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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

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.
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      I think Apple also forced the world to move on from Flash. The iPhone didn't have Flash.
      - taftster 1y ago
        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 1y ago
    Oh, that’s definitely revisionism. The iPhone killed Flash, and ActiveX (outside of South Korea / Silverlight) and applets were already dead at that point.
kevingadd 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425007
- abhisek 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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-stoppers/ https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
  - lamp_book 1y ago
    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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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
MrBuddyCasino 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
Firefox isn't built over Chromium.
thowawatp302 1y ago
Wait which innovations were these?
grishka 1y ago
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 1y ago
  >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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      >Java certainly meets your criteria and exists It does not. Nothing about Java provides a sandboxed runtime environment.
psychoslave 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
> Browsers used to be one of the most critical and insecure software. Everything in the early 2000s was insecure and critical.
superkuh 1y ago
>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.

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.

Waterluvian 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    I think Apple also forced the world to move on from Flash. The iPhone didn't have Flash.
    - taftster 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  Oh, that’s definitely revisionism. The iPhone killed Flash, and ActiveX (outside of South Korea / Silverlight) and applets were already dead at that point.

kevingadd 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425007
abhisek 1y ago
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 1y ago
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-stoppers/ https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
- lamp_book 1y ago
  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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.

hshdhdhj4444 1y ago

> 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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

MrBuddyCasino 1y ago

> 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 1y ago

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 1y ago

Firefox isn't built over Chromium.

thowawatp302 1y ago

Wait which innovations were these?

grishka 1y ago

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 1y ago
>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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    >Java certainly meets your criteria and exists It does not. Nothing about Java provides a sandboxed runtime environment.

psychoslave 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago

> Browsers used to be one of the most critical and insecure software. Everything in the early 2000s was insecure and critical.

superkuh 1y ago

>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.