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

• brap 1y ago
  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!
• ArinaS 1y ago
  Finally, the time for independent browsers has come. I expect rise in Goanna/Pale Moon's popularity by the end of this year.
• ggm 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Do you even remember the IE6 days? - this opinion seems quite widespread but the open web is great for all of us.
    • viraptor 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        >> 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 1y ago
          > 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 1y ago
          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.
          • bruce511 1y ago
            Yes, it added a lot of new things snd gained 100% market share. Then did absolutely nothing for years and years. The web basically stagnated because once you have 100% there's no incentive to even fix bugs.
  • bobajeff 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      I like having an open platform for app development, even if it's got some rough edges.
      • bobajeff 1y ago
        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 1y ago
      Um, no? Electron is insecure. Apps made with it can do far more harm to your machine then a webpage.
  • stickfigure 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        > 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 1y ago
          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 1y ago
        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.
  • asadotzler 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > "Apple's revenue" Revenue != profit. $18 billion for something they have to maintain anyway is 100% profit.
    • 3vidence 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• ranger_danger 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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&query=Sabotage%20firefox&sort=byDate&type=comment 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 1y ago
      Sabotage Firefox? They've literally been keeping Firefox afloat for what, a decade? Longer?
      • billiam 1y ago
        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 1y ago
          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 1y ago
        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-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ 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-sabotaged-microsofts-browser/ https://www.neowin.net/news/former-edge-intern-says-google-s...
• sitkack 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    This will just gut funding to fix exploits
    • Brian_K_White 1y ago
      Features that don't exist don't have exploits.
      • socalgal2 1y ago
        Yea, so instead people make native apps which pown your machine. Great progress!
        • forgotoldacc 1y ago
          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 1y ago
            "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.
• devsda 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Counting bullets just counts bullets not time spent laboring over those bullets
• not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    How will this help? If the web stagnates, it's even more reason to install an app instead.
    • OutOfHere 1y ago
      By supporting lightweight browsers and markups that are a lot safer and more sustainable.
• Bjorkbat 1y ago
  Makes me think of the horse browser (https://gethorse.com 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Netscape Navigator was sold to consumers as boxed software at retail. IIRC it was around $60.
  • chgs 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Their website says Electron, so Chromium.
  • jeroenhd 1y ago
• thayne 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism
  • andelink 1y ago
    "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 1y ago
      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.
• yesbut 1y ago
  Good. Perfect time for Mozilla to convert into a democratically controlled worker-owned company and cut off the parasite C team.
  • bruce511 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/about-us/ 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 https://institute.coop/what-worker-cooperative
• moralestapia 1y ago
  Great news! Mozilla will finally disappear!
  • EbNar 1y ago
    Hopefully
• galkk 1y ago
  Mozilla funneled shit ton of those money into nonsense, now they're having their reckoning. Cry me a river.
  • ascorbic 1y ago
    A lot of the nonsense has been increasinly desparate attempts at finding revenue sources beyond Google.
    • EbNar 1y ago
      [dead]
• mediumsmart 1y ago
  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 :)
• bamboozled 1y ago
  Can we get one good one then ?
• torben-friis 1y ago
  >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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • taftster 1y ago
    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.
• quangv 1y ago
  Fuck it. Burn the boats.
• errantmind 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    So when Mozilla fires vast numbers of people that will be progress for Firefox? Such a deeply weird outlook.
    • gitaarik 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • TiredOfLife 1y ago
      Mozilla has squandered billions on irrelevant crap.
      • WalterGR 1y ago
        Examples?
  • mrweasel 1y ago
    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.
• matt3210 1y ago
  Edge is not a white label. It has lots if cool features that chrome doesn’t
• k_bx 1y ago
  I guess let's wait for Mozilla Search being a wrapper around Google
• timewizard 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Apple has no incentive to develop a browser.
    • parrit 1y ago
      Why not? They develop an OS when they could use Linux.
• fguerraz 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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.
      • tasuki 1y ago
        Good luck to you! I think the world would be a better place if people paid for their web browsers. And yet, I'm more than a little reluctant to pay for mine: It's not the cost, it's the dread that non-open-source software can disappear anytime. I want my browser not to disappear. I want it to continue working even if you go bankrupt or when hardware manufacturers start using a different architecture.
        • freediver 1y ago
          Do you have the same expectations for other things you pay for - including software?
  • FMecha 1y ago
    I almost thought you think people should be buying a web browser on retail (like Netscape or Opera back then). EDIT: For that, see Horse - but that's still Chromium derived: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853708
• ec109685 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  I hope this encourages more third-party non-tech-giant compitition like the Arc and Brave browser.
  • amadeuspagel 1y ago
    Both based on chromium.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• TheMagicHorsey 1y ago
  What's going to happen is that we are going to see browser forks from places we never imagined ... like China.
• andrewstuart 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• new_user_final 1y ago
  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.
• pjmlp 1y ago
  Thanks everyone for making ChromeOS a reality, time to update those CVs from Web developer to ChromeOS developer. Google succeeding where Microsoft failed.
• OutOfHere 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    Wishful thinking. Fantasy.
• nottorp 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    We'll have buggy, unsafe, slow browsers with diverging standards and we'll like it.
    • hilbert42 1y ago
      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.
    • nottorp 1y ago
      "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 1y ago
        Firefox is working pretty swell for me.
        • atoav 1y ago
          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 1y ago
• kristopolous 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    Yellow scare strikes again!
    • kristopolous 1y ago
      not really. I'd like to move three. I think Beijing and Shanghai are more important than Silicon Valley right now.
• L-four 1y ago
  Can we get "HTTP 402 Payment Required" working now?
• ascorbic 1y ago
  What I'm unclear about is whether the remedies would block any payment for search queries, or just the ones tied to default placement.
• dbacar 1y ago
  Billions on a web browser. So many billions. I am trying to grasp that.
• qnleigh 1y ago
  Will there be an appeal? How finalized is this?
• devnullbrain 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      > 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 1y ago
        Yeah, have read the segment multiple times. Can not fathom a logical coherent meaning for that sentence.
      • roenxi 1y ago
        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.
• gloosx 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Lack of will is a lack of purpose, and the purpose of these companies is profit, easy to follow.
    • jeroenhd 1y ago
      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.
      • 1y ago
• eviks 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  What are the opportunities now for browser forks and browser development?
• phartenfeller 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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.
      • strogonoff 1y ago
        > I'm not porting my webapps to your tinker-toy OS for marginal return on my investment. Even more so if there is no return in the first place. Fun toy exploration-style projects, or something to scratch an itch. Remember the GUI for ffmpeg filter graph (that also encodes the video client-side), remember retro music trackers… The kind of stuff people can and do build in single-digit days is perhaps the best thing left about this otherwise bleak post-small post-2.0 age of Web.
• hamilyon2 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  I'm just hoping Mozilla/Firefox survives this. I'm not sure that any other mature, non-chromium based web browser exists.
  • ArinaS 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 https://www.palemoon.org/info.shtml.
        • debugnik 1y ago
          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 1y ago
            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 https://www.palemoon.org/history.shtml, there were two merges - first with Firefox 38 ESR, and second with Firefox 52 ESR.
• littlecranky67 1y ago
  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.
• TacticalCoder 1y ago
  [dead]
• sylware 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.
• mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Next year those pop ups that tell grandma to install an iOS critical update might actually do something!
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• kgwxd 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop-site-by-browser/browser-family-timeseries https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop... Firefox is 13%. Not great - it's down from 18% in 10 years, but it's good enough for me. If you want to complain that it's eventually funded by google, I have bad news for you about who pays for linux developers.
• jonnat 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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.
• cubefox 1y ago
  This will strongly slow down adoption of new rendering standards. I hope we don't get another IE6 era.
  • hollerith 1y ago
    Good!
    • cubefox 1y ago
      Bad. This will lead to a further push towards apps instead of websites.
      • Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
        Not if you believe websites and applications should be two different things.
        • cubefox 1y ago
          The users will switch from website to app if they feel the website is inferior, no matter what you believe.
          • Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
            They should have been using the application in the first place. There should be no need to “switch”. That we should even speak of the inferiority of a website in comparison to an application, is a sign that we have gone seriously wrong. The website will do what it is supposed to do and the application will likewise fulfil its duty, it is not “inferior” any more than a lawn-mower is inferior to a wardrobe.
            • cubefox 1y ago
              > They should have been using the application in the first place. Or you shouldn't have opposed the funding of the development of advanced web browser features which make switching to the app superfluous.
• agentultra 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.
• fHr 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• frabcus 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  The only concern I have with this is how security will be affected.
• juliangmp 1y ago
  Good, let it crash and burn to the point where chrome/chromium is recognized as the monopoly it effectively already is.
• zelon88 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    Correction: Apple neither uses nor contributes to Chromium. They have WebKit, which Chromium (Blink) was forked from in 2013.
• firefax 1y ago
  Why doesn't DuckDuckGo fund Firefox? A lot of their missteps stem from trying to diversify revenue.
• nickpsecurity 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    Linux is owned by Linux Foundation.
    • jayofdoom 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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…
• weare138 1y ago
  Google pays Mozilla and Apple to make Google Search the default search engine for Firefox and Safari. Google pays Apple about $18 billion each year, and pays Mozilla about $450 million each year. “In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue.” OP just made one the best arguments in favor of breaking up Google's monopoly.
• lazyeye 1y ago
  If Google hired a PR firm to lobby and protect their interests with chrome, this is exactly the kind of article they'd be placing in the media to achieve this aim.
• DavidPiper 1y ago
  I haven't been following Chrome/Google news closely, but a few weeks back on HN there was a blog by a prominent Chrome dev who had been suddenly and inexplicably laid off. I wonder if Google have read writing on a wall somewhere and are quietly preparing for large organisational changes (up to complete divestment) for how Chrome is managed.
• lincon127 1y ago
  Good. Browser development should've ended ages ago
• ashoeafoot 1y ago
  So, wouldn't it be primary goal to aquire a final form? Something lasting , all bugs fixed, no new features . Something that tries to browse any given site with breaking changes in best effort mode?