remember when everything was simple and we got our
| information in system or courier typefaces. Those
| limitations did not stop users from doing the essentials.
| The new generation of Web developers either have never
| known that or have conviently forgotten the fact.
|
| There are no satisfactory reasons why such websites (or
| all websites for that matter) cannot recognize browsers
| with only limited facilities available such as those
| having only HTML, or HTML/CSS sans JS and then
| automatically issuing pages that support those modes--
| that is, other than commercial/vested interests. And in a
| nutshell, that's the key problem.
|
| The Web has become so dysfunctional, operationally
| stereotyped and so commercialized because of these vested
| interests that many now consider it broken and are
| calling for it to be fixed. Moreover, unlike the early
| Web, it's now so important that the mess it's now in
| cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely, thus
| government intervention will eventually be necessary to
| regulate it to ensure that _all_ users have access
| (ensuring minimum connectivity standards etc. to allow
| all browsers--even text-only ones--to have access
| essential information) in the same way governments have
| had to regulate other essential services and utilities in
| the past.
|
| ...And regulation is not new to world history, it goes
| back centuries. Long ago, snail-mail was initially
| regulated by governments and then regularized by
| international convention, same with rail guages with most
| of the world now running on standard gauge. Then there
| are motoring regulations, it took many decades but most
| of the rules and road signage across the world are now
| very uniform because of government intervention then
| later strengthened through international
| conventions/agreements. Same with many other matters,
| weights and measures, the ISO, etc.
|
| Right, in the past that LCD conformity took many years to
| achieve. That said, the internet/Web is only a few
| decades old, it also now exists in a world that's highly
| connected which makes it much more capable of adapting to
| a fast-changing world.
|
| The only reasons why most internet and Web techies are
| hostile and or are horrified by the notion of tighter
| regulations are that they've grown up in an environment
| sans regulations, taking away freedoms always hurts,
| especially for those unscrupulous people who rort the
| system, steal user information, etc.
|
| The railway barons of the 19th Century thought the same
| but every country now has strict regulations governing
| railways from technical and safety requirements to rules
| governing ownership--and many of these regulations came
| into existence _because_ operators /owners abused their
| privileges.
|
| We're now seeing consumers (and thus lagging governments)
| catching up, and that's about time. Unfortunately, the
| internet took off quickly and it dazzled everyone, and
| we're only now coming to our senses--back down to
| reality. Another tragedy was that it was built on
| software which meant minimal physical resources/materials
| were needed. This allowed companies like MS, Meta, Apple
| etc. to exploit the fact and become the biggest and
| richest corporations in history. When companies can
| become that large and so rich in so very little time it
| doesn't require Einstein to determine something is very
| wrong with commerce and its regulation thereof.
|
| Sooner or later the big correction will come.
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| If I had to make a guess, you, as a person, can't implement
| an OS, personal computer, or any other appliance in your
| home. Maybe you can do the wiring or manage to dig out the
| basement itself. Not sure why browsers specifically draw your
| ire.
| erikerikson wrote:
| 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?
| taftster wrote:
| Going back to gopher as a starting point maybe. Let's
| innovate from there.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| That's a thing, in the form of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
| photonthug wrote:
| 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.
| fsloth wrote:
| 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.
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| We may need to ask some hard questions like: do browsers
| really need wasm in the first place?
| AndyKelley wrote:
| 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.
| melodyogonna wrote:
| 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.
| nasso_dev wrote:
| iirc WASM bytecode closely resembles V8 IR. If you're
| writing a JS engine, might as well provide a more direct
| frontend to it... I don't think it adds much.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| sebmellen wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We use WASM in web apps that are used by a very large
| number of "regular" consumers. It would be stupid to kill
| that off._
|
| Large numbers of users use lots of features. That doesn't
| change that most of them use none of them. WASM would
| continue to exist. It just doesn't need to be in every
| browser.
| sitkack wrote:
| Who said we have to kill off Wasm, Wasm (minus SIMD) is
| extremely simple and allows the user (the webdev) to ship
| the complexity, and not build the complexity into the
| browser itself.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| > 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Most people do need those things, because assuming
| there 's no civilisation spanning project to literally
| rewrite 90% of the web, without them their sites would
| break_
|
| Sites most people visit do not require backwards
| compatiblity. And aside from like Google Docs, I doubt
| most folk are doing anything with WASM (outside plugins).
|
| Look, in a world where Google subsidises browser
| development, this isn't an issue. We don't need to
| compromise. But if that funding stream disappears, you do
| have to compromise. And I'd argue a simple browser doing
| away with some of the more-complicated stuff would be (a)
| maintainable and (b) popular enough to pay itself back.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Maintainable, maybe. Popular, no. A browser where a good
| chunk of the web doesn't work is a browser that almost
| no-one will use.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _browser where a good chunk of the web doesn 't work is
| a browser that almost no-one will use_
|
| I think it could--it's sort of the case on mobile--but
| it's not a view I hold with the strongest conviction.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Rewriting everything seem to have been regular exercise
| in general... So I don't see problems with doing it once
| more. How many sites are actually say older than 5 years.
| And how much work would they need?
| deeThrow94 wrote:
| Well ok, we can stuff browsers in vms for archival
| purposes. That doesn't mean we need to support existing
| sites with future browsers.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm assuming people with such a hatred for browser complexity
| absolutely love the way those Delphi programs worked back
| before Web 2.0 made browsers a viable GUI platform, because
| that's the direction we're going in if browser start dying.
| Browsers have become the de-facto way to work for most
| people, and it's a major why Microsoft has been losing market
| share.
|
| People say HTML/CSS/JS/WASM is complex, but the Ladybird team
| is proving that a very small team can make a working browser
| in a few years. Thanks to the efforts of dedicated developers
| behind browsers, most of the web API, including rendering
| algorithms and such, has been painstakingly written out in
| detail.
| sitkack wrote:
| I never advocated for removing Wasm, Wasm itself allows the
| webdev to subsume complexity that would normally be built
| into the browser.
|
| Browser complexity is made _more_ tractable by Wasm, not
| less. Maybe remove JS now that Wasm exists.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| I don't think HN and reddit are really representative of
| what the web is or what it's capable of
| devsda wrote:
| 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.
| maxloh wrote:
| 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.
| mushufasa wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Counting bullets just counts bullets not time spent laboring
| over those bullets
| matwood wrote:
| Yeah, just counting bullets does not convey the work
| involved in defining a new standard prior to
| implementation.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| This article seems to fundamentally misunderstand how businesses
| fund development.
|
| Google's payments to Apple have no direct impact on Safari
| funding decisions. It's just a revenue stream. Similarly for
| Mozilla. Microsoft... not even sure whether to begin with those
| claims.
|
| I think the article touches upon some important truths about
| Google's code contributions to chromium and financial payments to
| Mozilla and Apple. But correlating those with product development
| funding is just entirely plainly wrong.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Google's payments to Apple have no direct impact on Safari
| funding decisions. It's just a revenue stream. Similarly for
| Mozilla. Microsoft... not even sure whether to begin with those
| claims.
|
| I don't understand. If Google is paying 80% of Mozilla browser
| development, how could stopping those payment not affect
| Mozilla funding decisions?
| almosthere wrote:
| I mean everyone wanted Google to stop paying to make their search
| the default! As soon as there is a new angle, the same people
| will suddenly argue the opposite of what they believe! These same
| people in fact are likely opposed to monopolies too, but, if
| Trump is involved - CHANGE EVERYTHING.
| bl4kers wrote:
| 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.
| hdjrudni wrote:
| How will this help? If the web stagnates, it's even more reason
| to install an app instead.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| By supporting lightweight browsers and markups that are a lot
| safer and more sustainable.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Makes me think of the horse browser (https://gethorse.com),
| namely the fact that unlike pretty much all other browsers it's a
| paid, subscription product. You actually have to pay $60 a year
| in order to use it.
|
| Sounds absolutely ridiculous when you consider that you haven't
| had to pay for a browser since Netscape, and even then I think
| you only had to pay once for it (it was before my time, might
| need some help on this statement from people actively using
| Netscape in its heyday), but this whole Google antitrust thing
| has made me appreciate just how fragile the current browser
| status quo happens to be. Safari and Edge are fine, but I don't
| particularly like using either, and to be frank the reasons for
| using an open-source browser besides Firefox or Chrome are
| largely ideological.
|
| It just might be the case where if you want an actually good
| browser, you'll have to start paying for it.
| bruce511 wrote:
| As far as I recall, the Netscape browser was free. There may
| have been a paid one (for enterprise), but I'm pretty sure we
| had a free one.
|
| They did charge OS makers to bundle it (via support contracts)
| but the biggest market there (Windows) wrote their own. By IE5
| Netscape was basically gone, IE6 had no competition (and hence
| no development) until Firefox came along.
| dharmab wrote:
| Netscape Navigator was sold to consumers as boxed software at
| retail. IIRC it was around $60.
| chgs wrote:
| Is horse a skin for WebKit or gecko?
|
| You want to pay for a skin that's fine. Doesn't change the
| underlying problem.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Their website says Electron, so Chromium.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Horse charges $60 a year and it's still nothing more than a
| skin over Chromium. I saw the recent surge in paid-for
| browsers, but none of them seem to actually do any engine work
| themselves, they all grab Chromium or WebKit and throw a layer
| of UI on top.
|
| Of course, people are paying for browsers, even if they don't
| know they are. WebKit and Edge are maintained by companies in a
| way similar to how Chrome is maintained by Google. It's just
| the alternatives to those two that are now in danger, and all
| of their derivatives (Electron, Tauri, and anything built on
| top of that).
| thayne wrote:
| The current situation is terrible, and something should be done
| about it. But cutting off the funding for something as critical
| as web browsers without a solid plan for how to replace that
| funding is irresponsible.
| gryfft wrote:
| > something should be done about it
|
| Ah, but this is something, and therefore, it must be done [1].
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism
| andelink wrote:
| "Cutting off the funding" is the most insane framing of the
| situation. It makes the DOJ sound like the wrongdoers or ones
| responsible here. This "funding" should never have happened in
| the first place. It totally distorts the economics of web
| browsers while also giving Google undue influence over the
| whole ecosystem. But sure, some browser developers will no
| longer be receiving some income, so let's allow it. Makes zero
| sense.
|
| I personally am excited to see what changes. Who cares if it
| costs more money for Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft. There are real
| costs to browser work that they should be feeling. Even if it
| slows down feature development, so what? I don't see how this
| can be worse than the status quo that got us here.
| thayne wrote:
| First of all, I absolutely agree it shouldn't have been
| allowed to happen in the first place, but it did. And I
| absolutely think there should be meaningful repercussions for
| Google.
|
| And really, I don't care if Microsoft and Apple stop getting
| paid for google search. My concern is Mozilla and Firefox.
| The google search money was Mozillas main source or revenue.
| They have been trying for years to find another way to make
| money, but have generally been unsuccessful, I'm doubtful
| they'll be able to figure out a way to replace that income
| now. What if this leads to Mozilla going out of business,
| Firefox being abandoned, and there being less competition? As
| a Firefox user, I might be biased but that seems like a worse
| outcome to me.
| andelink wrote:
| Perhaps Mozilla will spend money more effectively now? I'm
| not sure and frankly I don't care. For sure, it will be a
| sad day if Firefox formally goes under[1]. Still, it
| wouldn't change the validity of the decision to forbid
| these payments, spin off Chrome, etc.
|
| [1] I think Firefox will survive. Orion browser, which has
| been my main browser for maybe a year now, was developed
| with far less money than the Firefox budget and something
| like only two people. Is this a fair comparison? I have no
| idea.
| aseipp wrote:
| > Is this a fair comparison?
|
| Is this a serious question? Orion uses WebKit which
| practically speaking is like 80% of what people know as
| "a browser" and where an insane amount of the effort and
| money goes. There are like 30 various WebKit-derived
| zero-features 1-man browsers out there on GitHub, they
| even show up here sometimes. Firefox maintains its own
| entire engine called Gecko, it's completely incomparable.
| The actual development cost of your browser is subsidized
| almost entirely by Apple (and Kagi's VC money), make no
| mistake about it.
| chgs wrote:
| > Orion Browser is a browser developed by Kagi Inc. that
| is based on the WebKit engine
|
| So a skin for chrome.
| int_19h wrote:
| WebKit is Safari. Blink would be Chrome.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| As a corollary:
|
| If you are a company that wants to have control over the
| browser market and ensure that it doesn't get taken away, you
| should contrive to have the funding depend on you continuing to
| control it.
|
| The current situation is not an accident.
| yesbut wrote:
| Good. Perfect time for Mozilla to convert into a democratically
| controlled worker-owned company and cut off the parasite C team.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Taking your suggestion in good faith, I'm intrigued by your
| concept of democraticly controlled, worker owned. Please
| explore this further.
|
| I guess I'm wondering primarily what "democratically
| controlled" even means. Like everyone votes on every decision?
| Or we elect people to make decisions? Or we vote on "big
| decisions"? (Who defines "big"?
|
| Most companies are democratic. In the sense that the
| shareholders appoint the decision makers. Shareholders -> Board
| -> management.
|
| Your point about "worker owned" simply means the workers own
| the shares, and hence "democratic" would seem to be redundant.
| Unless you are suggesting that the democratic function is
| exercised in another way?
|
| Now clearly Mozilla is a mix of non profit and for profit. A
| non profit doesn't really have shares (there's usually some
| other approach to appointing decision makers.)
|
| So, I think you are suggesting that the voting rights move from
| "shareholders" to employees.
|
| Naturally this opens the door to 51% attacks, or more
| specifically incentivises workers to coalesce into groups with
| mutual-support voting.
|
| Given a reasonably high turnover in workers, we should
| therefore expect decision making to be mostly short-term not
| long term? (Simplistically, most people will vote to further
| their short term returns, ignoring long term goals because in
| the long run they're not here.)
|
| In other words the company starts to behave a lot like a govt
| does. Regular elections promote short-term goals and results
| (don't start a project that will complete after you've left) at
| the expense of things like maintainence etc.
|
| It also values political skills over say engineering skills.
| Being a good speaker counts for more than being competent.
|
| Do you believe this structure will make a better browser? When
| funding runs low, will they make better decisions on which
| staff to cut?
| yesbut wrote:
| Like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain.
|
| https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/about-us/
|
| > MONDRAGON is the outcome of a cooperative business project
| launched in 1956. Its mission is encapsulated in its
| Corporate Values: intercooperation, grassroots management,
| corporate social responsibility, innovation, democratic
| organisation, education and social transformation, among
| others.
|
| > Organisationally, MONDRAGON is divided into four areas:
| Finance, Industry, Retail and Knowledge. It currently
| consists of 81 separate, self-governing cooperatives, around
| 70,000 people and 12 R&D centres, occupying first place in
| the Basque business ranking and tenth in Spain.
|
| Or Scop-TI in France, a large worker cooperative in the IT
| and engineering sector.
|
| This isn't anything new:
|
| https://institute.coop/what-worker-cooperative
| kentrado wrote:
| He Is talking about a worker cooperative. You can search
| information about current ones if you are truly interested in
| how they work.
|
| I agree with him that software engineers should be making the
| decisions in Mozilla.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Great news! Mozilla will finally disappear!
| EbNar wrote:
| Hopefully
| mediumsmart wrote:
| Is Dan fabulating that 18 billion is 80% of Safaris yearly
| funding? Surely it's much less than that. A browser needs at
| least 50 billion per annum to stay on top of things. Nice try :)
| galkk wrote:
| Mozilla funneled shit ton of those money into nonsense, now
| they're having their reckoning. Cry me a river.
| ascorbic wrote:
| A lot of the nonsense has been increasinly desparate attempts
| at finding revenue sources beyond Google.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Can we get one good one then ?
| kace91 wrote:
| >It's obviously illegal for Google to prop up Mozilla Firefox and
| Apple Safari as if they were co-equal competitors to Chrome. And
| Chrome itself is the biggest "search-engine deal" of all, which
| is why the DoJ is so focused on forcing Google to divest from
| Chrome.
|
| >The laws intended to foster competition will inadvertently
| destabilize the foundational tools millions rely on to access the
| internet
|
| It sounds like, if anything, the problem lies in letting this
| "obviously illegal" setup become the statu quo.
| abhisek wrote:
| 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.
| chii wrote:
| > 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.
| taftster wrote:
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| mickelsen wrote:
| 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.
| taftster wrote:
| 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.
| mikelward wrote:
| I think Apple also forced the world to move on from
| Flash. The iPhone didn't have Flash.
| taftster wrote:
| All the other plugins were dying on their own (for
| whatever reason). But Flash was a stubborn virus, to be
| sure.
|
| Yes, it definitely took the big slap from Apple to kill
| Flash once and for all.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Oh, that's definitely revisionism. The iPhone killed Flash,
| and ActiveX (outside of South Korea / Silverlight) and
| applets were already dead at that point.
| mickelsen wrote:
| Yeah, true. I forgot that, even Steve's letter on why
| they wouldn't put flash on the iPhone.
|
| That was the final blow, yup. But the web was still a
| clunky mess of plugins, broken standards, and browser-
| specific hacks.
|
| Google pushed to make the web better. And through Chrome
| they helped bring WebKit to multiplatform: I still
| remember I couldn't even get rounded edges or nice
| typography support across platforms, only in Safari.
|
| It wasn't until Chrome took off that the rest started
| paying attention.
| michaelt wrote:
| The iPhone was undoubtedly the deciding factor, I agree -
| but interestingly Netflix used to rely on Silverlight for
| DRM [1] until Google introduced video DRM to Chrome in
| ~2013 [2]. iPhone netflix users had to use an app.
|
| [1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-26-netflix-finally-
| brings-w... [2] https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-
| at-netflix-721d1f143...
| asadotzler wrote:
| Why was ActiveX dead? Why didn't it succeed when MS
| launched it at a time IE had 90%+ user share?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Because it required Windows in a time that iPhones were
| storming the market.
|
| Also the ActiveX security model was pretty horrific.
| fsloth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The winning (marketingwise) systems couldn't get sandboxing
| to work. You couldn't simply download software and run it.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Sure, but back then people were used to downloading and
| running random exe files (even from really untrusted
| sources such as torrent sites, eMule, etc.)
| kevingadd wrote:
| I'm quite certain Apple would have continued their browser
| engineering and security efforts with or without Google. In the
| first place, Chromium was a fork of WebKit (which itself is
| derived from the work of the KHTML team). Apple values the
| security of their iOS users a _lot_ so they wouldn 't have just
| sat around and watched them get exploited.
|
| It's true that Google 'got there first' on a lot of stuff and
| that groups like Project Zero do incredible work but the idea
| that we'd be nowhere without Google is a bit silly.
| creato wrote:
| As of 2023 Apple had done very little of this to iMessage, a
| far simpler app than a browser:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425007
| abhisek wrote:
| Agreed that Apple would have continued browser engineering
| and focused on security as well in response to attack
| techniques.
|
| I am not suggesting that browsers would not evolve without
| Google. I am looking at the impact on web today. Perhaps new
| technologies will emerge, perhaps browser development will
| adopt different model or perhaps native apps will get a
| boost.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Apple doesn't invest sufficient resources in Safari even with
| Google's competition and support[1].
|
| [1]: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-
| show...
| briankelly wrote:
| That would be because they aren't meaningfully competing
| here. They both profit tremendously by the status quo and
| so do not step on each other's toes.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| taftster wrote:
| 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I like the late 00s/10s because it represents a
| particular level of refinement and balance of
| functionality in contrast to earlier eras. As much as I
| enjoyed the web of the 90s and early 00s, it was still
| quite nascent and in some ways a bit too basic for my
| taste.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 90s web was fun in a wild west kind of way. Sites were
| small, but the net in general was slow.
|
| 00-10 had a lot of forums in which I remember being very
| fun. At the same time it brought in the age of popups and
| ads everywhere.
|
| 10+ brought in the age of large social media and the
| feeling everything was trying to scam you. A lot of the
| forums that felt special and interesting started
| disappearing for multiple reasons, but mostly their
| userbase had moved to FB or something else huge. Then
| those large sites started moderating anything interesting
| away.
| thbb123 wrote:
| In the late 90's, I attended a talk by Ted Nelson, the
| guy who coined the term Hypertext. To him, things started
| going downhill with HTML, and the URL. The gist of his
| complain is that he wanted links to be bi-directional.
|
| In the 80's, telecom operators were complaining that
| TCP/IP and packet transmission was a regression over
| circuit commutation.
|
| So it looks like the internet has progressed through
| perpetual regression.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| The internet is 30-40 years old, and has brought an
| entirely new paradigm to the world. It has abolished
| distances, disproportionately increasing the reach of a
| few.
|
| I'd love to share your optimism that things will keep
| improving in the long run, but I don't see what you're
| basing that off.
| abhisek wrote:
| > 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| That's definitely a consideration, but alongside the rise
| of Blink within the web dev sphere there's also been a
| growing culture of sitting on the bleeding edge of new
| features regardless of how necessary doing so is, which
| influences both hobby and production projects alike.
|
| On other platforms it's still much more the norm to stick
| to proven tech for anything non-trivial and to only adopt
| new APIs when there's high adoption and adequate
| justification for doing so.
| taftster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > _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!?
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Morizero wrote:
| > 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
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Maybe they were actually lying when they originally said
| "Don't be evil," and removing it was only being more
| truthful?
| croes wrote:
| There actions back then fitted the Don't be evil motto.
|
| That's what mattered.
| ksec wrote:
| >There actions back then fitted the Don't be evil motto.
|
| Disagree with that. All the privacy issues people have
| problem with now were already a problem in 2007. But
| being the media darling along with Submarine PR Google
| didn't get much bad press.
|
| There were lots of other things too, including their site
| breaking Firefox as well as Chrome, their promise not to
| make another browser.
| charcircuit wrote:
| They never removed it.
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| 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.
| derf_ wrote:
| If you are referring to the standards-based "Unified
| Plan" vs. the Google proprietary "Plan B" for handling
| multiple media tracks in SDP, I believe that "Plan B" was
| finally phased out in 2022.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or
| notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs
| without any user visible indication.
|
| >No matter how efficient they made it, javascript
| "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste
| the user's resources compared to native code.
|
| >No matter how efficient they made it, javascript
| "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste
| the user's resources compared to native code.
|
| So should we not deliver advanced sandboxed cross
| platform applications for any platform, and instead
| deliver unsandboxed native code for all possible
| platforms? ActiveX called, it wants to say thanks for the
| endorsement and that it told you so.
|
| And no more zoom meetings because somebody's Mac might
| not go to sleep? I'm with you on that one, brother!
| nottorp wrote:
| > ActiveX called
|
| You do not need to "deliver" inside a bloated VM you
| know.
|
| Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these
| days.
|
| > And no more zoom meetings
|
| Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >You do not need to "deliver" inside a bloated VM you
| know.
|
| >Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM
| these days.
|
| Then Java applets? Oops, that's a bloated VM too.
|
| And how is an M4 emulating x86 code or jitting WASM code
| not also a bloated VM? Bloated VMs are here to stay.
|
| >> And no more zoom meetings
|
| >Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.
|
| Yay, we've found common ground! Want to chat about it on
| zoom? ;)
| nottorp wrote:
| I can read and write just fine thank you, want o chat
| about it on irc? :)
| 20after4 wrote:
| IRC and other simple tech are the real losers in the
| modern tech ecosystem.
| derf_ wrote:
| _> > Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance
| monopoly and made non patented state of the art video
| compression possible.
|
| > Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to
| those._
|
| They were not the only contributor (I was the technical
| lead for Mozilla's efforts in this space), but they were
| by far the largest contributor, in both dollars and
| engineering hours.
| rs186 wrote:
| > No matter how efficient they made it, javascript
| "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste
| the user's resources compared to native code.
|
| Well that's just biased. Saying application is bloated
| (which is often not true) is the result of an entire
| ecosystem, has something to do with an interpreter, is
| ridiculous. Any qualified software engineer can see the
| fault in such a comment. You probably know that as well.
|
| So I consider your comment trolling.
| mordae wrote:
| webrtc is awful, though
| pizza wrote:
| You raise some good points but re: codecs, I was quite
| unimpressed with how they handled JPEG-XL.
| eitland wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > That said, it's not as if other browsers weren't
| already making independent strides in optimisation and
| innovation
|
| Honestly I can't believe that anyone who was around when
| Chrome came out would say this. IE7 was around, and
| terrible. Firefox was trying hard, as was Opera, but web
| tech has become infinitely better with Chrome around, and
| Google funding it. Without Google funding Firefox as
| well, Firefox would be nowhere near what it is today.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly
| and made non patented state of the art video compression
| possible.
|
| Not really. That was done more by the greed of the MPEG
| alliance.
|
| Back in the days when <video> was first proposed, VP8 was
| required to be supported as a codec by all browsers. This
| was removed as a requirement after Apple stated they were
| never going to support it, but the other browsers still
| implemented VP8 because it was codec free. Then Google
| implemented H.264 in Chrome. Mozilla only implemented H.264
| in Firefox after it became clear that Google's announcement
| that they were going to rip H.264 out of Chrome was a bald-
| faced lie, making H.264 a de facto codec requirement for
| web browsers.
|
| Having won, then the MPEG Alliance got greedy with their
| next version. H.265 upped the prices on its license
| agreement, and additionally demanded a cut of all streaming
| revenue. It got worse--the alliance fragment, and so you
| had to pay _multiple_ consortia the royalties for the codec
| (although only one of them had the per-video demand).
|
| It was in response to this greed that the Alliance for Open
| Media was created, which brought us AV1. I don't know how
| important Google is to the AOM, but I will note that, at
| launch, it did contain everybody important to the web video
| space except for Apple (which, as noted earlier, is the
| entity that previously torpedoed the attempt to mandate
| royalty-free codecs for web video).
| ksec wrote:
| Not supporting H.264 was arguably what caused the
| downfall of Firefox usage. Unfortunately Mozilla didn't
| listen.
| troupo wrote:
| > VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and
|
| and paved way for Google monopoly. They literally
| threatened to pull their support from devices if devices
| don't implement AV1 in hardware.
| ksec wrote:
| And refuse to support JPEG-XL
|
| They are now no different to Microsoft with Windows
| Media.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit
| based on? KHTML.
|
| And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would
| still be a major player in the browser engine race today.
| Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and
| the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete
| with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser
| engine did.
|
| Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in
| Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about
| to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable
|
| Which incidentally also made it much more complex to
| implement, giving Google control over the web.
| ahofmann wrote:
| This is so important to look at, when we talk about this
| topic. I was there, 3000 years ago, when browser where
| kind of simple software. We could go back to that state
| and would loose almost nothing. All the complexity that
| is now in browsers was in the operating systems at that
| time. The millions of fronted-devs of today would just be
| "normal" devs three decades ago. I know, that that will
| not happen. But it helps looking through all the bullshit
| that Google has created, where they've build and control
| the platform (the web with chromium), that Microsoft and
| Apple used to control (their oses).
| badsectoracula wrote:
| FWIW i have a feeling (and it is just a feeling, not
| something i can confirm) that the entirety of Windows 95
| was simpler than Firefox or Chrome today :-P.
| lblume wrote:
| This is very likely true.
|
| By LOC: Windows 95 is estimated to have 10-15 million
| LOC, Chrome 30-40 million.
|
| By binary size: Windows 95 took about 50 MB, Chrome
| 200-300 MB.
|
| By architecture design: the codebase of Windows 95 is
| fairly shallow and monolithic, while Chrome is very
| modular (think V8, Blink, WASM, sandboxes...) and uses
| other dependencies.
| asah wrote:
| -1: this writes down the billions Google invested over many
| years.
|
| It's like saying that a modern car is hitting more than a
| model T from 100 years ago.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > _All the major browser innovation that has happened during
| the last decade is because of the funding from Google towards
| Chromium._
|
| Some people think innovation mostly happens in startups, but
| Big Corp monopolies have a unique and important role to play.
| Bell Labs and Xerox PARC did stuff no startup has the money
| for.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Counterpoint: the majority of it is not really innovation, but
| is instead it's just a rat race.
|
| The web doesn't need standards evolving at the speed of light,
| it's only happening because Google's strategy with Chrome has
| always been to set a pace that others can't follow, not about
| designing things right.
| rajnathani wrote:
| Firefox isn't built over Chromium.
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| Wait which innovations were these?
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >I wouldn't call turning browsers into application runtimes
| "major innovation".
|
| I would call it one of the most important innovations of the
| last 20 years. Name another true write-once-run-anywhere
| universal VM that is installed in billions of consumer
| devices and costs nothing. It doesn't exist. The only way the
| entire modern software ecosystem is even possible is because
| of the web as a platform. Literally everything else is a non-
| portable closed proprietary stack.
| grishka wrote:
| I argue that such a thing as a "true write-once-run-
| anywhere universal VM that is installed in billions of
| consumer devices" is not needed in this form. It creates
| more problems than it solves.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Name another true write-once-run-anywhere universal VM
| that is installed in billions of consumer devices and costs
| nothing. It doesn't exist.
|
| Java certainly meets your criteria and exists. But much
| like the person you are replying to, I consider the "modern
| software ecosystem" to be _utter garbage_. Web browsers are
| just a terrible user experience for applications compared
| to the desktop. We have regressed greatly in user
| experience, not progressed.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Java certainly meets your criteria and exists
|
| It does not. Nothing about Java provides a sandboxed
| runtime environment.
| Zambyte wrote:
| You don't need a VM for a "write once run anywhere"
| environment at all. That's the whole point of high level
| programming languages like C and Fortran. The innovation of
| having a VM to run everything in is to be able to _compile_
| once and run anywhere, which is only valuable to people
| wishing to hide the source code from the people running
| their software (malware authors).
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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.
| shafyy wrote:
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| Exactly. It's like the arguments that are sometimes made to
| that credit Genghis Kahn with creating an integration of the
| Eurasian landmass and rolling out administrative reforms. It
| doesn't tell us what the world could have been like if it
| wasn't steered towards consolidation, and it doesn't even
| pretend to morally justify the domination. It's an inevitable
| consequence of domination that no one but you has the power
| to roll out reforms or advancements of any type. Organic
| progression that might have happened anyway becomes something
| that only could have ever happened through you.
| voxgen wrote:
| The last major innovation as a product was PWA support starting
| in 2016.
|
| Browsers used to try new ideas like RSS, widgets, shared and
| social browser sessions. Interfaces to facilitate low-friction
| integration with the rest of your life, and to multiplex data
| sources so that it's not a hassle to have many providers for
| [news, entertainment, social] experiences.
|
| Likely no coincidence that this innovation languished once
| monopolies started pumping money into the ecosystem.
| glenstein wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree. Opera. Before it pivoted to Chrome and
| sold to Chinese investors I think was the apex example of
| this. I will never stop singing the praises of Opera Unite,
| which was a brilliant and potentially revolutionary way of
| leveraging the browser for something that could have been the
| basis of peer-to-peer web and social connection.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| > Browsers used to be one of the most critical and insecure
| software.
|
| Everything in the early 2000s was insecure and critical.
| superkuh wrote:
| >major browser innovation that has happened during the last
| decade
|
| Indeed. And since there has been nothing but bad changes to
| HTTP and HTML in the last decade, all centered around turning
| the web into just a means of transporting javascript
| applications, we know who to blame. I'm still upset that Google
| and Microsoft agents within the IETF managed to openwash and
| push QUIC/udp through as HTTP/3.
|
| It's a status quo that definitely needs changing if we're going
| to have a web usable by human persons and not just corporate
| persons.
| quangv wrote:
| Fuck it. Burn the boats.
| errantmind wrote:
| 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.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| So when Mozilla fires vast numbers of people that will be
| progress for Firefox?
|
| Such a deeply weird outlook.
| gitaarik wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Mozilla has squandered billions on irrelevant crap.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Examples?
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Mozilla has been trying to come up with a profitable business
| model for years. VPNs, privacy masking services, their own
| mobile OS, feed readers, you name it. Nobody is interested,
| new attempts at making money turn into cost centers, and the
| next attempt is burdened by the early shutdown of previous
| attempts.
|
| Every time they try something, the open source crowd cries
| out in pain because money isn't going towards their three
| preferred bugs instead, and the mainstream doesn't care about
| anything Mozilla does.
|
| They have made stupid decisions to be sure, and the money
| squandered at the top is definitely infuriating, but no
| amount of incentives or donations is going to replace the
| money Google is handing Mozilla to get out of the antitrust
| laws.
| lioeters wrote:
| With the reduced funding, Mozilla can fire the
| overpaid/underperforming executives; and re-hire the tech-
| focused people who were actually developing the browser.
| matt3210 wrote:
| Edge is not a white label. It has lots if cool features that
| chrome doesn't
| timewizard wrote:
| > And the DoJ has also argued that Google should be forced to
| sell off Chrome, forbidding Google from paying for Chrome and
| Chromium.
|
| Part of the DoJ's argument is that Google currently underinvests
| in chrome to keep the ecosystem locked in place. Particularly
| when compared to the insane amount of money that searches
| initiated from Chrome bring into Google.
|
| They also believe it's an attractive business and will be easy to
| find a buyer for because of this. It's worth way more than Google
| would let you believe. Just look at what they pay Apple to _not_
| be in the search market.
| kjeldsendk wrote:
| The headline could also be that the browser market is finally
| opening up to competition again.
|
| OpenAI would be happy to buy it's way into the default search for
| Firefox and the other browsers.
|
| I already made it my default search engine. It makes Google look
| old and shows just how much Google search is turned into a
| marketplace search.
| parrit wrote:
| Microsoft and Apple can afford to keep developing a browser.
| Hopefully FF can get money from another knowledge discovery
| company e.g. Anthropic? OpenAI?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Apple has no incentive to develop a browser.
| k_bx wrote:
| I guess let's wait for Mozilla Search being a wrapper around
| Google
| fguerraz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| freediver wrote:
| Yes. We had that business model for Orion browser since day
| one.
|
| Web browser is is the most important, most intimate piece of
| software on your computer. It is astonishing that ad-tech has
| convinced us for so long that someone else should be paying
| for our browser.
| ec109685 wrote:
| This is so alarmist. Whatever company buys chrome would have
| incentives to keep investing in it.
|
| Similarly if Google can't bid for search engine placement,
| someone else will.
|
| While Chrome has done great things for the web ecosystem, neither
| Google or Apple have released a browser that can truly produce
| apps that rival native experiences. If the keepers of the web
| didn't have their own app stores, would that change?
| bigomega wrote:
| I hope this encourages more third-party non-tech-giant
| compitition like the Arc and Brave browser.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Both based on chromium.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| What's going to happen is that we are going to see browser forks
| from places we never imagined ... like China.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| This is a tragedy.
|
| I closely follow browser development and love that the pace of
| innovation is so fast.
|
| How can such an obviously bad decision be made?
|
| If the big tech companies are so powerful then why is this
| happening?
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| searching for w3c... zero results.
|
| so, people here are too young or forgetful.
|
| the whole reason browsers are deemed unsafe was exactly because
| of google and Microsoft hold on standards. chrome only reason to
| exist as a cost center on google was to undermine Microsoft on
| these groups, the same way Microsoft was undermining google there
| with IE.
|
| everyone here is saying how google saved the internet by coopting
| an existing open source project... and then holding back thinks
| like cookie isolation for another couple decades. sigh.
|
| interesting that google draw the same uncritical fanboyism which
| used to be reserved for apple.
| new_user_final wrote:
| Google will sell Chrome for 100 billion and fork Chromium to
| build Grome browser like MySQL and MariaDB. People will stop
| using chrome when it will start to alter webpage (like edge
| modify web content if you search chrome) and heavily track user
| activity to feed LLM (like perplexity's browser) to serve Ad.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| This is a good thing. It's time for a big change. Some contenders
| are:
|
| 1. A lighter browser that goes back to the early 90s, supporting
| HTML, forms, sockets, a handful of codecs, and nothing more. The
| newer modern features have added disproportionate security risk.
| There are so many exploited zero-days in modern browsers that no
| modern browser is safe.
|
| 2. A chat system limiting to what AI can directly infer (in a
| rendered sense). Usually this content is limited to
| markdown/text/HTML and images/video, but no scripts. The AI's
| internal representation does not render a script like a browser
| does. Sockets can be simulated by message updates.
| 0dayz wrote:
| There already are "browsers" from the 90s you can use.
|
| And which browser doesn't support html, forms and why would we
| want to use sockets?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Konqueror still works, as does IE11. You don't need modern
| browsers. Most people just want them.
|
| > There are so many exploited zero-days in modern browsers that
| no modern browser is safe.
|
| Interesting suggestion. Do you know how many of those zero-days
| are related to modern features? Most of them seem to be coming
| from "browsers are still made in C(++)" and "Javascript/CSS
| performance optimisalisations gone wrong" that has been a risk
| for decades now. There was that time Apple accidentally opened
| up part of local browser storage from any website to any other
| website, but the same bug might as well happen with something
| as basic as cookies; we were just lucky that the bug was in
| that weird web SQL thing from a decade and a half ago that
| nobody uses.
| int_19h wrote:
| People don't want them. People want something that "just
| works" for them to browse the web. The web is a complex mess
| of standards that requires a complicated browser right now,
| but does it need to be?
| asadotzler wrote:
| Wishful thinking. Fantasy.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Thanks everyone for making ChromeOS a reality, time to update
| those CVs from Web developer to ChromeOS developer.
|
| Google succeeding where Microsoft failed.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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...
| kubb wrote:
| We'll have buggy, unsafe, slow browsers with diverging
| standards and we'll like it.
| nottorp wrote:
| "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.
| kubb wrote:
| Firefox is working pretty swell for me.
| atoav wrote:
| Yes, for me as well, but once a year I will encounter
| some web page thst won"t do what it is meant to unless
| you use chrome.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| In half of those cases, changing your user agent to
| Chrome magically solves all the issues.
| mmsc wrote:
| This is literally some browsers' solution. They have an
| internal domain list and use the chrome UA for those
| secondcoming wrote:
| Firefox has been my goto browser for years but recently
| I've noticed it screwing things up, most notable when
| viewing source code in github. The text highlighting gets
| broken somehow.
| skydhash wrote:
| Then it's GitHub fault, because hihglighting works
| everywhere else. When has it becomes the default to blame
| the platform because some program have bad code?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| > 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.
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| Obviously they are not talking about the difference
| between the two browsers, but between the two situations.
| Your post looks like you chose the least charitable
| interpretation in order to pick a fight.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The two situations are also totally different: Chrome has
| been far better for the Web than IE ever was, and the
| reason Firefox is still keeping up is that it got that
| money from Google.
|
| If we decide that Web innovation is done in the browser,
| and it all has to move to Javascript libraries again, the
| way we did when browser innovation stalled in the 2000s
| and we got jQuery, so be it, I suppose.
| troupo wrote:
| Chrome is IE, but in reverse: https://www.quirksmode.org/
| blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...
| ytpete wrote:
| 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.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| > ...pressure Apple to catch up to Google's web standards
| faster.
|
| Ftfy.
|
| Safari is the only brake we have in this rush towards
| complex and unmaintainable web, with Google (the only
| company which can afford to play this game) at the helm.
| So no, Safari not supporting some random new feature is
| not a bad thing.
| concinds wrote:
| 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).
| yurishimo wrote:
| > Apple wants to cripple the web and favor its App Store
| monopoly
|
| While I agree that this is probably true at the BOD
| level, the people working on the browser itself go in the
| opposite direction. They spend a lot of effort trying to
| actually develop a robust standard. Jen Simmons has been
| kicking ass since she went to work on Safari and I'm here
| for it. If she leaves or is forced out, I will be much
| more skeptical about the pushback offered by Apple.
|
| The Interop 20XX projects are a great first start and I'm
| hopefully that feature parity will continue to increase
| over the next few years.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I like the work and advocacy of Jen Simmons too, but
| without the large infusion of cash (on the order of $20B)
| from Google, why wouldn't Apple downsize the Safari team
| and force her out?
|
| I worry about the jobs of all browser devs in fact. The
| pace of innovation in web and browser technologies will
| significantly slow down. All browser teams are likely to
| be downsized.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Ever hear of NaCl? Presumably not.
| troupo wrote:
| > Chrome simply has superior, less buggy support for
| basic, uncontroversial web APIs, the kind that every
| browser maker agrees on.
|
| You write this with a straight face after giving WebMIDI
| as an example.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| When is the last time you heard of someone getting pwned on
| w3m
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Good. Force a return to native apps.
| abhisek wrote:
| > 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.
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| wmanley wrote:
| I read your comment to mean:
|
| > There should be a huge mess of choices available because
| it increases the cost of web development.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Well, one way to read "forced to not cut corners" is
| "forced to increase cost" :-P
| bee_rider wrote:
| If the cost of web development goes up, either websites
| will be more expensive, or they'll just have to be less
| complicated. We're hoping for the latter.
| kubb wrote:
| 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.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I think they might start from scratch as this gives them the
| chance to nuke all the legacy code
| rienbdj wrote:
| Would be ironic if Google make the a 100% Rust browser
| before Mozilla.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Servo?
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Servo is a rendering engine with a pretty rough reference
| browser chrome around it. It's also not Mozilla's even
| though it started there.
| dieortin wrote:
| AFAIK they would be forbidden from entering the browser
| market for some years
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| > 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.
| izabera wrote:
| 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.
| margorczynski wrote:
| > $260M spent on software development,
|
| What? I know the browser is a complex piece of software but
| considering at least part of the development is done by
| volunteers isn't this a bit too high?
|
| Maybe at least they should move a part of the operation
| outside of HCOL areas in the US?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| There are almost no volunteers working on web browsers
| anymore.
| dubcanada wrote:
| 1800 ish devs from the last figure I could find. 700 ish on
| Firefox.
|
| Now there is no way 700 people actually work on Firefox
| code. Throw in team leads, QA, dev tools, UI, specialized
| developers like WebRTC and that number makes a little more
| sense. But still seems inflated.
|
| Most of Mozilla is already remote.
|
| I mean Mozilla and Firefox should survive. But I do imagine
| we'll lose Thunderbird and anything not Firefox related.
| And dev will drop heavily. CEO salary of almost 7 million
| will need to go as well.
|
| It may be good for Mozilla to return to a streamlined
| company. Rather then a bloated one as it is now.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Almost nothing noticeable has changed with Firefox for
| years. A couple of minor features here and there, and
| just keeping up with standards. It does seem pretty
| excessive. Definitely seems that Mozilla has become
| massively wasteful and misguided over the past ~15 years.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| That's actually the point. An army of people are keeping
| up with standards so things just work. I'm curious as to
| what it looks like when only certain browsers are
| maintained.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| New standards do not get adopted that easily? One can
| dream...
| cassianoleal wrote:
| That's one of the main problems with Google controlling
| not only the top browser but also the rendering engine
| behind most of the competition. They don't have to care
| about standards at that point. When they do, it's mostly
| to put a veneer of openness over their operations.
| frabcus wrote:
| Thunderbird is (amazingly) funded entirely by donations
| from users. The money is hypothecated for that purpose.
| There are so few good email clients now they get enough
| donors.
|
| Source: someone I know who works there
| nottorp wrote:
| Wait, you can donate for Thunderbird specifically?
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| You can! Thunderbird lives in a separate entity outside
| the main Mozillasphere called MZLA. I've given a few
| times in the past and use it for personal use, but my
| workplace recently banned Thunderbird.
|
| https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/
| cududa wrote:
| Aside from a handful of individuals the only volunteers
| doing a modicum of serious volunteer work are retirees/
| people that don't need to work anymore or companies
| directing their employees to make contributions for their
| own motivations
|
| You seriously underestimate the complexity of a browser if
| you think it's a hobbies maintained thing
| chippiewill wrote:
| 100%, those hare brained schemes are Mozilla frantically
| trying to find another revenue stream to fund Firefox so
| they're not reliant on Google
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _firefox is not remotely able to bring in enough cash to
| justify its current development costs_
|
| Mozilla's donations are roughly equal to their CEO's
| compensation [1][2].
|
| [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... _"$7.8M in donations
| from the public, grants from foundations, and government
| funding" in 2023_
|
| [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-
| fdn-990... _$6.9mm in 2022, page 7_
| nottorp wrote:
| Yes, and you can't donate specifically for Firefox
| development.
|
| I don't want my donations to support the latest fashion, I
| want them to go directly to the browser.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| If only they had set aside some funds to serve as an
| endowment for the future.
| ksec wrote:
| Around 2012 I was advocating Wikimedia should have merged
| with Mozilla where by Wikimedia foundation would continue to
| fund the development of Firefox.
|
| But then both were rotten and massively over spend.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > 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?
| nottorp wrote:
| They refuse to say don't they?
| redeeman wrote:
| I for one strongly prefer to be told how colors shape the
| world, rather than fixing big longstanding things in the
| issue tracker.
| int_19h wrote:
| I was wondering what this refers to, and apparently it's
| this:
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/independent-
| voices...
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Mozilla spends very little on "hairebrained schemes" like
| (for example) Rust these days compared to direct investment
| in Firefox. Did you miss the massive layoffs that occurred
| many years ago?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those
| harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the
| Firefox browser.
|
| It was the other way around. Other product like VPN, MDN Plus,
| Pocket was a way to diversify revenue which could be channeled
| to Firefox, although the problem is Mozilla isn't the best
| company at making money.
| rfoo wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sure killing a major revenue stream helps an
| organization to focus on keeping its cost center going and get
| rid of other shots trying to bring in more revenue /s
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| Not that bad of a thing if you don't mind Mozilla closing shop
| or pivoting to promotion of crypto scams and sports betting.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They will be forced to stop working on the browser and let the
| open source community do it for free.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Back in the 2000s, Microsoft wasn't wasting their desktop money
| on harebrained schemes like porting Windows to touchscreen
| mobile devices (or rather, it wasn't a huge priority), and then
| Android ate their lunch.
|
| Firefox spending money on harebrained schemes like FirefoxOS is
| a _good_ thing (even if it failed), it 's how you find black
| swans that everyone has to copy from you. Otherwise you're
| always playing catch-up.
| romankolpak wrote:
| How do you make money by developing a web browser? You build
| this immensely complex piece of software and then have no
| choice but to distribute it for free. It seems like with the
| current browser landscape the only viable business model for
| companies building browsers is to make your money elsewhere
| while investing some of it into the browser development.
| raincole wrote:
| > Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be
| forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non
| browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
|
| Why the hell would they?
|
| Mozilla does all the "harebrained" stuff to make money.
| Especially to diversify their income and rely on Google less.
| Developing Firefox is a net loss of money.
| this_user wrote:
| Is any of their stuff actually making money? It certainly
| doesn't seem like it, and most of their products and projects
| were complete failures, because they were getting involved in
| things where they had no expertise like building a mobile OS.
| raincole wrote:
| From their own report [0], in 2023, they made 494M from
| 'Royalties' and 64M from 'Subscription and Advertising
| Revenue".
|
| If I read it correctly, 'Royalties' is mostly just Google
| paying them to be the default search engine. 'Subscription
| and Advertising Revenue' is what people on HN refer as
| harebrained projects, like Mozilla VPN.
|
| Notably both numbers declined in 2023, and it's not clear
| how much these subscription and advertising projects cost.
| So we don't really know if they made a profit.
|
| https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-
| fdn-202...
| glenstein wrote:
| >Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced
| to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser
| initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
|
| Again, the whack-a-mole myth that simply won't die. I have
| asked people about this over and over and over again over I'm
| gonna say like the past year and a half and at this point I
| feel pretty confident that this was kind of a mass-hallucinated
| myth. If you try to be objective and actually look at the
| numbers and you look at the time period over which Firefox lost
| browser share and you look at their budgets in the time period
| over which they engaged in side bets, the math just doesn't add
| up. None of the side bets ever occurred at prohibitive
| development costs, and they did not occur over a time period
| over which Firefox's browser share crashed. There's no such
| thing as a missing browser feature which Firefox was unable to
| implement because they didn't have access to resources due to
| those resources being siphoned away by sidebeds. And people
| seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually like make a
| real argument about these things before simply claiming it.
|
| There is a kinda-sorta real version of the argument, which is
| that around 2016 or so, before Firefox released quantum, the
| quality of the browser was lagging behind alternatives, and
| they were investing significant resources in Firefox OS. That's
| the closest to a real thing that this argument can attach to.
| But no one making this claim even knows that no one making this
| claim has looked at their budget, how much it costs to run a
| VPN, or made any cause and effect connection between that and
| other things. This is a myth that kind of got hallucinated into
| existence by hn comment sections.
|
| I do think the critique of straying from a commitment to
| privacy is a real thing, but the narrative that they wasted
| time and resources on side features while the core browser
| experience deteriorated, attempts to establish a cause-and-
| effect relationship between that and market share is not backed
| up by any facts. And if you look at my comment history, it's
| practically a year of pleading with people to cite any example
| whatsoever that would substantiate this argument.
| nabakin wrote:
| I keep seeing comments on HN that misunderstand what's
| happening with Mozilla and it's kind of frustrating.
|
| Right now, if you were to take away Google's money, Firefox
| would not be able to compete with Chromium and Safari.
|
| Those 'harebrained' initiatives are attempts to find a source
| of revenue aside from Google and are necessary to Firefox's
| survival. So saying
|
| > stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser
| initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser
|
| completely misses the point.
|
| Unless we want Firefox to die, we should understand their
| situation and encourage this exploratory process, not hate on
| it.
| kristopolous wrote:
| yet another piece of technology we shall cede to china.
|
| downvote if you want - if it happens, my prediction will age like
| fine wine.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Whereas if it doesn't happen nobody remembers your comment and
| you suffer no social consequences. Very +EV bet.
|
| Currently, it's ceded to a country hostile to mine. Great.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I mean if the courts break it up and the funding goes away.
|
| Then in a couple years after proper funding and less crazy
| austerity elsewhere, such as in China, there will be these
| nail-biting articles about how evil wicked China is getting
| ahead in the browser and we need good American USA browsers
| without ever reflecting on our own stupid yeehaw foot
| shooting behavior that created the situation.
|
| Absolute psychotic madness
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Yellow scare strikes again!
| ascorbic wrote:
| What I'm unclear about is whether the remedies would block _any_
| payment for search queries, or just the ones tied to default
| placement.
| L-four wrote:
| Can we get "HTTP 402 Payment Required" working now?
| dbacar wrote:
| Billions on a web browser. So many billions. I am trying to grasp
| that.
| qnleigh wrote:
| Will there be an appeal? How finalized is this?
| devnullbrain wrote:
| 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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?
| GlacierFox wrote:
| Yeah, have read the segment multiple times. Can not fathom
| a logical coherent meaning for that sentence.
| roenxi wrote:
| The point I'm trying to make is that we've identified the
| prime customer of web browser development - it is Google.
|
| That is like identifying the prime customers of a
| supermarket - people who live nearby.
|
| Having customers who are particularly keen or invested for
| whatever reason does not make an enterprise a cartel.
| shafyy wrote:
| What makes Google a cartel (or rather, monopoly) in this
| case is that they own > 80% of the browser market. Not
| that they pay other companies so that they appear as the
| default search engine.
| roenxi wrote:
| I think that is a mistaken view, but rather than argue
| that I'll put a more interesting question. If you believe
| that there is a cartel here and the result is that we the
| plebs get high quality products for free, do you think
| cartels are a bad thing? Because it seems to be all
| upside for pretty much everyone. If this is a cartel
| (which, again, I don't see it), we should be looking to
| get cartels involved in food and housing.
|
| Breaking up this 'cartel' is literally going to mean that
| the best 4 web browsers won't get quite as much
| development effort directed towards them. The plan seems
| to be to choke them of so much development that even
| dodgy hobbyist projects can complete. That is a low-
| quality bar.
| shafyy wrote:
| But we don't get the high quality products for free.
| Google is using Chrome to strenghten their market
| dominance in other markets, such as advertising.
| Furthermore, they are using their market power in
| browsers to push through standards and protocols that
| mostly benefit them.
|
| Just ask yourself this: Google is one of the largest and
| most profitable companies on Earth. They are a for-
| profit, capitalistic company. Legally, their main duty is
| to maximize shareholder profit. Why would they give away
| somehting for free, if in the end, it does not benefit
| them more than not giving it away for free?
|
| Competition is always better for consumers, unless you
| believe in a "benevolent dictator" situation (which, as
| reality shows, also never ends well).
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Nor does calling browsers dependent on Search funding a
| cartel.
|
| People expect web browsers to be provided for free, which
| heavily complicates funding.
|
| There is nothing stopping someone from making a new
| browser. The base of Chrome is open source, you don't even
| have to do the hard part. And distribution worldwide is
| relatively easy, if you can give people a reason to use
| your browser.
| lukan wrote:
| How did the developement of chrome made more people use the
| internet?
|
| Some remember the time, when browsers existed before chrome
| as well .. and I am not a ware of a uniquie chrome feature,
| removing significant barriers.
|
| But by developing the browser, they can
|
| A) decide the direction where the web is heading
|
| B) get direct control over peoples internet experience and
| their data
| tnh wrote:
| There are alternate histories where the web stagnated as an
| app development platform in favor of other ecosystems.
|
| MS development slowed around IE6 after winning browser war
| against Netscape.
|
| Apple's mobile ecosystem competes successfully with web,
| but could have gone further.
|
| Chrome and Android have helped keep the web more relevant.
| lblume wrote:
| At its core, the ideals of the Web as an interoperable,
| nearly universal platform are extremely promising. I
| highly doubt people would prefer completely split
| ecosystems where programs could only be accessed on
| specific platforms.
| koalaman wrote:
| You could not watch Netflix on Linux until Chrome came
| along.
|
| You also didn't have very good security from browser
| exploits until Chrome.
|
| Chrome also made the web significantly faster to use.
|
| Chrome was critical in unblocking the use of Linux on
| desktop.
| belter wrote:
| Al Capone did a lot of good on his neighborhood...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Chrome didn't murder anyone
| belter wrote:
| Neither did Al Capone
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Now that's a mic drop moment
| lukan wrote:
| "Chrome was critical in unblocking the use of Linux on
| desktop."
|
| Sure, but it was about more people using the internet in
| general.
|
| The very small minority using linux desktop (hello, I am
| among them) could and did use the internet before chrome.
|
| And from a technical point of view, I do love chrome dev
| tools. But that is besides the point.
| mopenstein wrote:
| Isn't Android Linux based? The development of chrome on
| desktop Linux have any benefits for mobile Linux?
| lukan wrote:
| The other way around.
|
| "development of chrome on desktop Linux have any benefits
| for mobile Linux?"
|
| Android is the big market, that gets prime support.
|
| Otherwise android and linux desktop just share the kernel
| (and not even the same one).
|
| So the developement of chrome on android probably makes
| it a bit easier to target linux desktop, but not much.
|
| (I still don't have WebGPU on my linux desktop but since
| quite a while on my old android phone)
| Izkata wrote:
| Dolphin Browser was the go-to in the late 2000s for
| Android.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I've been using exclusively Linux on the desktop for
| almost 10 years now. If there was an unblocker, it was
| wine/Proton, or for laptops, NetworkManager (I remember
| having a bit of difficulty configuring wpa_supplicant for
| my university in 2008). I don't even have
| Chrome/Chromium. Linux on the desktop is enough of a
| niche/bubble still that it wouldn't surprise me if a
| large number of other users don't have Chrome either
| (e.g. I don't use or care about services with DRM, and
| have it disabled in my browser). Honestly besides flexbox
| and TLS updates I'm not sure I know of anything useful
| that's been added to browsers in the last 20 years.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| +1 for Wine, I didn't bother with Linux until Wine showed
| up.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Uh, Wine showed up in June of 1993[1], a full month
| _before_ the first official release of Windows NT. Not
| necessarily in a usable form, mind you, but even now the
| usability is heavily dependent on what specific software
| you are trying to emulate.
|
| [1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/commit/2c25c3e9
| 442c69b...
| lukan wrote:
| "Honestly besides flexbox and TLS updates I'm not sure I
| know of anything useful that's been added to browsers in
| the last 20 years."
|
| Wasm and webgl/webGPU are really useful for anything
| performance related.
| raudette wrote:
| Yeah - I think the big problems are solved, and then you
| start moving into more and more niche cases. I really
| love being able to flash firmware on ESP32 devices with
| webserial!
|
| The use of USB authentication devices (FIDO2) is also
| interesting.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Easily over 99% of what I use a browser for are
| essentially static pages, so wasm and especially webgpu
| strike me as extremely niche. Like it's cute that you can
| run quake in a browser, but I can also just open my start
| menu and launch quake. For actual web usage (looking up
| information, shopping, paying my bills, bank transfers,
| stock trades, etc.), simple, static html is the high
| performance approach.
| lukan wrote:
| Google maps or other map applications are a pretty
| mainstream feature.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| In a browser/on the desktop? I would think everyone would
| use a dedicated application, probably on their phone. For
| Linux users in particular, I would be unsurprised if they
| use OsmAnd. Maps also shouldn't require webgpu or wasm.
| e.g. XForms made something like a scrollable map
| application trivial to develop years before wasm was a
| thing[0]. That shows what _could_ have been a browser
| improvement if W3C standards were still relevant. Google
| maps of course predates those things by over a decade.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yYY7GJAbOo
| lukan wrote:
| If I want to use google maps, or find a new home - I am
| not browsing maps with my phone. I use a big screen.
|
| With the browser.
|
| And most real estate sites also do have a map for
| example.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| That still sounds relatively niche/doesn't really
| disagree with my statement that easily over 99% of web
| usage is not something like that. How often are you
| finding a new home? Map widgets also shouldn't really be
| a performance concern; they were doable 15-20 years ago
| (i.e. with much weaker hardware and no webasm/webgpu).
|
| Something like improved forms with validations and
| databinding would be useful for actual easier document
| authoring. Built-in charts (line graphs, pie charts, etc.
| with baked in support for legends and axes) would also be
| generically useful in the way that tables were. Flexbox
| was useful for layouts, but otherwise we instead got
| pushes for more scripting performance to cover up the
| impact of mass surveillance and more ways to leak data
| about the underlying system to conduct that surveillance.
| lukan wrote:
| "How often are you finding a new home?"
|
| Too often.
|
| " Map widgets also shouldn't really be a performance
| concern"
|
| Have you ever build one?
|
| I hate those stuttering ones build by suckers and enjoy
| those that just run smooth GPU accelerated.
|
| Also I frequently encounter maps on various sites.
|
| The tracking service for my package. The shop showing me
| the nearest stores. A map with points of niche interest
| ..
| fireflash38 wrote:
| And they've been working quite well with not all that
| much in ways of improvement for years, if not decades.
| What's the last huge improvement in maps thats been
| noticeable to users in the last 5 years?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the technical term is they are paying customers (although
| in Google 's case it is complex and non-traditional because
| they are carrying the financial burden on behalf of the
| people who click on ads and there are a bunch of free
| riders)_
|
| Not the fact that Google is the one doing the paying?
| Qwertious wrote:
| I'm wondering which local residents didn't eat food before
| supermarkets existed.
| bluGill wrote:
| The vast majority since according to Wikipedia the first
| supermarket was in the 1930s, and thus very few were born
| before that. I know that I personally have never lived
| someplace where most of my food didn't come from a
| supermarket.
| CPLX wrote:
| That's not correct. Google believes the more people use its
| search engine the more money it makes from ads. That's
| correct.
|
| So it monopolizes the distribution platforms for search
| engines.
|
| The easier analogy here is an oil monopolist paying off all
| the tanker and rail and pipeline companies so nobody else can
| get oil to customers, and then splitting the massive profits
| with the shippers.
|
| By the way this example actually happened and is the origin
| of the term "antitrust" which is the area of law that Google
| was found guilty of violating by multiple judges. So the
| analogy is right on the nose.
| secondcoming wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe we can finally reduce some of the absurd complexity
| then?
| citrin_ru wrote:
| The complexity is enormous but isn't google employees are
| active on various standards committees? Google benefit from
| the complexity because it ensures there will be less
| competing browsers.
| jopsen wrote:
| A lot of the complexity stems from backwards compatibility.
|
| Also I seriously doubt there is any conspiracy here!
|
| (opinions are my own)
| citrin_ru wrote:
| It is not necessary a conspiracy. It's just google had
| (and still has) no incentives to keep web ecosistem
| simple and accessible to browser developers, while making
| it harder perfectly aligns with google's interests.
| gwillen wrote:
| I think Google basically _is_ the standards committees, at
| this point. Not in the sense of having majority control
| just by themselves, but in the sense of (1) the cartel
| being argued over here (browsers funded by Google) having
| that or close to it, and (2) Chrome being the main source
| of new features getting implemented, so that the job of the
| standards committees is mostly to play catch-up with
| Chrome.
| deeThrow94 wrote:
| At what point does the complexity of the browser cross a line
| to being anticompetitive?
| Qwertious wrote:
| With sufficient funding and scope creep, _everything_ is a
| huge undertaking.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > Is it a cartel or is it a fact that writing a fully specs-
| compliant browser is a huge undertaking due to the complexity
| of everything?
|
| And who made the specs so stupidly complex in the first
| place?
|
| Back in early 2000s you could visit pretty much every site
| using a KHTML-based browser and that was written by a handful
| of KDE devs.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| We did.
|
| I certainly peacock every time the new latest greatest
| [thing] is added to the spec, and am certainly not shy
| about using those features. There is a handful of misses,
| but it feels a little dishonest to point the finger
| squarely at Google when HN in particular lights up like a
| Christmas tree with every new feature.
|
| Want me to link to our discussion(s) about the new browser
| DateTime library - Temporal? Or what about Streams, Pattern
| Matching, Subgrid, Container Queries, color-mix, et al. We
| ask for this stuff, and we're thrilled when it arrives.
| Seems hypocritical to then turn around and complain that
| they're making the browsers "too complicated."
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Well, HN isn't really of a unified opinion on the matter
| - you'll find as many people complaining about browser
| complexity as people who love these features. The thing
| is, only one choice between having them or not would make
| it harder to create new browsers.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >would make it harder to create new browsers.
|
| Blink and v8 are open source. You don't even need to
| implement the spec yourself. New browsers can piggy back
| off open source (which is what Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc
| also did) to help making a browser easier.
| troupo wrote:
| > due to the complexity of everything?
|
| Google pushes over 400 new web APIs per year, often with no
| true specs and with no input or consensus from other browser
| vendors.
|
| So. Who is responsible for complexity?
| hollerith wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not even a web dev, but even I can see that
| Google wants to make the web stack ever more complicated
| and is has been good at getting what it wants.
|
| I always thought they do that to make it more expensive for
| anyone to compete with them. E.g., want to introduce a new
| operating systems for phones? No one will use it unless it
| has a web browser. So you have to hire a thousand expensive
| developers to create and maintain the browser (or maybe
| somehow induce Mozilla to port Firefox to it, which would
| probably also be expensive).
| troupo wrote:
| They also do it depending on who wins internal turf wars.
| When Chrome/ChromeOS wins, we get a hundred hardware
| APIs.
|
| When ads win (they always win) we get FLOC and other
| bullcrap.
|
| etc.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I don't think there would be demand for extraneous web
| APIs if the native ones were a good enough replacement.
| Kinda feels like the fault of OEMs for driving people to
| the web for good content.
| acka wrote:
| Sounds very similar to the practice of "Embrace, extend,
| and extinguish".
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| They literally giveaway the base of Chrome for free under one
| of the most permissive licenses out there, a new browser
| doesn't even have to start from scratch.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Hardly cartel behaviour then
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| How is this a cartel?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It has some cartel-like aspects but lacks others, probably
| because the software industry has a unique structure in which
| there are nearly no distribution costs.
|
| _Cambridge Dictionary: A cartel is a group of similar
| independent companies or countries that join together to
| control prices and limit competition. It involves restricting
| output, controlling prices, and allocating market shares._
|
| Group of similar but independent companies (check) that join
| together to control prices (no, but they do join together to
| control the web in other ways), and limit competition (yes,
| by constantly adding features to HTML whilst market dumping
| they prevent competitors from arising). It involves
| restricting output (not in the literal sense, does apply if
| you consider the synchronized way they implement standards),
| controlling prices (yes, forcing them to zero instead of the
| natural market rate), and allocating market shares (yes, if
| you consider iOS browser restrictions).
| ndr42 wrote:
| I remember that apple, google, ms had some anti-poaching
| agreements in place, while not directly related it seems
| that that is also pattern of cartels to have informal
| agreements that hinders competition.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| But they are not joining together in any way. In fact they
| have transactional relationship which is opposite of
| cartel.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| They all have contracts with Google, work on the same
| shared specifications and in the case of most browser
| companies, work on the same shared codebase. That would
| count as a joining together for the purposes of cartel
| law.
| firecall wrote:
| "A cartel is a group of independent market participants who
| collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with
| each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the
| market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to
| limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial
| shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and
| marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider
| cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to
| outlaw cartel practices."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
|
| I don't agree that the current situation in the browser market
| fits the definition of a Cartel, as I understand it! :-)
| dijit wrote:
| Not sure I agree. The "price fixing" aspect could be about
| ads, after all- and none of the major browsers are neutral in
| this.
|
| Manifest v3 for example, and various standards that make
| fingerprinting easier.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| The more appropriate term is an oligopoly.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| Or perhaps even racketeering.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering
| xg15 wrote:
| If the article is true, it would be _worse_ than a cartel, it
| would be effectively a monopoly with a few sockpuppet
| competitors.
|
| In an actual cartel or oligopoly, you'd expect at least the
| cartel members be relatively equal in power. But if the
| article is right, then Google has basically _all_ the power
| to decide the course of web tech going forward, as the other
| browsers devs can 't meaningfully deviate from whatever
| vision Google has for the web, without risking their funding.
| CPLX wrote:
| Of course it's a cartel. They agree not to compete with each
| other in online search advertising, one company collects the
| monopoly profits and then distributes them to the other
| cartel members.
|
| It's textbook.
| rolandog wrote:
| I think we're at an awkward place where governments worldwide
| have been slow to understand the importance of the global
| infrastructure that has sprouted, largely due to open source
| software...
|
| Given that browsers are essential to access information, I
| think they shouldn't be developed behind a business model, but
| rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.
|
| There should be some independence guarantees in order to make
| that organization not have to bow to pressure from governments
| to sacrifice privacy due to funding threats.
| verisimi wrote:
| Could it possibly be that governments are perfectly ok with
| restricting and controlling browsers as this allows them far
| greater control?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Sure, but they're not doing that either?
|
| It's Google that's in control of Chrome and sponsors it's
| competitors, not the government.
| verisimi wrote:
| How separarate do you think google are from the
| governance system? Are you aware that their early funding
| was from in-q-tel?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Okay, given your theory that Google control equals
| government control... Wouldn't the anti trust now be
| against their interest of controlling the browsers?
|
| You seem to have a very contradictory opinion
| gymbeaux wrote:
| You have to admit (in the U.S.) companies have
| significant power over the government.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| As far as I can see, nobody said anything that could
| conceivably be interpreted to imply otherwise, so sure?
|
| I am really unsure what your argument even is, gymbeaux -
| and how it relates to verisimi's previous point. You're
| not trying to argue that it was Google's masterplan all
| along to get the anti-trust ruling, right?
| verisimi wrote:
| I'm not privy to the plan, but what was right at one
| stage (funding a company to gain a monopoly position on
| search) need not be right at a later stage. Perhaps now a
| different strategy is unfolding. Perhaps it is obvious
| that government and corporations work in tandem, and the
| optics require that it appears that government acts
| against monopolists to regain confidence.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Is there any model or example where this "global digital
| infrastructure fund" exists?
| twiss wrote:
| Depending on how you define "global",
| https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund might qualify:
|
| > With the Sovereign Tech Fund, we invest globally in the
| open software components that underpin Germany's and
| Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate.
|
| Not globally funded, but does invest globally.
|
| However, they say:
|
| > The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in _open digital base
| technologies_ that are vital to the development of other
| software or enable digital networking. We invest in
| projects that benefit and strengthen the open source
| ecosystem. Examples include libraries for programming
| languages, package managers, open implementations of
| communication protocols, administration tools for
| developers, digital encryption technologies, and more.
| (...) We are currently _not_ looking for user-facing
| applications, such as messaging apps or file storage
| services. If this changes, we will announce it here.
|
| So, a browser wouldn't qualify, but an HTTP(S) library
| does, and perhaps even a browser engine would..?
| delroth wrote:
| There are several other programs like STF funded by the
| EU (often mediated via NLNet), and for example Servo gets
| some amount of its funding via NGI (an EU Commission
| initiative): https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Edge exposes its engine to be used in other programs like
| Skype.
| twiss wrote:
| Edge no longer has its own engine, it's based on Chromium
| now. When it did, it also wouldn't qualify for STF
| funding because it wasn't open source.
|
| But yes, a browser engine is potentially an embeddable
| library, so an open source one might qualify :)
| karlgkk wrote:
| You ever noticed how the majority of Linux desktop related
| companies are european?
|
| That's not an accident. So yes, there's precedence
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| If we're talking about commercial desktop products, is it
| really a majority?
|
| Canonical is UK-based.
|
| I can think of Suse but even that changed hands several
| times through a bunch of US companies.
|
| Red Hat/Fedora, PopOS, Chrome OS etc. all are not
| european
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| I agree in ways, but I think a single global fund is a bit
| far-reaching and over-centralized, thus prone to corruption.
| I think it would make sense for, say, the US, EU, and BRICS
| (with maybe China as a separate entity) to each have open-
| source funds for OSS digital infrastructure, and cooperate on
| global web standards. So if one fund goes rogue/corrupt or is
| crippled by Republican-types, the world still has two (or
| three) backups.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| This is a very sensible proposal, that would guarantee
| essential tools, and would cost a very small fraction of
| the respective countries economies.
| specproc wrote:
| Having worked in the non-profit space my whole career, I've
| always thought having government funding for OSS would be a
| great use of money. It's a really underutilised resource.
|
| States invest in cultural production, e.g. by film grants,
| software grants would be a great way to attract talent and
| solve problems.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.
|
| How do you ensure it's not just laundering money with little
| or no work into the problem.
|
| I think it's messed up Google essentially funds all browsers
| but putting it in the hands of politicians isn't going to
| help, would be better to try and have more companies funding
| it so at least the dependency on Google is less.
| moomin wrote:
| Maybe ask the Linux Foundation how they do it?
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| or W3C
| pkaye wrote:
| The Linux Foundation is funded by a large number of
| companies for which Linux is very critical to them. These
| companies themselves have their own developers.
| njarboe wrote:
| For lots of companies (most?), web browsing is critical
| to them. Amazon could fund browser companies. Brave
| exists. Is Opera still around?
| rs999gti wrote:
| > but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund
|
| Sounds like a backdoor way to add a kill switch or censor
| filter to browsers from a central, unelected authority that
| does not respect the sovereignty and speech and media laws of
| the individual users' home countries.
|
| No thanks, I'll take an open source, corporate controlled
| browser 10/10 times.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I'm not exactly sure why I should find a corporate entity
| any less centralized or unelected or not respectful of
| rights than a government
| mixedCase wrote:
| Governments are elected every now and then by large sums
| of people as a package deal for handling a number of
| issues, and only one is in place. Products and companies
| exist in multiples and regardless of how big they are,
| they're still more targeted, and you the consumer get to
| choose directly and every day.
| gspencley wrote:
| > I'm not exactly sure why I should find a corporate
| entity any less centralized or unelected or not
| respectful of rights than a government
|
| Because corporate entities and government entities
| operate under radically different frameworks.
|
| The domain of government is force. This isn't a bad
| thing, it is necessary. Government is the recognition
| that we, as human beings, can interact with each other in
| two fundamental ways: force or reason/diplomacy. That
| when reason/diplomacy is chosen life flourishes. People
| create, produce, trade, freely associate and basically
| build civilization. When force is chosen you get war,
| destruction, poverty, misery.
|
| Government's primary role in society, in my opinion, is
| to remove the element of force from civil existence so
| that all interpersonal relations are consensual (there
| are edge cases - the parent/child relationship or the
| extremely ill etc. but I need to scope cap somewhere).
|
| The concept of rights derives directly from this concept.
| They are the recognition that rational people can
| cooexist peacefully if certain aspects of the human
| experience are recognized and protected. Those aspects
| being that in order to survive as a human being your
| tools are reason and action; you need to be able to think
| freely and you need to be able to act in accordance with
| your rational judgements. The infringement of a person's
| rights is fundamentally interference in either the
| ability to think (freedom of expression / conscience) or
| the ability to act (freedom to own and acquire property,
| freedom to travel, freedom of association etc.)
|
| This means that government's entire domain is force. It
| is the entity that gets to determine the rules around
| when the application of force is allowed. It is the
| entity that gets to step in when you and I can't agree on
| what the definition of "assault" is and one of us calls
| the cops.
|
| Businesses ought to exist entirely outside of the domain
| of force. Business is what happens when you remove force
| from society and people are able to think, create,
| develop, produce and trade freely without gangs and
| thieves and thugs interfering.
|
| Where things get blurry is when you marry government and
| business. But always remember that business operates
| under the rules that government creates. The more
| incentive there is for business to care about political
| policy, the more lobbyists and corporate interest groups
| you will create but that's the framework you're creating.
| Government forces it through laws. Business is just
| playing by the rules that you voted for.
| jerf wrote:
| You don't need a global infrastructure fund. We already know
| that projects can be run where people and groups come
| alongside each other in the context of an open source license
| and work together. Some people will create "releases" of this
| project, and some of them will become more and less popular
| over time, but we don't have to have any one global entity
| blessing any particular team or aspect of development.
|
| Look to how the Linux kernel is developed, and look to its
| full history, including forks large and small, alternate
| releases for alternate reasons, alternate releases by
| different people and teams, and so on. It's not a
| hypothetical, it's the organization of one of the largest
| software projects in the world.
|
| And it's a good thing we don't need a global fund, because
| trying to start at such a high level is basically asking for
| this to take the next 15 years to even get started. By
| contrast, anyone can start a new fork of Chromium or Firefox
| today... which, again, is not just me theorizing, but is a
| thing that has _happened_ , several times over. Making it so
| "getting started" is something that can happen in a
| distributed fashion without having to get some "global"
| organization to sign off or be created is superior, which is
| sort of softballing it a bit because it's honestly the
| difference between _possible_ and _impossible_.
|
| If someday that develops into a "global organization" or some
| set of such, hey, that's fine. But trying to get "someone
| else" to _start_ it at that level... and it has to be
| "someone else" since none of us could even hardly start doing
| that ourselves... is impractical to the level of impossible.
| dayvid wrote:
| There's too much money on the line if there is a lack of
| standardization and rendering/features are all over the
| place. I don't think it will turn that way as most users
| will converge on a small number of browsers.
|
| If there is no global infra fund, there will be some type
| of ad-hoc board composed of some independent entities, but
| a lot of entities backed by large businesses. If not US
| then other countries as in many countries there are large
| tech companies aligned with government interests.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Be careful, there's some people who actively don't understand
| what a public good is and are hostile to it very existence,
| let alone suggesting a government could practically ensure
| it's viability.
|
| They're also completely blind deaf and dumb to modern society
| having never had to suffer.
| eru wrote:
| > That is a cartel.
|
| Wikipedia says:
|
| > A cartel is a group of independent market participants who
| collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with
| each other[1] in order to improve their profits and dominate
| the market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to
| limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial
| shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and
| marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider
| cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to
| outlaw cartel practices.
|
| What you are alleging sounds bad, but it doesn't sound like a
| particularly good match for the term 'cartel'.
| fHr wrote:
| Classic nitpick to be fair it's almost a cartel but because
| it is not fitting 100% it's not. Do you work at one of these
| companies by any chance?
| eru wrote:
| Not all things we dislike are the same. The same in
| politics: people there often have the tendency to call
| everyone they dislike either a Nazi or a communist. Totally
| ignoring that there are many, many different and exciting
| varieties of bad.
|
| I used to work for Google for a few years for what it's
| worth.
| fifilura wrote:
| Pretty sure that Opera and most likely e.g. Vivaldi also has
| this kind of deal.
|
| If they do it, there would be no reason, other than
| administrative, for Google to hold this money back to only a
| handful of vendors.
|
| I think that weakens the cartel argument.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Can anyone tell me a browser that does not depend on being
| funded by google?
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Orion by Kagi
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| Orion from Kagi is not bad, but it has enough quirks that I
| only use it for personal browsing, not work (dev-related)
| stuff.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Thanks, it is still in beta as well, but I will give it a
| try.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Safari. Servo. Ladybird. Flow.
| ImJamal wrote:
| Apple gets money from Google for the default search engine.
| selectodude wrote:
| Apple monetizes safari but it's certainly not reliant on
| Google for its continued existence.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Edge.
| welfare wrote:
| It's more of an oligopoly than a cartel to be honest. It's more
| like how the telco industry operates. High barriers to entry
| with generous subsidies and incentives for the existing few
| providers.
| glitchc wrote:
| It sounds to me that Google started this payment scheme
| precisely to avoid anti-trust legislation.
|
| By propping up competitors, Google could always point and say
| "Look, there's the competition and they're thriving. How can we
| be a monopoly?"
| exabrial wrote:
| Alternative stance:
|
| Google has made sure that _nobody_ can implement a browser with
| hostile takeovers the "standards" committees and pushing the
| standards solely in the direction of corporate interests,
| bypassing consumer interests. The whole point was to make them
| so complicated it would be impossible for someone without an
| insane budget to implement one.
|
| Proof of this is the whole advertising sandbox crap... what the
| hell does an HMTL Client "need" an advert sandbox for?
|
| Breakups are painful. Ultimately they're better for everyone.
| ksec wrote:
| I have been wondering if we could have a much much simpler
| subset of HTML / CSS and JS.
|
| Or May be even a new standard that compiles into HTML / CSS /
| JS. A standard that fits most uses cases and is simpler to
| implement.
| gtf21 wrote:
| I think I share the same opinion: I think this is going to be
| a very painful break with the previous paradigm, but a much
| needed one, and that actually this version of the current
| paradigm is quite bad: browsers only survive when Google pays
| them money.
|
| Instead this will put all browsers on a much more even
| playing field, and perhaps it will force governments and
| citizens to realise that free software takes someone to write
| it.
| zeroq wrote:
| Say what you want, but I genuinely miss the comfort of working
| with Flash where you had a single target and you knew that
| whatever you see on the screen right now will be exactly the
| same for every single user, ever, despite on whatever device
| they will be viewing your project.
|
| I earned my first money for "web developement" in '99, and as
| much I understand underlying dynamics, I - as a user but mostly
| as a developer - really enjoy the current phase and I really
| liked that brief period when IE was the browser.
| taftster wrote:
| Are mobile apps the equivalent of that experience today?
| Cross-platform SDKs for mobile devices have been around for
| awhile. This might be the closest equivalent to a Flash
| application?
| mattmcknight wrote:
| It's bizarre to suggest this. They don't need Google's money to
| compete in browser development. The hard part is competing with
| a free product. If someone comes up with another way to offer
| the browser for free, or offer features that make someone want
| to pay, they can compete. Chromium is already open source.
| Moving Chrome out of Google does nothing that benefits anyone.
| xg15 wrote:
| Microsoft isn't exactly a garage startup - and they weren't
| just dethroned by Google, they actively tried to compete and
| gain back ground afterwards, building an entirely new browser
| in the process (pre-Chrome Edge) and offering it for free.
|
| All for nothing, in the end even they had to give up and
| switch to white-label Chromium.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| I am not sure they had to give up, but my initial
| experiences with Edge weren't great. There are some
| interesting claims of bad behavior on Google's part, but I
| wasn't only seeing problems on Google properties.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
| xnx wrote:
| > All for nothing, in the end even they had to give up and
| switch to white-label Chromium.
|
| How is that a loss? All Microsoft wants is a controlled
| space to push their own products/services. Google gave them
| a tool to do just that for free. Microsoft would absolutely
| be writing its own (probably worse) browser if Google
| wasn't so generous to give them on without Microsoft having
| to incur any development cost.
| troyvit wrote:
| I think offering a simple web browser for free isn't that
| difficult. That was in place since the 20th century. What
| will be hard is continuing to develop a web browser that
| matches the feature set of a browser whose advanced
| functionality is propped up by the most extractive industry
| in modern times. That industry has a purpose in funding these
| advanced features, and while it has opened up a lot of power
| for individuals it has come at a great cost.
| xhrpost wrote:
| Anyone remember when you could buy a physical copy of Netscape
| Navigator off a store shelf? I personally feel in this weird
| position where I don't want to pay for software and expect it
| for free but maybe not fully grasping that "free" software
| (particularly from for-profit companies) still comes at a cost.
| Trying to make myself more open to paying for good software
| again. Unfortunately the subscription model everyone is moving
| to doesn't make that easier.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Three. Edge is a chrome rebadge, it's not actually different in
| the way webkit (somewhat) and gecko (very) are.
| xnx wrote:
| > That is a cartel.
|
| Never heard of a cartel that gives its product (and the
| ingredients to make it) away for free to anyone including their
| direct competitors.
| xnx wrote:
| I read of a lot of complaints that web standards are too
| complicated.
|
| This is absolutely true if you simply want a web browser to be
| a document reader.
|
| Thankfully (in my opinion) the modern browser is realizing the
| dream to "reduce Windows to a buggy set of device drivers".
| gloosx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Lack of will is a lack of purpose, and the purpose of these
| companies is profit, easy to follow.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Google has actively developed an entire UI framework for
| mobile applications that compiles directly into HTML+WASM.
| They want the browser to be competent, because a competent
| browser can attract money iOS users would otherwise spend on
| App Store fees.
|
| I don't see how it would be "relatively straightforward" to
| make web browsers competitive if Chrome barely manages to
| keep up. There's a _lot_ of money going into making Chrome an
| alternative to the Android/iOS/macOS/Windows SDK, to the
| point where modern GUI applications have thrown out native
| controls and just render everything to a browser window
| instead.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Maybe you are right, but sone things I really dislike are:
|
| - Getting rid of native SQLite in Chrome (Firefox was
| forced to follow), with the main reason is that ,,there are
| no 2 different implementations, all browsers use the
| same''.
|
| - While there is file system implementation, there's no
| mmap, so there is no fast app start (just have SQLite with
| mmap, nothing fancy).
|
| - No file system persistency guarantee, the OS can just
| wipe out the data
|
| - All the persistent page APIs are just super hard to use
| compared to simple HTML/javascript/css as they are in a
| different process and need communication...it's
| overcomplicated instead of embracing a simple page as an
| app as an option as well.
|
| You are right that WASM is a great improvement, and file
| system API is slowly coming back (still I'm not sure about
| mmap API which is crucial for fast app startup), but I'm
| talking about what was possible 10 years ago then reversed.
| streptomycin wrote:
| > Getting rid of native SQLite in Chrome (Firefox was
| forced to follow), with the main reason is that ,,there
| are no 2 different implementations, all browsers use the
| same''.
|
| You have that backwards, it was Mozilla arguing against
| WebSQL (and never implementing it in Firefox in the first
| place) and Google was arguing for it.
|
| I agree with your point about file system persistence,
| that is probably the biggest limitation in web apps
| compared to native apps today. However again it was
| Google arguing in favor of the File System Access API
| (letting web apps read/write normal files) and
| Mozilla/Apple arguing against it and only supporting a
| neutered version (fake hidden files that the browser can
| delete whenever it wants).
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Great, thanks for correcting me on the details
| eviks wrote:
| > The laws intended to foster competition will inadvertently
| destabilize the foundational tools millions rely on to access the
| internet.
|
| So where is the contradiction? Did the author forget that
| "stabilization" of an anti-competitive market dynamic does _not_
| foster competition? And destabilizing anti-competitive is pro-
| competitive?
| red_admiral wrote:
| If I were working at Mozilla, I'd be refreshing my CV right now.
|
| The Firefox team is in an unenviable position. They need money to
| pay their staff, they're reliant on a single source that's about
| to dry up, and their userbase is as far as I can tell heavily
| biased towards techy types who don't want integration with Pocket
| and similar.
|
| I'd personally like to see something like Supermium gain market
| share, especially for 'techies' - built on Chromium but (if
| possible) keeping support for Manifest V2.
| roschdal wrote:
| What are the opportunities now for browser forks and browser
| development?
| phartenfeller wrote:
| I think browsers are in the best state to slow down their
| development rate. They have come so far, it is the most
| uniquitous application ecosystem nowadays. Even though there are
| still great developments currently, they are rather niche and it
| would be way more damaging if it slowed down 10 years ago. Maybe
| financial constraints also have a positive side. TL;DR the web
| ecosystem has matured a lot.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I think the 80% argument exactly demonstrated why intervention is
| needed. This is no longer a productive competitive market. It's a
| monopoly with sockpupets propped up as 'competitors'.
| fifilura wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Oh no, what a nightmare if browsers have to stop implementing
| zany new API-of-the-week and stabilize on a slow-moving web
| standard.
|
| Will we ever get wireless-USB-for-smells?
| wildylion wrote:
| Maybe it's time for ISPs to start endorsing small donations to
| Mozilla and others, for a good cause. But in the jacked up world
| we're living in, nobody would do this.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| ISPs are a commodity business and can't afford to donate money.
| This really hits at the core of the contradiction here. People
| want the incredible public good of a modern web browser --
| without the monopoly that can and has an incentive to pay for
| it.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Recently, the browser has become this great unifying environment
| where we can build complex cross-platform experiences available
| to anyone on demand and not locked into any walled garden. Just
| off the top of my head:
|
| -- WebCodecs. You don't need ffmpeg; encode in the browser.
|
| -- Web Audio. An advanced modular synth graph in the browser.
|
| -- WebRTC. P2P communication between browsers. Calls,
| collaboration, etc.
|
| -- WebGPU. Run shaders in the browser.
|
| -- File System API & File System Access extensions. Read/write
| very large files without having to put the entire contents in
| RAM.
|
| All of this required significant amount of resources to spec and
| implement. With 80% of funding cut, I struggle to see how it can
| be maintained. Would be sad to see this rot with bugs.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > we can build complex cross-platform experiences
|
| Sounds good for the developer but as a user who gives a shit? I
| miss my native desktop applications! They were faster and used
| less memory!
| strogonoff wrote:
| In this case, good for the developer is good for the user. As
| users, we get 1) tons more of those (since they're easier to
| build, with one codebase that runs on literally every modern
| computing device, from phones to tables to laptops) 2)
| without being locked into a walled garden 3) fairly securely
| (heavily sandboxed, unlike desktop apps).
|
| The sheer number of cool things that got posted on HN in
| recent years leveraging these APIs.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Sounds good for the user, but as a developer who gives a
| shit? I'm not porting my webapps to your tinker-toy OS for
| marginal return on my investment. That's redundant work that
| I'm not being compensated for, it doesn't matter how lickable
| the buttons are or how much of your 16gb of RAM I'm wasting.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Does this also mean Google will be forced to provide widevine to
| competing browsers on fair terms?
|
| Widevine is arguably less of monopoly lever than money, still
| prevents competition from creating any new web browser ecosystem
| _QrE wrote:
| I'm just hoping Mozilla/Firefox survives this. I'm not sure that
| any other mature, non-chromium based web browser exists.
| ArinaS wrote:
| What you're looking for is Pale Moon/any other Goanna-based
| browser. They'll probably the only ones which will survive in
| this fight.
| asadotzler wrote:
| They die the minute Firefox developers stop feeding them
| security fixes on the regular. They are not developing,
| they're packaging. If real development stops at Mozilla, if
| Gecko dies at Mozilla, there isn't a volunteer project on the
| planet that could keep it alive in Pale Moon or any other
| Mozilla derivative.
| ArinaS wrote:
| They're not using Mozilla's security fixes or browser
| engine. Pale Moon is a hard fork, so _it is_ developed, and
| developed independently from Mozilla 's Firefox.
|
| Also check out this page -
| https://www.palemoon.org/info.shtml.
| debugnik wrote:
| Goanna has been rebased over Gecko several times because
| they keep falling behind, hasn't it? So it's more of a
| periodically-hard fork.
| ArinaS wrote:
| They didn't "rebase" it though - just some code from
| Gecko was merged into it. And as I understand from
| https://www.palemoon.org/history.shtml, there were two
| merges - first with Firefox 38 ESR, and second with
| Firefox 52 ESR.
| debugnik wrote:
| Thanks for the details! I was speaking from memory, but I
| see the last merge was quite a while ago. That somewhat
| increases my trust on the project then, although I'm not
| sure I'd ever trust a minor browser fork without further
| security assurances.
| brap wrote:
| Apparently a controversial take:
|
| Government should not tell private business how to run, and let
| people decide for themselves what they want to use.
|
| The horror!
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I remember paying for Opera 6.11 back in the day. If you can't
| offer a browser for free, charge for it. But as long as google
| uses its money it extorted from business to offer a browser for
| free, you can't compete with a browser that costs.
| sylware wrote:
| The whatng cartel has only 3 web engines which can compile with
| only 2 c++ compilers:
|
| The web engines are: - mozilla geeko - apple webkit - gogol blink
| (fork of webkit)
|
| The compilers are: - gcc (MIT) - clang (apple).
|
| Providing real-life alternatives to those are close to zero.
| Namely, the only real alternative is a regulated technical
| compatibility with orders of magnitude simpler computer
| languages, file formats and protocols.
|
| For instance, for the web, where reasonable, it would mean
| noscript/basic (x)html (basic HTML forms can do wonders with
| proper HTTP redirects) and if really too alien to noscript/basic
| (x)html, some public web APIs or other protocols (IRC for
| instance). Secrets/keys setup would have to be easily available
| via some noscript/basic (x)html portal or some other easy means
| of identity verification, could be a very rate limited and
| constraint anonymous web API.
|
| Keep in mind the obvious: most of the work for a service which is
| public on internet is keeping it safe and available, certainly
| not the GUI/protocol which have to stay minimal in order to
| maximize technical interoperability anyway and will mechanically
| easy the tasks to keep it safe and available.
| vertnerd wrote:
| Maybe we'll be able to pay for our browser again? I used to pay
| for Opera, and I'd be happy to pay for a good browser like
| Firefox, too. Just like I pay for my Kagi search engine. If the
| browser is worth something to you, then it's worth paying for.
| ArinaS wrote:
| Finally, the time for independent browsers has come.
|
| I expect rise in Goanna/Pale Moon's popularity by the end of this
| year.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Next year those pop ups that tell grandma to install an iOS
| critical update might actually do something!
| kgwxd wrote:
| Why do we have Linux but not the browser equivalent? It's been
| far more important than an OS for most people for a long time
| now.
| ta1243 wrote:
| We do have an open source browser, it dates back to 2002.
|
| It's has higher desktop use than Linux - 15% of desktop
| browsers according to wikimedia compared with 7% for linux
| (about half of which is chromebooks)
| kgwxd wrote:
| Chromium? I'm dreaming of something without a giant corp
| behind it. A project that, at it's core, would always and
| forever, celebrate uBlock Origin, and things like it, instead
| of making up "security" issues to thwart it's power.
| ta1243 wrote:
| https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#deskto
| p...
|
| Firefox is 13%. Not great - it's down from 18% in 10 years,
| but it's good enough for me.
|
| If you want to complain that it's eventually funded by
| google, I have bad news for you about who pays for linux
| developers.
| jonnat wrote:
| I admit I've not been following the Chrome saga, but what does
| the DoJ mean by Google divesting from Chrome? Will they have to
| sell the Chrome brand? Will they have to get rid of all Chrome
| developers? If not, what would prevent Google from keeping all
| the devs and just rebranding the browser to something else based
| on Chromium?
|
| I truly don't understand how you could force someone to divest
| from an open source project. Why would they not simply prevent
| Google (or any company) from paying broswers to limit our choice
| of search engine?
| Havoc wrote:
| These payments were an ugly hack by google to get around monopoly
| lawsuits anyway.
|
| I do want FF to succeed - it's my main browser - but that whole
| setup was an artificial unhealthy construct that needs to end
| even if it is painful
|
| Similar the whole chromium situation is problematic too. See
| google moving android to closed source
| _heimdall wrote:
| I don't see what the problem with this ruling or forced
| divestiture is.
|
| Starting a new browser today is a massive, nearly impossible task
| made harder by the fact that the few browsers we do have continue
| to push through new specs and features. Sure that's good for
| consumers, but its bad for competition.
|
| If those new specs and features are only possible because Google
| is artificially propping up the few browsers we do have, that
| reeks of an antitrust violation.
|
| We will almost certainly see a slowdown in improvements to the
| web and browsers if this goes through, but we'll also see the
| door finally open to potential competitors that want to start a
| new browser engine rather than just put some paint on chromium
| and call it a browser company.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| > Sure that's good for consumers, but its bad for competition.
|
| It may be good for consumers on the short term, but the lack of
| competition is bad for consumers on the long term.
|
| So no, it's not good for consumers unless the competition
| aspect is fixed somehow.
| derbOac wrote:
| > Sure that's good for consumers, but its bad for competition.
|
| So we want competition that's bad for consumers?
|
| I have to admit I get the logic of the remedy being proposed,
| but something seems off to me and I can't put my finger on it.
| It seems different from the days of Microsoft, not just
| technically but in terms of the economics and consumer choice.
|
| There's definitely stagnation in search, but I'm not convinced
| it has anything to do with Google paying browsers per se.
|
| Part of me feels like there's kind of a shadow competition (in
| terms of browser market) that's really between Apple and
| everyone else, that's not being recognized by the DOJ in this.
| It's not this browser vs that browser, it's how you access the
| internet in mobile versus another way of doing so, and who
| controls that.
|
| Maybe. I can't quite figure out what I think about all of this.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I could have clarified there. Google propping up a few
| browsers is good for consumers _in the short term_.
|
| In the long term I'd argue that less competition will be a
| bad thing, and that we have already seen that when it comes
| to browsers.
|
| For years Google made a habit out of ignoring the spec
| process in favor of designing their own web specs and
| shipping them in Chrome. That's ultimately bad for developers
| who have to code for different browsers like we're back in
| the IE days, and it being bad for developers leads to it
| being bad for users.
|
| More importantly, the few browser vendors we do have can take
| all this Google money and use it to subsidize features that
| are bad for privacy, or further anticompetitive behaviors in
| related fields like AI. Without the Google funding we could
| end up with new browser competitors that are at least on a
| more level playing field.
|
| All that said, I'm not actually a fan of government
| intervention and am torn on that front. If we do have a
| government tasked with protecting markets from
| anticompetitive behavior, though, they should enforce it.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Maybe I'm naive but isn't the only difficult task the
| JavaScript part? I'd argue that JavaScript is mostly where we
| went wrong.
|
| The web shouldn't be this hard.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Implementing a spec compliant CSS renderer seems like a huge
| challenge as well, especially when it needs to be comparably
| performant.
| cubefox wrote:
| This will strongly slow down adoption of new rendering standards.
| I hope we don't get another IE6 era.
| hollerith wrote:
| Good!
| cubefox wrote:
| Bad. This will lead to a further push towards apps instead of
| websites.
| agentultra wrote:
| Doesn't seem like competition when the standards are, _do what
| Google says_.
|
| Some of that funding has been used for DRM, tracking, etc.
|
| Some things have turned out good though.
|
| Seems like it will be a tough time for browsers to find alternate
| funding sources.
| concinds wrote:
| Hopefully Google will keep sending half a billion a year to
| Mozilla (now with no strings attached). It was a good arrangement
| for everyone, especially for us. (Mozilla's not without
| controversy these days but hey, that's not on Google). I don't
| get why so many people are using fancy logic to argue,
| implicitly, that Firefox would be better with less funding. It
| won't be.
|
| But it was very trashy of Apple to rent-seek off of their market
| power. $20 billion a year, to adopt a search engine that Apple
| _insists_ , in court, they would have used _anyway_ for free, is
| pure rent-seeking. Profiting off of the fact that Safari is
| preinstalled and has a high market-share floor (since other
| browsers have very limited competitive advantages on iPhone
| compared to Windows /Mac). Companies should be forced to compete
| for every dollar they earn.
| nashashmi wrote:
| If Google sold search business to private equity, then this
| problem could be solved.
|
| Google could still pay browsers to make Gemini the default AI.
| frabcus wrote:
| Presuabmly the browsers will still get paid by other search
| engines to set default? This could ultimately help DuckDuckGo,
| Bing and Kagi quite a lot. And the revenue won't fall completely.
| conductr wrote:
| If Google is forced to stop the funding of competitors, I don't
| quite understand why they also have to exit the market/stop
| working on Chromium/Chrome?
|
| There's the leveling of the playing field, each competitor has to
| fund their own products, but then why also do they have to be
| kicked out of the game?
|
| I feel like consumers should ultimately make the decision of who
| wins and has the better product. The fact Google has found the
| best way to get value out of "free" browser use, shouldn't be
| held against them. If consumers choose to use a browser that's
| highly connected to Googles paid services, then perhaps that's
| what the consumer wants. I view it as the other competitors job
| to lure those customers away from Chrome with their own product
| enhancements.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| The only concern I have with this is how security will be
| affected.
| juliangmp wrote:
| Good, let it crash and burn to the point where chrome/chromium is
| recognized as the monopoly it effectively already is.
| zelon88 wrote:
| I support this. Especially the Google selling Chrome / Chromium
| part. If it's so important, then Google should relinquish (cede)
| control over it to the community, and just keep writing the
| checks.
|
| Honestly, I have no compassion for Apple or Google. I'd be
| willing to endure a lot of headaches in the name of costing those
| two companies influence over our society.
| jmclnx wrote:
| IBM/Red Hat has plenty of cash, time for them to step up and
| support Firefox. IBM hates paying for anything these days.
|
| A good example is OpenSSH, that is used by Red Hat and AIX but
| they give nothing to the OpenBSD Foundation. Even Microsoft sends
| a decent amount to OpenBSD, IBM, a fat 0.
| tgtweak wrote:
| There are two very distinct parts here and the article does a
| good job of muddying it.
|
| Chromium: the base of Chrome, which is opensource - is developed
| in part by google and many other companies, including Microsoft,
| Apple, Brave, and dozens of others who depend on the chromium
| ecosystem. Google is not "financing" these companies, they are
| contributing to and benefiting from opensource bidirectionally
| and the ecosystem benefits from compatibility streamlining. 94%
| of commits to chromium from Google is also cherrypicked, many are
| automated commits to update libraries and pull in code from other
| repos and projects, and they do have a google/chromium handle on
| them as reviewers and signoff. It is true that they are the
| primary stewards and that most code in chromium passes through
| google hands before arriving there - but a good amount is
| chromeOS/android commits. Most downstream projects prune a ton of
| this "clank" out - claiming that commits in those directories are
| supporting 3rd party browsers is bunk. Google's own docs say any
| code "that isn't written by Chromium developers" must live in
| //third_party, this is enormous: v8, Skia, ANGLE, FFMPEG, ICU,
| OpenSSL - codecs, llvm... keeps on going. When a new upstream tag
| is imported, the roll commit is stamped with a Google email,
| throwing off this number considerably. The committer field shows
| the Google engineer or CQ bot, not necessarily the external
| engineer who produced the diff.
|
| Google Search contracts: it is true that Mozilla and Apple
| receive large royalties in order to have Google be the default
| search engine in those browsers - in addition to android vendors
| and other platform partners. I don't think this amounts to 80% of
| "funding" on those browsers.
|
| The second part is far more dangerous than the first - some care
| needs to be made rolling these claims together.
|
| Everyone else could jump on quantum/gecko if they really felt
| like it was critical to their business to not use google-centric
| codebases.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| What does belief have to do with it? You can literally look
| those numbers up, and then go "...wow, no, that 80% is pretty
| damn close".
| isametry wrote:
| Correction: Apple neither uses nor contributes to Chromium.
| They have WebKit, which Chromium (Blink) was forked from in
| 2013.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Yes that is correct, substitute Apple for Samsung or Electron
| I suppose.
| firefax wrote:
| Why doesn't DuckDuckGo fund Firefox? A lot of their missteps stem
| from trying to diversify revenue.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| This article is misleading in three ways. First, it ignores the
| markets are the cause of this problem. Second, it falsely claims
| Google is responsible for the development of other companies'
| browsers. Third, it treats Google paying for their development as
| a good thing with antitrust action being evil.
|
| There's countless companies that depend on web browsers. Most
| don't buy them or contribute to their development. The biggest
| companies that include browsers in their products or platforms
| have budgets to build their own browsers, esp starting with
| existing code. They don't purely due to selfishness which, for
| many, hurts them in the long run as 3rd parties dictate their
| requirements.
|
| That brings us to Apple and Microsoft. These are among the
| richest companies in existence. Their strategy is to create lock-
| in to their platforms which heavily use browsers. They have their
| own browsers. If they don't invest in their browsers, whatever
| happens is _their_ fault alone. Double true since, unlike most
| alternative browsers, they have the money to sustain the project.
|
| Third point is that it's good that the business model is to hope
| Google keeps paying for two of them with their advertising
| revenue. While it's great that they do, let's not forget both the
| dangers of (a) monoculture centered on one, greedy company; and
| (b) that many of us thing Google's advertising practices,
| especially in search, are so horrible we're trying to avoid using
| Google. I'd rather the the projects be self-sustaining and
| independent even if Google is a major customer.
|
| Which brings me to a point of agreement where the one,
| independent project... Firefox... could be really hurt by a loss
| of Google funding. That's a sad reality I'd like to avoid.
| Meanwhile, I'd like to see more non-Google funding for Firefox or
| products layered on it from Mozilla. There should be a really,
| strong push to make sure Google isn't necessary for their
| survival. Most of what I see Mozilla promoting isn't that.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| The complexity of the web specs is out of control.
|
| It is a form of regulatory capture from Google & Apple to prevent
| new players from entering the space. Just look at the
| devellopment hell of Servo & Ladybird.
|
| Maybe the future is in lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini.
| lumb63 wrote:
| There seems to me to be a false dichotomy present in a lot of the
| comments here: either Google funds all web browsers, or all the
| web browsers will crash and burn and the modern web will die.
|
| Linux is a project spanning many decades with thousands of
| contributors and is not owned by any company. The BSDs are
| similar. I do not see why something similar cannot be
| accomplished with the web; a group of FOSS developers, and
| eventually, perhaps full-time developers at all manner of
| companies, could support a modern web browser. This seems to work
| fine for Linux - many companies pay developers to work on Linux
| because their business depends on it, so it is a good investment
| for them. The same applies for web browsers - many companies'
| businesses depend on it, so funding a browser is the cost of
| doing business.
| Vilian wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what chromium is, or were supposed to be,
| companies invest in it, the problem is that google simply
| invest more
| asdsadasdasd123 wrote:
| The last argument is basically the key point, you think google
| is going to let browsers die? Their entire business model
| depends on its survival; they just get less control over its
| destiny now, which is probably fine tbh.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Linux is owned by Linux Foundation.
| jayofdoom wrote:
| This is a radical misunderstanding of how things work.
|
| They might (I'm assuming based on usual foundation policies)
| own or enforce the trademark, but Linux is owned collectively
| by everyone who ever contributed to it at all -- there's no
| copyright assignment in the project whatsoever.
|
| Additionally, Linux was a large, successful commercial
| project LONG before LF existed.
| quantadev wrote:
| If everyone was relying on Google, then that should come to an
| end. Browsers got WAY too bloated anyway, and frankly I think we
| can dramatically simplify the web too.
|
| There should be some kind of open-source consortium that is in
| control of web standards, and then some open-source kernel for
| all Web Browsers to share, just like there are independent
| versions of Linux all sharing a common core.
|
| So it's a good thing if Google loses control. I'm all for it.
| They have too much power.
| moogleii wrote:
| Fairly misleading wording with such lines like "Most of the
| funding for all of the major browsers is going away"... it makes
| it sound like it goes directly towards the individual browser
| budgets. That might be true of Mozilla since they don't make that
| many products tbh, but with Apple and Microsoft, there's no
| evidence Google's payments don't just go straight into a general
| fund.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Mozilla gets paid half a billion per year and they still can't
| produce anything of value?
|
| It just shows how easily corruption can take hold of an
| organisation. The amount of dev time you could buy with half a
| billion...
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