All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding

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.

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.

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! :-)

By propping up competitors, Google could always point and say "Look, there's the competition and they're thriving. How can we be a monopoly?"

It is a bit like calling a supermarket a cartel if it relies on local residents for 80% of its profits. No, the technical term is they are paying customers (although in Google's case it is complex and non-traditional because they are carrying the financial burden on behalf of the people who click on ads and there are a bunch of free riders). The odds are against a bunch of alternative customers hiding in the wings waiting to pop up; if they go away then they are just gone.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We simply don't know how browsers would have developed in the past years if Google did not have a monopoly. However, we know that monopolies are almost never good for consumers. Therefore, there is a high chance that in an alternative timeline, where one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world did not have a monopoly on browsers, we as consumers, would have been better off.

Browsers used to try new ideas like RSS, widgets, shared and social browser sessions. Interfaces to facilitate low-friction integration with the rest of your life, and to multiplex data sources so that it's not a hassle to have many providers for [news, entertainment, social] experiences.

Likely no coincidence that this innovation languished once monopolies started pumping money into the ecosystem.

Indeed. And since there has been nothing but bad changes to HTTP and HTML in the last decade, all centered around turning the web into just a means of transporting javascript applications, we know who to blame. I'm still upset that Google and Microsoft agents within the IETF managed to openwash and push QUIC/udp through as HTTP/3.

It's a status quo that definitely needs changing if we're going to have a web usable by human persons and not just corporate persons.

Everything in the early 2000s was insecure and critical.

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.

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.

The web doesn't need standards evolving at the speed of light, it's only happening because Google's strategy with Chrome has always been to set a pace that others can't follow, not about designing things right.

It'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.

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.

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.

Absolutely not. As you say, harebrained schemes would go, also it'd change the browser ecosystem considerably.

In time that might force browsers to adopt a minimum connectivity standard for all browsers that would be simper than those in use today. That would have many upsides for users which I posted about earlier.

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

They'd fork the open source of Chrome and get to work. After a while, they'll start taking the market share (they can afford to hire back the whole team).

Couple of years later are we in the same position? Maybe, maybe not. I'm curious to see how it plays out.

Probably not a bad thing if you you believe in "antifragility". The technology will improve as it should.

I would consider KHTML as a technology. Much like v8 and blink. I have no doubt the open source technology community is capable of producing great technologies with or without big tech funding. But will it be able to "productize" them and drive large scale adoption? I have my doubts but time will tell.

It was the other way around. Other product like VPN, MDN Plus, Pocket was a way to diversify revenue which could be channeled to Firefox, although the problem is Mozilla isn't the best company at making money.

They 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The web shouldn't be this hard.

True green-field standards work is roughly one-fifth of effort, with Safari and Firefox currently leading in CSS & media-query adoption, Chrome in new JavaScript/DOM APIs.

Eye-catching integrations (VPN, local AI summariser, etc.) stay single-digits because the core browser still has to do the unglamorous work of being correct and secure.

You could argue that Tauri exists, but I doubt that it would gain large-scale corporate adoption, as storage consumption was never their concern, development time and cost are.

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

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

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

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

Such a deeply weird outlook.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I 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.

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.

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

I don't understand. If Google is paying 80% of Mozilla browser development, how could stopping those payment not affect Mozilla funding decisions?