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.
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!
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm talking about a time when investment in browser development and web standards was so lacking that being able to achieve things like this blew everyone's mind:
Maybe! My thoughts were, say, tangential or incidental.
A guess is that a central issue is how much in new features should we develop and use?
I see a dilemma: (A) I mentioned the old controls that go back to early Windows and even IBM's 3270 terminals. An advantage of these controls is that lots of software tools implement them and billions of people already understand them. (B) Being too happy with the old stuff or even the present risks progress that is possible and worthwhile.
Your post seemed to illustrate (B).
But generally in the industry, with smartphones, laptops, desktops, Apple, Google's Android, Windows, browsers, apps and extrapolating, we could have an explosion of new features that would complicate work for everyone and fragment the industry.
Ah, maybe Darwin would explain: Lots of mutations with only the best lasting??
For my work, I'm thrilled with the tools and technology available now that I get to exploit.
CSS grids are pretty nice, flexbox is ok, float hacks were fine and an improvement over table shenanigans. On the other hand I quite liked the simple hbox/vbox explicit elements that things like ActionScript + MXML had (Flex). I liked Flex overall quite a bit, even if it was just another ill-fated attempt at freeing us from the browser strangleholds like Java applets and the rest. Having native platform functionality and a bunch of other nice things readily available now (barring Safari, especially mobile Safari, holding everyone back worse than IE6 did) is nice, but it doesn't quite feel like innovation when much of that was available via plugins back in the day.
We have to compare apple to apple here. What was the state of native applications back then?
The main point that we could derive from this is that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, and all the more when geopolitics is involved. But still it's fun and sometime inspiring.
I've never understood the hate for table layouts. They literally just make sense. And now all they advanced css frameworks have basically just recreated table layouts via divs with row and column classes. I get the need for responsive designs but I still think we could have gotten there with tables.
It's like people got mad that tables were being used to for something other than strictly tabular data, so they recreated the idea behind table as a layout tool with "css grid" and made it 50x more complicated.
I wish web design could follow like woodworking where the most focus is on using the base tools very effectively. The introduction of new tools is mostly frowned upon. Of course that's all because of the inherently dangerous nature of using power tools. Regardless of tech stack you aren't to likely to lose a finger from coding.
The move from table layouts to divs+css was based on the idea that mixing markup and layout/styling was bad. Then a few years later as everyone moved to React et al. it was good again.
Yeah, a switch in mode between "make an XML document and then make something else to present it" (I think suffered massively from never actually being completely achievable with CSS, let alone comprehensible) and "just make a UI toolkit for javascript" (where in a full webapp world, the underlying documents are usually JSON and the presentation layer is javascript using HTML+CSS to talk to a layout and rendering engine).
I understand the sentiment, but disregarding the nuance does the situation a disservice. HTML/CSS serves two separate but related use cases: a document layout and display language, and as a display layer for applications. I remember Pete Hunt's talk "React: Rethinking best practices" [1] explaining in 2013 why the styling separation of concerns for document display doesn't make sense for applications. Has opinion on best practice se-sawed back and forth? No, we've merely gone from web content being document centered to being massively application centered, and the discourse on best practices follows that proportional shift.
Would it be better if there was a different web application display technology, not retrofitted on top of HTML/CSS? Like maybe, but HTML/CSS is... fine. Even separated from the success of Javascript, it's an archetypal example of "worse is better" [2] leading to market success.
Layouts implemented with tables make sense when you need to place elements once, and not a ton of them at once. Making even slight changes to your tables within tables within tables is such a nightmare, that throwing out all of your code and starting from scratch might just be preferable. Tables are not a basic tool for this task, it's a severe misuse of the tooling, caused by a lack of alternatives at the time.
> I've never understood the hate for table layouts.
Then I would say you have never understood HTML. Using tables for layout conflates content/structure/semantics with presentation and this is a problem in general with the HTML standards prior to HTML4 Strict. The reasons why this is bad have been expounded upon for near thirty years and are well known. HTML tables are not a “base tool” for layout.
A good litmus test for bad Web-design is “does it fail on screen readers?”. Indeed this does; it makes pages near unnavigable.
The web tried to be a competitor for native apps by offering technical parity but it wasn’t enough. Web versions of serious apps tend to be broken and have a banner asking you to download the native app. You can argue about why it happened, but it happened.
It most certainly is not. Web apps still suck ass compared to native. It's just that users are willing to accept even the crappiest solutions because they don't have very significant needs.
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.
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.
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.
Apple has considered that same question for most other apps. Garage Band, for example, and Apple Mail.
I don't think you should listen to anyone's ideas about why Apple does what it does. But if you want to hear my unfounded speculation: Apple wants to control the out-of-the-box experience for its shiny hardware and therefore includes a variety of apps that >x% of the customers are presumed to use on the first day they have their new shiny hardware, where x is some number and "day" may mean "week" or… well, really, this is unfounded speculation, it doesn't have to be precise.
but that's not really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This will be one of them.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple works. Nobody is debating whether they should keep working on Xcode or Safari; it’s both.
WebKit is one of the most important frameworks Apple makes; many of their own apps rely on it like Mail and the App Store.
And many thousands of 3rd party apps (Facebook, Twitter) rely on WebKit to render web content on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS and tvOS.
Does losing $18 billion mean some adjustments? Of course, but it’s probably something else that’s not mission critical, not something like Safari/WebKit that’s on over 2 billion devices.
I'm not sure the fact that a web view component exists means it gets priority.
Facebook, Twitter etc have no choice but to use what iOS provides.
It's not like they'd stop publishing iOS apps I'd apple decided to never update the WebView componemt again.
And the audience is captive, if they get a bad rendering in mail they won't think "bad apple" but "bad email sender", same way we all bend around Outlook's rendering.
> Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make money working on Safari?"
It doesn’t need to make money. A good web browser is a standard part of an operating system these days. Apple can’t ship without one. You might as well ask how they monetise Finder or Notes.
Apple never fully owned WebKit in the first place - most certainly not back in 2003. There was an extremely public and messy divorce period with the KDE codebase[0], and to this day there's still KHTML/KJS-derived code in WebKit that has to be sublicensed under GPLv2 for redistribution purposes.
If we're going to split hairs over the whole "Blink is an inferior WebKit fork" brouhaha, we shouldn't forget who Apple sherlocked to get there. After all, turnabout is fair play.
Finder and Notes are artificially and arbitrarily designed to hook into iCloud first and refuse any convenient synchronization with other cloud platforms. It is pretty easily argued that these apps are designed like this to upsell Apple iCloud subscriptions, not because it's easier or smarter to do that way.
Similarly, Safari isn't clouds and rainbows either. It serves the same purpose IE did back in the day; furnish a "premium" experience that is deliberately irreplaceable and intertwined with the OS. We saw this with the push notification API, "Add to Homescreen" functionality and so many other places where Apple dragged their feet and refused a featureset that would enable competition with native apps. This is a hell of their own making, Apple can leave any time they want by acquiescing to app publishers the same way they did on Mac.
A browser that is just good enough for people not to notice that web apps work better on a $50 android then on their $1000 iPhone is a standard part of an operating system these days.
Perhaps you haven’t noticed but Safari has shipped about 20 updates in the last 3.5 years.
If you check the Interop 2025 numbers, you’ll see Safari is neck and neck with the other browsers and has implemented the latest CSS features [1].
The WebKit team was first to crack the code on how to implement :has() that eluded browser teams for 20 years and was the first to ship it [2].
As for wishing that they didn’t have to maintain Safari, it’s a mission critical framework on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS… it’s the only thing saving the web from the monoculture of Chrome-based browsers; unfortunately Firefox is in the low single-digits as far as market share goes. Safari on iOS has about 25% market share.
From the outside it looks to me like Apple started reinvesting in Safari in 2023 (starting with adding support for notifications for PWAs) when the EU started getting serious about regulating the App Store monopoly, and they see investment into Safari as fodder for negotiation with governments about "people can always use the web if they don't like the App Store"
At WWDC 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a "sweet solution" for developers who wanted to program the iPhone: web apps in Mobile Safari!
Developers, who wanted a real, native SDK, were greatly disappointed (to put it mildly), and in 2008 Apple introduced not only a native iPhone app SDK with developer tooling but an entire app store.
But Jobs wasn't entirely off base. Gmail had replaced dedicated email apps. Apple had implemented native-like widgets in Mobile Safari as well as touch input, javascript canvas support, and audio support. Today you can implement a video streaming client (Netflix), game streaming client (Amazon Luna), groupware client (Discord, Slack, Teams), or even a whole office suite (Office 365) in Safari. Even many "native" mobile apps are basically just shells on web apps.
Seems clear they have not been investing much of that 18B on Safari. Wow, can you imagine what Safari would be if Apple had invested a large fraction of that income on Safari?
Yeah, it's a funny argument because while Apple has certainly put a lot of money into WebKit and JavaScriptCore over the years in absolute terms, they already don't prioritize Safari or treat web technologies as an alternative to native app development.
I think it's important to keep in mind that this isn't the end of antitrust. The EU has already forced Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. They might force them to support PWAs on a similar level to native apps next. Chromium will be open source for the foreseeable future, no matter who buys the Chrome branding and userbase. This could be the very beginning of a much more competitive app landscape.
They won't. They never really did. The OG firefox was a rebel creation that they latched onto, that then itself became the old guard. Firefox still has tone deaf usability bugs that are 10, 15 and 20 years old.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Those at least have to be downloaded and installed by the user, which indicates a high level of intent/consent and is difficult to do accidentally. In the browser environment, malicious content can be navigated to without any user intent or consent whatsoever, which when combined with holes punched in browser sandboxes for the sake of fancy features makes for danger with a dramatically larger scope.
Right now, most untrusted code runs in the browser's sandbox, and that's great - outside of the realm of fancy 0 days, the damage is limited.
But if downloading apps becomes the norm again (like every online store asking you to get their app and an extra app for a discount program), I expect that socially engineering less technical users into downloading malware will become much easier.
Aside from a few rushed features, all the things that have been coming to web are really lovely. I'll be very sad if this all slows down. We were just about at feature parity with native mobile apps.
But practically? How many sites actually offer an innovative and/or mobile-first version of their website anymore?
There was definitely a time when we had websites delivering various layouts based on the viewport size of the user agent. CSS media queries, flexible layouts, etc. were all very important innovations for a very short lived period of time.
Now, every serious web presence has moved on to offering their own mobile app, pushing users that direction. The browser was stubborn and erred on the side of privacy. So it didn't quite offer all the integrated (ahem, intrusive) means to interact with the user's device in order to bleed every penny and every bit of data mined from your usage and behaviors.
So I don't see anything lovely in the current situation at all. The traditional web -- you know the one where you surf with a web browser to discover the world -- has been dying for quite some time. It might even be dead and we just don't realize it yet.
We don't need web browser parity with mobile apps. We just need the web to be what the web is good at. It's a lost cause thinking that the web browser will ever integrate with a portable device quite the same as a native app. Those days are gone.
>Now, every serious web presence has moved on to offering their own mobile app, pushing users that direction.
If Apple didn't do everything in their power to slow down the adoption of PWAs you might have seen it take off by now. They still won't allow you to easily install a PWA to your homescreen, you basically have to be a power user (a reader here, and maybe not even then) to know about it.
That would be nice but up to now there's been no real consequences for Apple, the operators of the biggest walled garden. MS has also been a pretty bad actor in many ways, although their platform is slightly open, for now.
You do realize, a terrible company will buy chrome and we will be forced to wait until something better arrives (yahoo is interested at the moment). It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.
There are forks but they're very limited in how far they can deviate from what Google wants. The Manifest v3 discussions show this. Extension APIs aren't a big part of browsers compared to all the other things they do, and there was clearly demand to keep Manifest v2 alive, so you'd expect at least one or two forkers to differentiate by doing that.
In practice the rebasing costs are so high that everyone shrugged and said they had no choice but to go along with it.
Chromium is open source, but not designed for anyone except Google to develop it. Nothing malicious about it, it's just that building a healthy contributor community is a different thing to uploading some source code. If you've ever worked with the Chromium codebase you'll find you have to reverse engineer it to work things out. The codebase is deliberately under-architected (a legacy of the scars of working on Gecko), so many things you'd expect to be well defined re-usable modules that could be worked on independently of Google are actually leaky hacks whose API changes radically depending on what platform you're compiling for, what day of the week it is, etc. Even very basic things like opening a window isn't properly abstracted in a cross platform manner, last time I looked, and at any moment Google might land a giant rewrite they were working on in private for months, obliterating all your work at a stroke.
There are reasons for all of this... Chrome is a native app that tries to exploit the native OS as much as possible, and they don't want to be tied down by lowest-common-denominator internal abstractions or API commitments. But if you view Chrome as an OS then the API churn makes Linux look like a stroll through a grassy meadow.
> The codebase is deliberately under-architected (a legacy of the scars of working on Gecko), so many things you'd expect to be well defined re-usable modules that could be worked on independently of Google are actually leaky hacks
I'm guessing you're specifically referring to Gecko's early over-use of XPCOM, which the Gecko team itself had to clean up in a long process of deCOMtamination [1].
I'm hopeful that if Servo ever gets enough funding to become a serious contender among browser engines (hey, KHTML was once an underdog too), that it might walk a middle path between overuse of COM-ish ABIs and what you described about Chromium. Servo is already decomposed into many smaller Rust crates; this provides a pretty strong compile-time boundary between modules. Yet those modules are all statically linked, and in a release build, that combined program gets the full benefit of LTO. Of course, where trait objects are used, there's still dynamic dispatch via vtables, but the point is that one can get strong modularity without using something COM-ish everywhere.
Incidentally, the first time I built Chromium (or more specifically, CEF) from source in late 2012, I was impressed as I watched hundreds of static libraries being linked into one big binary. Then as I studied the code (though not deeply enough to learn the things you described), I saw that Chromium didn't use anything COM-ish internally (though CEF provided a COM-ish ABI on top). That striking contrast with Gecko's architecture (which I had previously worked with) stuck with me. I wonder how much the heavily reliance on static linking and LTO (meaning whole-program optimization), combined with the complete lack of COMtamination, contributed to Chrome's speed, which was one of its early selling points.
[1]: Mozilla used to have a dedicated wiki page about deCOMtamination, but I can no longer find it.
1) chromium is open sourced and there are plenty of forks
2) You're being facetious if you're saying Firefox is much worse. Feature sets and performance are very similar. Most people would not notice the difference if reskinned
2.1) ditto for Safari or any of the chromium browsers.
3) a monopoly is good for noone (even the monopoly)
1) all those forks are soft fork that rely on Google's maintenance of chromium. So unless they are willing to invest a LOT more into development, or someone else does a hard fork and puts enough resources into it, whoever buys chrome will inherit a lot of power over those forks.
2) Without the funding from google search, Firefox's future is very much in question. Unlike Apple and MS, Mozilla doesn't really have other funds to pull from to maintain a browser.
and there's plenty of somewhat usable browsers out there too.
But the OP's implication is that there ought to be a fully working browser (that satisfies the standards of the day), but creatable from someone in their garage.
That hasn't been true for cars, appliances or any modern equipment for ages. And the same phenomenon being applicable to software isn't really that unimaginable (nor a problem).
> That hasn't been true for cars, appliances or any modern equipment for ages.
Personally, I don't see that as progress. I don't need touch screens and surveillance everywhere in every major purchase I make. I fail to see what we have gotten in exchange for all the increased complexity.
If we had as many browsers as OSs - somewhat interoperable but genuinely independent - then I would feel much better about the web. Compare NT/Darwin/*+Linux/(Net|Free|Open|Dragonfly)BSD/illumos (to say nothing of the long tail; you can in fact use Haiku for a lot) against Gecko/Blink/WebKit.
If you consider the BSDs and Illumos to be operating systems, you might as well consider Lynx/Ladybird/Servo/Netsurf/Trident as browsers.
For 97% of the world, there are four operating systems: Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS. There are three browsers: Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The rest is an irrelevant sidenote that only hobbyists and developers care about, existing at the grace of the megacorporations that sponsor them.
Agreed, and I would argue that it's even worse on the browser side. We have Chrome and Safari on iOS, the rest is essentially irrelevant. With regards to web standards, Edge is just another Chrome-reskin. When Apple sooner or later looses the WebKit monopoly on iOS, it will all be Chrome...
I have daily driven OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and I have tried to use anything that isn't Gecko or Blink. I feel comfortable saying that the OS situation is much better than the browser situation. I'm interested in technical merit / feature completeness, not popularity. The situation is likely to improve with Ladybird and maybe Servo, granted.
Absolutely! Looking at this objectively, most of the web and browser developments over the last two decades have been for the benefit of Big Tech and business—not typical web users.
These developments have been forced on users to allow that mob to sell us more stuff, confine what we do, and spy on us and collect our statistics etc. Moreover, complicated web browsers provide a larger surface/more opportunites for attack.
Everything I want to do on the Web I could do with a browser from the early 2000s.
I mostly run my browsers without JavaScript. That kills most ads and makes pages load so much faster (as pages are much, much smaller). Without JavaScript I often see a single webpage drop from over 7MB down to around 100kB.
7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the hell do we users put up with this shit?
It seems to me if all that Google infrastructure were to be busted up and browsers went their own way then the changes in the browser ecosystem would eventually force lower common denominator standards (more basic APIs, back to HTML, etc.).
With simper web tech being the only guaranteed way of communicating with all Web uses this would force the sleazeballs and purveyors of crap and bad behavior to behave more openly and responsibly. Also, users would be able to mount better defenses against the remaining crap.
In short, the market would be less accessible unless they reverted to lower tech/LCD web standards, and that'd be a damn good thing for the average web user.
> 7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the hell do we users put up with this shit?
That's mostly due to insane web "frameworks" like React, and developers who (systematically) overuse and misuse them, and then test their websites on WiFi/5G and iPhones with superfast chips so they don't notice (their users do). The solution is to increase the capabilities of "native" Javascript and CSS, and put in massive effort into interoperability so web devs stop feeling the need for frameworks as "compatibility shims" (looking at you, IE and Safari). Those solutions are exactly what browser makers (sans Apple) have been focusing on lately.
The solution you recommend would have the exact opposite effect of what you intend.
"The solution you recommend would have the exact opposite effect of what you intend."
It depends on how one works and what one has to do and or wants to achieve. I've pretty much worked the Web without say JavaScript since it was first released. In fact, I even used to turn off the 'scripts' setting in Internet Explorer it's that long ago.
Over that time I've become addicted to the raw speed of page rendering sans JS, similarly the lack of annoying 'jitters' and hesitations in page rendering that it causes. Same goes for the absence of ads, etc. In fact, I've rarely had need to recourse to ad-blockers as I see so few ads without JS enabled.
Is working without or with very limited JS use an impediment? For many it clearly it is because Big Tech and vested interests have forced the tech down the throats of users in places where its use is not essential. For me however the Web mostly sans JS is not a problem. I've used the Web since its inception and I do everything I want, and that's always been so.
Occasionally, I'm forced to use JS when purchasing something so I'll first determine what I want sans JS then clear caches etc. And sometimes I even switch browsers to make the purchase—I see no need to give these snoopers more data than absolutely necessary, I expect the same privacy online as I'd get from walking into a retail shop and paying cash. So should everyone.
Sites that force JS I back out of faster than entering them—there are plenty more fish in the sea so to speak—more than I can ever consume in my lifetime. For example, on news sites that force JS and block access there are others running the same stories that do not, only neophytes aren't aware of that.
I cannot think of one instance where I've been locked out of such info and not found an alternative source for not having used JavaScript.
Enabling and disabling JS is dead easy on my browsers, my JS icon is red when it's off and green when on. A single click changes the state and a page refresh reloads the page in whatever state I want, it's dead easy to work this way.
Same happens on my phones, when I buy a new phone it takes me some while before I even insert the SIM as I first have to delouse it of all the Google and vendor shit—there's not one Google service I use or have need to use, there are many alternatives, NewPipe, F-droid, etc., etc.
I've nothing against JS, only the way it's used and much abused. What's desperately needed are JS browser engines that allow users to manage its functionality, what it's allowed to do—to kill access to user data by default or as specified, and or supply randomized crap data back to snoopers and so on so that users can take back control of their Web browsing.
Your point is only valid if the user wants certain enhanced features which is not always the case. For example, information sites and government services etc. that convey essential information do not need JS, likewise they don't even need CSS.
Look at it this way: written text contains the same information whether it's displayed in system typeface fonts, courier monospace or Garamond. Sure, Garamond looks much nicer and fancier but it's not essential to convey information. Same goes for much of the other overrated and much abused internet standards.
Of course, that statement will cause you apoplexy if you're a web developer for two reasons, likely your income depends on it, and second it's a notion so foreign to and removed from internet developers' thinking/daily experience that it's inconceivable to them. Well, enough of us outside that circle are now thinking this way not to let the notion die. Perhaps also you're not old enough to remember when everything was simple and we got our information in system or courier typefaces. Those limitations did not stop users from doing the essentials. The new generation of Web developers either have never kn...
If I had to make a guess, you, as a person, can't implement an OS, personal computer, or any other appliance in your home. Maybe you can do the wiring or manage to dig out the basement itself. Not sure why browsers specifically draw your ire.
I completely appreciate what you're saying. Then I look at the level of crazy complexity and backward compatibility in html/css/js/wasm processing. And then I wonder: what are you actually proposing here?
This is going to be unpopular but.. just to illustrate that we didn’t have to be stuck here. Using things like xpra/xephyr to serve a whole x11 gui over web is surprisingly easy and awesome and like 1/100th the complexity of a modern web stack.
This might not be cheap to serve, but it’s cheap to build, and it makes you wonder about the intersection and inflection of those cost curves. And of course we haven’t spent decades optimizing for it.
Don't get me wrong.. REST APIs, HTTP, HTML5, all wonderful. But as a user, the cost/benefits of ubiquitous JavaScript in depth simply to win interactivity and single page apps at the cost of um, everything wrong with the web (and by extension much of the world economy via surveillance capitalism) are a bit suspect.
iirc WASM bytecode closely resembles V8 IR. If you're writing a JS engine, might as well provide a more direct frontend to it... I don't think it adds much.
> the level of crazy complexity and backward compatibility in html/css/js/wasm processing
Most people don't need insane levels of backwards compatibility or intense PWA support. That's just cruft that slows everything down and increases the attack surface for, to the user, no real gain.
Perhaps what we need is a lot of lightweight general-use browsers (based on a small number of engines) and then some heavyweight power-user browsers that can WASM to their hearts' content.
> We use WASM in web apps that are used by a very large number of “regular” consumers. It would be stupid to kill that off.
Large numbers of users use lots of features. That doesn't change that most of them use none of them. WASM would continue to exist. It just doesn't need to be in every browser.
Who said we have to kill off Wasm, Wasm (minus SIMD) is extremely simple and allows the user (the webdev) to ship the complexity, and not build the complexity into the browser itself.
No, what you mean is 'most greenfield web dev projects don't need...'.
Most people do need those things, because assuming there's no civilisation spanning project to literally rewrite 90% of the web, without them their sites would break.
> Most people do need those things, because assuming there's no civilisation spanning project to literally rewrite 90% of the web, without them their sites would break
Sites most people visit do not require backwards compatiblity. And aside from like Google Docs, I doubt most folk are doing anything with WASM (outside plugins).
Look, in a world where Google subsidises browser development, this isn't an issue. We don't need to compromise. But if that funding stream disappears, you do have to compromise. And I'd argue a simple browser doing away with some of the more-complicated stuff would be (a) maintainable and (b) popular enough to pay itself back.
Unless you can make it so the only part that doesn't work is the bad part. A browser where ads don't work and tracking doesn't work but everything else works is a good browser.
Rewriting everything seem to have been regular exercise in general... So I don't see problems with doing it once more. How many sites are actually say older than 5 years. And how much work would they need?
I'm assuming people with such a hatred for browser complexity absolutely love the way those Delphi programs worked back before Web 2.0 made browsers a viable GUI platform, because that's the direction we're going in if browser start dying. Browsers have become the de-facto way to work for most people, and it's a major why Microsoft has been losing market share.
People say HTML/CSS/JS/WASM is complex, but the Ladybird team is proving that a very small team can make a working browser in a few years. Thanks to the efforts of dedicated developers behind browsers, most of the web API, including rendering algorithms and such, has been painstakingly written out in detail.
Clearly you’re not doing much front line web development.
Web browsers are incredibly capable and all the features they add are making browsers better and life easier for developers and experience better for users.
This is the sort of comment that back end developers make, who hate front end development.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Makes me think of the horse browser (https://gethorse.com), namely the fact that unlike pretty much all other browsers it's a paid, subscription product. You actually have to pay $60 a year in order to use it.
Sounds absolutely ridiculous when you consider that you haven't had to pay for a browser since Netscape, and even then I think you only had to pay once for it (it was before my time, might need some help on this statement from people actively using Netscape in its heyday), but this whole Google antitrust thing has made me appreciate just how fragile the current browser status quo happens to be. Safari and Edge are fine, but I don't particularly like using either, and to be frank the reasons for using an open-source browser besides Firefox or Chrome are largely ideological.
It just might be the case where if you want an actually good browser, you'll have to start paying for it.
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.
Horse charges $60 a year and it's still nothing more than a skin over Chromium. I saw the recent surge in paid-for browsers, but none of them seem to actually do any engine work themselves, they all grab Chromium or WebKit and throw a layer of UI on top.
Of course, people are paying for browsers, even if they don't know they are. WebKit and Edge are maintained by companies in a way similar to how Chrome is maintained by Google. It's just the alternatives to those two that are now in danger, and all of their derivatives (Electron, Tauri, and anything built on top of that).
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.
"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.
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.
Perhaps Mozilla will spend money more effectively now? I'm not sure and frankly I don't care. For sure, it will be a sad day if Firefox formally goes under[1]. Still, it wouldn't change the validity of the decision to forbid these payments, spin off Chrome, etc.
[1] I think Firefox will survive. Orion browser, which has been my main browser for maybe a year now, was developed with far less money than the Firefox budget and something like only two people. Is this a fair comparison? I have no idea.
Is this a serious question? Orion uses WebKit which practically speaking is like 80% of what people know as "a browser" and where an insane amount of the effort and money goes. There are like 30 various WebKit-derived zero-features 1-man browsers out there on GitHub, they even show up here sometimes. Firefox maintains its own entire engine called Gecko, it's completely incomparable. The actual development cost of your browser is subsidized almost entirely by Apple (and Kagi's VC money), make no mistake about it.
If you are a company that wants to have control over the browser market and ensure that it doesn't get taken away, you should contrive to have the funding depend on you continuing to control it.
To be clear, I am not saying the current situation should continue, but if they are going to destroy Mizillas main source of revenue, there should be some kind of plan in place to make sure we don't end up losing one of two serious competitors to chrome.
As one possibility, the remedies could include Google paying reperations to Mozilla for the damage their anti-competitive behavior has done to Firefox, without Mozilla being obligated to use Google as the search engine, to give Mozilla more time to find alternative funding. I'm not sure that is necessarily the best option, but I'm sure they could come up with something that doesn't leave Mozilla high and dry.
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?
> 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.
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 :)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, that’s definitely revisionism. The iPhone killed Flash, and ActiveX (outside of South Korea / Silverlight) and applets were already dead at that point.
Yeah, true. I forgot that, even Steve's letter on why they wouldn't put flash on the iPhone.
That was the final blow, yup. But the web was still a clunky mess of plugins, broken standards, and browser-specific hacks.
Google pushed to make the web better. And through Chrome they helped bring WebKit to multiplatform: I still remember I couldn't even get rounded edges or nice typography support across platforms, only in Safari.
It wasn’t until Chrome took off that the rest started paying attention.
The iPhone was undoubtedly the deciding factor, I agree - but interestingly Netflix used to rely on Silverlight for DRM [1] until Google introduced video DRM to Chrome in ~2013 [2]. iPhone netflix users had to use an app.
The web browser is an ugly mongrel that in a “sane” world would never exist. The only reason it is a platform is due to the immense wealth funneled to ductaping and reinforcing it to hold.
It’s basically a statue of liberty made of ductape and chewing gum, then reinforced with formula-1 level engineering and novel materials research.
The building blocks and lessons learned could be used for something novel (nope not gonna happen it’s permanent now). WASM, json, Skia renderer, pretty awesome v8 virtual machine etc etc … all of that are pretty neat.
I guess the key thing is what is the value of browser now?
It’s the ui to bazillion networked business and government systems, productivity tools etc.
I would argue the sticky moat here is not the web interface, though, but the data and the familiar usage patterns. _Theoretically_ the ux is portable to any system with vector graphics renderer and the data itself should be (a long stretch right) independent of the client ui.
Sure, but back then people were used to downloading and running random exe files (even from really untrusted sources such as torrent sites, eMule, etc.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
90s web was fun in a wild west kind of way. Sites were small, but the net in general was slow.
00-10 had a lot of forums in which I remember being very fun. At the same time it brought in the age of popups and ads everywhere.
10+ brought in the age of large social media and the feeling everything was trying to scam you. A lot of the forums that felt special and interesting started disappearing for multiple reasons, but mostly their userbase had moved to FB or something else huge. Then those large sites started moderating anything interesting away.
In the late 90's, I attended a talk by Ted Nelson, the guy who coined the term Hypertext. To him, things started going downhill with HTML, and the URL. The gist of his complain is that he wanted links to be bi-directional.
In the 80's, telecom operators were complaining that TCP/IP and packet transmission was a regression over circuit commutation.
So it looks like the internet has progressed through perpetual regression.
The internet is 30-40 years old, and has brought an entirely new paradigm to the world. It has abolished distances, disproportionately increasing the reach of a few.
I'd love to share your optimism that things will keep improving in the long run, but I don't see what you're basing that off.
> Furthermore, devs hadn’t normalized feature chasing and so any modern browser worked correctly
What you are saying seems much larger than the web itself. I don't think Chromium or for that matter "technology" is responsible for that. I think it has more to do with massive capital in funding technology startups building on every random idea which in turn led to the tremendous demand for platforms with the promise of "shipping fast" at the cost of short sighted technical decisions.
That’s definitely a consideration, but alongside the rise of Blink within the web dev sphere there’s also been a growing culture of sitting on the bleeding edge of new features regardless of how necessary doing so is, which influences both hobby and production projects alike.
On other platforms it’s still much more the norm to stick to proven tech for anything non-trivial and to only adopt new APIs when there’s high adoption and adequate justification for doing so.
You're speaking my language here. I think this is exactly what happens when a company has cornered the market. We have completely stagnated, as you say, for at least a decade, maybe more.
Lots of innovation has happened, don't get me wrong. And maybe the web browser as we know is "mature" and therefore lacking need to evolve.
But I'd argue (as I did in a sibling comment) that maybe this drying up of funds could pave the way for new innovation. The web, the creative parts of the web, and definitely the internet as well, didn't have monster budgets to drive its innovation originally. It had some (DARPA, et al), but not like today.
>Copy and Paste context menu entries are sometimes disabled when they should not be
they should never be disabled. If I want to copy the letters from the OK/Cancel buttons—which you also tried to eliminate—or the keyboard keycaps you are displaying, I should be able to; what's it to you what I want to do?
How much do you love it when you are using a PDF of a scanned ancient text or a cellphone snapshot you just took of a streetsign, and your device lets you copy the text? This is what computers are for, to be our servants, not to be Google's overseer.
> 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.
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.
The finer point is where these tens of billions came from.
All of it was ad money, and a lot of these innovations were also targeted at better dealing with ads (Flash died because of how taxing it was, mobile browsers just couldn't do it. JavaScript perf allowed these ads to come back full force)
The net balance of how much web technology advanced vs how much ad ecosystems developed is pretty near 0 to me, if not slightly negative.
>There actions back then fitted the Don‘t be evil motto.
Disagree with that. All the privacy issues people have problem with now were already a problem in 2007. But being the media darling along with Submarine PR Google didn't get much bad press.
There were lots of other things too, including their site breaking Firefox as well as Chrome, their promise not to make another browser.
Isn't webrtc broken in Chrome? Or did they finally fix that? It used to be that everyone supported Chrome's broken implementation, leaving Firefox users with the correct implementation out in the cold.
If you are referring to the standards-based "Unified Plan" vs. the Google proprietary "Plan B" for handling multiple media tracks in SDP, I believe that "Plan B" was finally phased out in 2022.
> Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.
Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.
> V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.
No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
> Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.
That's useful but only because the bloatware above. If you didn't give code running in the browser that much power you wouldn't need sandboxing.
> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.
> SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.
It's also a binary protocol that cannot be debugged/tested via plain telnet, which places a barrier to entry for development. Perhaps enhances Google's market domination by requiring their libraries and via their control of the standard.
>Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.
>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
So should we not deliver advanced sandboxed cross platform applications for any platform, and instead deliver unsandboxed native code for all possible platforms? ActiveX called, it wants to say thanks for the endorsement and that it told you so.
And no more zoom meetings because somebody's Mac might not go to sleep? I'm with you on that one, brother!
> > Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
> Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.
They were not the only contributor (I was the technical lead for Mozilla's efforts in this space), but they were by far the largest contributor, in both dollars and engineering hours.
> No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
Well that's just biased. Saying application is bloated (which is often not true) is the result of an entire ecosystem, has something to do with an interpreter, is ridiculous. Any qualified software engineer can see the fault in such a comment. You probably know that as well.
Is have to agree to be honest. Whoever decided to run JavaScript in the backend should be committed to a mental institution. JavaScript is a nightmare. But you can't tell a man something his paycheck depends on him not knowing.
Of all the things you've mentioned, the only one that genuinely stands out to me as a positive contribution from Google—something that wouldn’t have happened had Chrome never existed—is the codec situation.
They leveraged their scale and influence for good in that instance.
That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation.
In fact, I sometimes wonder whether Chrome has actually steered the browser ecosystem in the wrong direction, while simultaneously eroding a lot of the diversity that once existed.
> That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation
Honestly I can't believe that anyone who was around when Chrome came out would say this. IE7 was around, and terrible. Firefox was trying hard, as was Opera, but web tech has become infinitely better with Chrome around, and Google funding it. Without Google funding Firefox as well, Firefox would be nowhere near what it is today.
> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
Not really. That was done more by the greed of the MPEG alliance.
Back in the days when <video> was first proposed, VP8 was required to be supported as a codec by all browsers. This was removed as a requirement after Apple stated they were never going to support it, but the other browsers still implemented VP8 because it was codec free. Then Google implemented H.264 in Chrome. Mozilla only implemented H.264 in Firefox after it became clear that Google's announcement that they were going to rip H.264 out of Chrome was a bald-faced lie, making H.264 a de facto codec requirement for web browsers.
Having won, then the MPEG Alliance got greedy with their next version. H.265 upped the prices on its license agreement, and additionally demanded a cut of all streaming revenue. It got worse--the alliance fragment, and so you had to pay multiple consortia the royalties for the codec (although only one of them had the per-video demand).
It was in response to this greed that the Alliance for Open Media was created, which brought us AV1. I don't know how important Google is to the AOM, but I will note that, at launch, it did contain everybody important to the web video space except for Apple (which, as noted earlier, is the entity that previously torpedoed the attempt to mandate royalty-free codecs for web video).
No, there isn't a need for appreciation. We all cheered at that time where Google was building a great JavaScript engine and a browser around that. But in hindsight it is clear, that Google was just running the old embrace, expand, extinguish playbook on a scale that we where unable to comprehend. We would've be just fine with Firefox, webkit and maybe Microsoft would have made Internet explorer somehow not total shit. Google captured the whole web as a market and we used the opportunity to build endless JS frameworks in top and went wild with all the VC and advertising money.
That antitrust case is what made Microsoft stop developing their browser.
Chrome would still have won because it was force pushed by google.com, every google service, every google software nad large part of 3rd party software had it as bundled (checked by default) install.
> And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.
And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would still be a major player in the browser engine race today. Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser engine did.
Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.
This is so important to look at, when we talk about this topic. I was there, 3000 years ago, when browser where kind of simple software. We could go back to that state and would loose almost nothing. All the complexity that is now in browsers was in the operating systems at that time. The millions of fronted-devs of today would just be "normal" devs three decades ago.
I know, that that will not happen. But it helps looking through all the bullshit that Google has created, where they've build and control the platform (the web with chromium), that Microsoft and Apple used to control (their oses).
FWIW i have a feeling (and it is just a feeling, not something i can confirm) that the entirety of Windows 95 was simpler than Firefox or Chrome today :-P.
By LOC: Windows 95 is estimated to have 10-15 million LOC, Chrome 30-40 million.
By binary size: Windows 95 took about 50 MB, Chrome 200-300 MB.
By architecture design: the codebase of Windows 95 is fairly shallow and monolithic, while Chrome is very modular (think V8, Blink, WASM, sandboxes...) and uses other dependencies.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
Nor does anything about WASM. The sandbox is provided externally. The only difference is that Java standardizes functions for things like file access, while WASM doesn't standardize them (but WASI does!)
You don't need a VM for a "write once run anywhere" environment at all. That's the whole point of high level programming languages like C and Fortran. The innovation of having a VM to run everything in is to be able to compile once and run anywhere, which is only valuable to people wishing to hide the source code from the people running their software (malware authors).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Mozilla has been trying to come up with a profitable business model for years. VPNs, privacy masking services, their own mobile OS, feed readers, you name it. Nobody is interested, new attempts at making money turn into cost centers, and the next attempt is burdened by the early shutdown of previous attempts.
Every time they try something, the open source crowd cries out in pain because money isn't going towards their three preferred bugs instead, and the mainstream doesn't care about anything Mozilla does.
They have made stupid decisions to be sure, and the money squandered at the top is definitely infuriating, but no amount of incentives or donations is going to replace the money Google is handing Mozilla to get out of the antitrust laws.
With the reduced funding, Mozilla can fire the overpaid/underperforming executives; and re-hire the tech-focused people who were actually developing the browser.
> 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.
Microsoft and Apple can afford to keep developing a browser. Hopefully FF can get money from another knowledge discovery company e.g. Anthropic? OpenAI?
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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".
The web basically stagnated because once you have 100% there's no incentive to even fix bugs.
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.
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.
They still are on mobile for navigation - full screen sans js
Things that definitely look like trivial banality at shallow level often end up to need a lot of attention on many concurrent details.
I'm talking about a time when investment in browser development and web standards was so lacking that being able to achieve things like this blew everyone's mind:
https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/menus/demo.html
Hackernews, were it around back then, would've gone as crazy for this post as we do the latest AI model today.
Maybe! My thoughts were, say, tangential or incidental.
A guess is that a central issue is how much in new features should we develop and use?
I see a dilemma: (A) I mentioned the old controls that go back to early Windows and even IBM's 3270 terminals. An advantage of these controls is that lots of software tools implement them and billions of people already understand them. (B) Being too happy with the old stuff or even the present risks progress that is possible and worthwhile.
Your post seemed to illustrate (B).
But generally in the industry, with smartphones, laptops, desktops, Apple, Google's Android, Windows, browsers, apps and extrapolating, we could have an explosion of new features that would complicate work for everyone and fragment the industry.
Ah, maybe Darwin would explain: Lots of mutations with only the best lasting??
For my work, I'm thrilled with the tools and technology available now that I get to exploit.
The main point that we could derive from this is that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, and all the more when geopolitics is involved. But still it's fun and sometime inspiring.
It's like people got mad that tables were being used to for something other than strictly tabular data, so they recreated the idea behind table as a layout tool with "css grid" and made it 50x more complicated.
I wish web design could follow like woodworking where the most focus is on using the base tools very effectively. The introduction of new tools is mostly frowned upon. Of course that's all because of the inherently dangerous nature of using power tools. Regardless of tech stack you aren't to likely to lose a finger from coding.
Sigh.
Would it be better if there was a different web application display technology, not retrofitted on top of HTML/CSS? Like maybe, but HTML/CSS is... fine. Even separated from the success of Javascript, it's an archetypal example of "worse is better" [2] leading to market success.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Then I would say you have never understood HTML. Using tables for layout conflates content/structure/semantics with presentation and this is a problem in general with the HTML standards prior to HTML4 Strict. The reasons why this is bad have been expounded upon for near thirty years and are well known. HTML tables are not a “base tool” for layout.
A good litmus test for bad Web-design is “does it fail on screen readers?”. Indeed this does; it makes pages near unnavigable.
Fixed that for you.
I'm pretty happy not to have "submit to Apple for meticulous review and approval" in my deployment cycle.
It most certainly is not. Web apps still suck ass compared to native. It's just that users are willing to accept even the crappiest solutions because they don't have very significant needs.
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.
Revenue != profit. $18 billion for something they have to maintain anyway is 100% profit.
TODO: find a link to the original article that mentioned it.
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.
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.
Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make money working on Safari?" the answer is really clear: "Google pays us $18 billion annually."
After that money is cut off, an executive at Apple has to ask the question: "Why should we keep investing in Safari, instead of SwiftUI and Xcode?"
I'm sure we'd all love the answer to be, "We have plenty of money, so we should invest heavily in both," but that's not really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This will be one of them.
I don't think you should listen to anyone's ideas about why Apple does what it does. But if you want to hear my unfounded speculation: Apple wants to control the out-of-the-box experience for its shiny hardware and therefore includes a variety of apps that >x% of the customers are presumed to use on the first day they have their new shiny hardware, where x is some number and "day" may mean "week" or… well, really, this is unfounded speculation, it doesn't have to be precise.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple works. Nobody is debating whether they should keep working on Xcode or Safari; it’s both.
WebKit is one of the most important frameworks Apple makes; many of their own apps rely on it like Mail and the App Store.
And many thousands of 3rd party apps (Facebook, Twitter) rely on WebKit to render web content on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS and tvOS.
Does losing $18 billion mean some adjustments? Of course, but it’s probably something else that’s not mission critical, not something like Safari/WebKit that’s on over 2 billion devices.
Facebook, Twitter etc have no choice but to use what iOS provides.
It's not like they'd stop publishing iOS apps I'd apple decided to never update the WebView componemt again.
And the audience is captive, if they get a bad rendering in mail they won't think "bad apple" but "bad email sender", same way we all bend around Outlook's rendering.
It doesn’t need to make money. A good web browser is a standard part of an operating system these days. Apple can’t ship without one. You might as well ask how they monetise Finder or Notes.
Strategically it makes no sense to not own something that important.
Remember: Safari was created when Apple’s 5-year deal with Microsoft that made Internet Explorer the default browser for MacOS X expired in 2003.
10 years later. Google forked WebKit to create Chrome.
If we're going to split hairs over the whole "Blink is an inferior WebKit fork" brouhaha, we shouldn't forget who Apple sherlocked to get there. After all, turnabout is fair play.
[0] https://blogs.kde.org/2005/04/29/bitter-failure-named-safari...
Similarly, Safari isn't clouds and rainbows either. It serves the same purpose IE did back in the day; furnish a "premium" experience that is deliberately irreplaceable and intertwined with the OS. We saw this with the push notification API, "Add to Homescreen" functionality and so many other places where Apple dragged their feet and refused a featureset that would enable competition with native apps. This is a hell of their own making, Apple can leave any time they want by acquiescing to app publishers the same way they did on Mac.
Safari has long lagged on other browsers, Apple would rather it didn't exist but have to keep it ticking over
With less competition they will likely be happy to lag behind even further again
If you check the Interop 2025 numbers, you’ll see Safari is neck and neck with the other browsers and has implemented the latest CSS features [1].
The WebKit team was first to crack the code on how to implement :has() that eluded browser teams for 20 years and was the first to ship it [2].
As for wishing that they didn’t have to maintain Safari, it’s a mission critical framework on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS… it’s the only thing saving the web from the monoculture of Chrome-based browsers; unfortunately Firefox is in the low single-digits as far as market share goes. Safari on iOS has about 25% market share.
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/16458/announcing-interop-2025/
[2]: https://webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/
Apart from not implementing a handful of Google’s sneaky draft fingerprinting proposals (WebUSB, WebMIDI, etc), what is Safari actually lagging on?
Developers, who wanted a real, native SDK, were greatly disappointed (to put it mildly), and in 2008 Apple introduced not only a native iPhone app SDK with developer tooling but an entire app store.
But Jobs wasn't entirely off base. Gmail had replaced dedicated email apps. Apple had implemented native-like widgets in Mobile Safari as well as touch input, javascript canvas support, and audio support. Today you can implement a video streaming client (Netflix), game streaming client (Amazon Luna), groupware client (Discord, Slack, Teams), or even a whole office suite (Office 365) in Safari. Even many "native" mobile apps are basically just shells on web apps.
Or it could all go to shit. Hard to say.
This loss of funding will be good for them, they can focus on a browser instead of stupid things.
I think the main reasons are to sabotage Firefox and to increase their partnerships with the other FAANGs.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Of course, monopolists and their toadies don’t acknowledge all of their dirty behavior.
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.
But if downloading apps becomes the norm again (like every online store asking you to get their app and an extra app for a discount program), I expect that socially engineering less technical users into downloading malware will become much easier.
The real problem, of course, is backwards compatibility.
But practically? How many sites actually offer an innovative and/or mobile-first version of their website anymore?
There was definitely a time when we had websites delivering various layouts based on the viewport size of the user agent. CSS media queries, flexible layouts, etc. were all very important innovations for a very short lived period of time.
Now, every serious web presence has moved on to offering their own mobile app, pushing users that direction. The browser was stubborn and erred on the side of privacy. So it didn't quite offer all the integrated (ahem, intrusive) means to interact with the user's device in order to bleed every penny and every bit of data mined from your usage and behaviors.
So I don't see anything lovely in the current situation at all. The traditional web -- you know the one where you surf with a web browser to discover the world -- has been dying for quite some time. It might even be dead and we just don't realize it yet.
We don't need web browser parity with mobile apps. We just need the web to be what the web is good at. It's a lost cause thinking that the web browser will ever integrate with a portable device quite the same as a native app. Those days are gone.
If Apple didn't do everything in their power to slow down the adoption of PWAs you might have seen it take off by now. They still won't allow you to easily install a PWA to your homescreen, you basically have to be a power user (a reader here, and maybe not even then) to know about it.
I want an America where competition thrives again.
Instead we have endless complaints about what Google does with Chrome, and how complex it is :\",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browser...
In practice the rebasing costs are so high that everyone shrugged and said they had no choice but to go along with it.
Chromium is open source, but not designed for anyone except Google to develop it. Nothing malicious about it, it's just that building a healthy contributor community is a different thing to uploading some source code. If you've ever worked with the Chromium codebase you'll find you have to reverse engineer it to work things out. The codebase is deliberately under-architected (a legacy of the scars of working on Gecko), so many things you'd expect to be well defined re-usable modules that could be worked on independently of Google are actually leaky hacks whose API changes radically depending on what platform you're compiling for, what day of the week it is, etc. Even very basic things like opening a window isn't properly abstracted in a cross platform manner, last time I looked, and at any moment Google might land a giant rewrite they were working on in private for months, obliterating all your work at a stroke.
There are reasons for all of this... Chrome is a native app that tries to exploit the native OS as much as possible, and they don't want to be tied down by lowest-common-denominator internal abstractions or API commitments. But if you view Chrome as an OS then the API churn makes Linux look like a stroll through a grassy meadow.
I'm guessing you're specifically referring to Gecko's early over-use of XPCOM, which the Gecko team itself had to clean up in a long process of deCOMtamination [1].
I'm hopeful that if Servo ever gets enough funding to become a serious contender among browser engines (hey, KHTML was once an underdog too), that it might walk a middle path between overuse of COM-ish ABIs and what you described about Chromium. Servo is already decomposed into many smaller Rust crates; this provides a pretty strong compile-time boundary between modules. Yet those modules are all statically linked, and in a release build, that combined program gets the full benefit of LTO. Of course, where trait objects are used, there's still dynamic dispatch via vtables, but the point is that one can get strong modularity without using something COM-ish everywhere.
Incidentally, the first time I built Chromium (or more specifically, CEF) from source in late 2012, I was impressed as I watched hundreds of static libraries being linked into one big binary. Then as I studied the code (though not deeply enough to learn the things you described), I saw that Chromium didn't use anything COM-ish internally (though CEF provided a COM-ish ABI on top). That striking contrast with Gecko's architecture (which I had previously worked with) stuck with me. I wonder how much the heavily reliance on static linking and LTO (meaning whole-program optimization), combined with the complete lack of COMtamination, contributed to Chrome's speed, which was one of its early selling points.
[1]: Mozilla used to have a dedicated wiki page about deCOMtamination, but I can no longer find it.
2) You're being facetious if you're saying Firefox is much worse. Feature sets and performance are very similar. Most people would not notice the difference if reskinned
2.1) ditto for Safari or any of the chromium browsers.
3) a monopoly is good for noone (even the monopoly)
2) Without the funding from google search, Firefox's future is very much in question. Unlike Apple and MS, Mozilla doesn't really have other funds to pull from to maintain a browser.
We've gone too far. Give us back html homepages and executables you can run if you'd like something crazier
I dont think a browser being more complex than a person can grasp is an important aspect/problem that needs rectifying.
It absolutely should be. And arguably, is - there are multiple tiny OS projects that are somewhat useable
But the OP's implication is that there ought to be a fully working browser (that satisfies the standards of the day), but creatable from someone in their garage.
That hasn't been true for cars, appliances or any modern equipment for ages. And the same phenomenon being applicable to software isn't really that unimaginable (nor a problem).
Personally, I don't see that as progress. I don't need touch screens and surveillance everywhere in every major purchase I make. I fail to see what we have gotten in exchange for all the increased complexity.
For 97% of the world, there are four operating systems: Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS. There are three browsers: Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The rest is an irrelevant sidenote that only hobbyists and developers care about, existing at the grace of the megacorporations that sponsor them.
Absolutely! Looking at this objectively, most of the web and browser developments over the last two decades have been for the benefit of Big Tech and business—not typical web users.
These developments have been forced on users to allow that mob to sell us more stuff, confine what we do, and spy on us and collect our statistics etc. Moreover, complicated web browsers provide a larger surface/more opportunites for attack.
Everything I want to do on the Web I could do with a browser from the early 2000s.
I mostly run my browsers without JavaScript. That kills most ads and makes pages load so much faster (as pages are much, much smaller). Without JavaScript I often see a single webpage drop from over 7MB down to around 100kB.
7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the hell do we users put up with this shit?
It seems to me if all that Google infrastructure were to be busted up and browsers went their own way then the changes in the browser ecosystem would eventually force lower common denominator standards (more basic APIs, back to HTML, etc.).
With simper web tech being the only guaranteed way of communicating with all Web uses this would force the sleazeballs and purveyors of crap and bad behavior to behave more openly and responsibly. Also, users would be able to mount better defenses against the remaining crap.
In short, the market would be less accessible unless they reverted to lower tech/LCD web standards, and that'd be a damn good thing for the average web user.
That's mostly due to insane web "frameworks" like React, and developers who (systematically) overuse and misuse them, and then test their websites on WiFi/5G and iPhones with superfast chips so they don't notice (their users do). The solution is to increase the capabilities of "native" Javascript and CSS, and put in massive effort into interoperability so web devs stop feeling the need for frameworks as "compatibility shims" (looking at you, IE and Safari). Those solutions are exactly what browser makers (sans Apple) have been focusing on lately.
The solution you recommend would have the exact opposite effect of what you intend.
It depends on how one works and what one has to do and or wants to achieve. I've pretty much worked the Web without say JavaScript since it was first released. In fact, I even used to turn off the 'scripts' setting in Internet Explorer it's that long ago.
Over that time I've become addicted to the raw speed of page rendering sans JS, similarly the lack of annoying 'jitters' and hesitations in page rendering that it causes. Same goes for the absence of ads, etc. In fact, I've rarely had need to recourse to ad-blockers as I see so few ads without JS enabled.
Is working without or with very limited JS use an impediment? For many it clearly it is because Big Tech and vested interests have forced the tech down the throats of users in places where its use is not essential. For me however the Web mostly sans JS is not a problem. I've used the Web since its inception and I do everything I want, and that's always been so.
Occasionally, I'm forced to use JS when purchasing something so I'll first determine what I want sans JS then clear caches etc. And sometimes I even switch browsers to make the purchase—I see no need to give these snoopers more data than absolutely necessary, I expect the same privacy online as I'd get from walking into a retail shop and paying cash. So should everyone.
Sites that force JS I back out of faster than entering them—there are plenty more fish in the sea so to speak—more than I can ever consume in my lifetime. For example, on news sites that force JS and block access there are others running the same stories that do not, only neophytes aren't aware of that.
I cannot think of one instance where I've been locked out of such info and not found an alternative source for not having used JavaScript.
Enabling and disabling JS is dead easy on my browsers, my JS icon is red when it's off and green when on. A single click changes the state and a page refresh reloads the page in whatever state I want, it's dead easy to work this way.
Same happens on my phones, when I buy a new phone it takes me some while before I even insert the SIM as I first have to delouse it of all the Google and vendor shit—there's not one Google service I use or have need to use, there are many alternatives, NewPipe, F-droid, etc., etc.
I've nothing against JS, only the way it's used and much abused. What's desperately needed are JS browser engines that allow users to manage its functionality, what it's allowed to do—to kill access to user data by default or as specified, and or supply randomized crap data back to snoopers and so on so that users can take back control of their Web browsing.
Your point is only valid if the user wants certain enhanced features which is not always the case. For example, information sites and government services etc. that convey essential information do not need JS, likewise they don't even need CSS.
Look at it this way: written text contains the same information whether it's displayed in system typeface fonts, courier monospace or Garamond. Sure, Garamond looks much nicer and fancier but it's not essential to convey information. Same goes for much of the other overrated and much abused internet standards.
Of course, that statement will cause you apoplexy if you're a web developer for two reasons, likely your income depends on it, and second it's a notion so foreign to and removed from internet developers' thinking/daily experience that it's inconceivable to them. Well, enough of us outside that circle are now thinking this way not to let the notion die. Perhaps also you're not old enough to remember when everything was simple and we got our information in system or courier typefaces. Those limitations did not stop users from doing the essentials. The new generation of Web developers either have never kn...
This might not be cheap to serve, but it’s cheap to build, and it makes you wonder about the intersection and inflection of those cost curves. And of course we haven’t spent decades optimizing for it.
Don't get me wrong.. REST APIs, HTTP, HTML5, all wonderful. But as a user, the cost/benefits of ubiquitous JavaScript in depth simply to win interactivity and single page apps at the cost of um, everything wrong with the web (and by extension much of the world economy via surveillance capitalism) are a bit suspect.
Practically at this point it’s configuring a Skia render context. This gives a known api to target for the graphics stuff.
There is near 0 value for designers to pain themselves over this.
The design interface should be 85% graphical.
The implementation should be a runtime for a configurable context and it should be configurable with code.
The ui given to designers should be a graphical tool. There could be many, many such tools!
I’m writing this as a graphics engineer who has followed this for over 20 years. I would love to hear engineering based counter arguments to this pov.
It's a lot easier to maintain a WebAssembly engine than a JavaScript engine.
On the do-browsers-need-js point, you might be interested in:
https://github.com/wasi-gfx/webidl2wit
Browsers were being used for more complex things, which resulted in companies adopting hacky solutions to enable more performance.
WASM is seeking to develop a consistent standard for these use cases.
Most people don't need insane levels of backwards compatibility or intense PWA support. That's just cruft that slows everything down and increases the attack surface for, to the user, no real gain.
Perhaps what we need is a lot of lightweight general-use browsers (based on a small number of engines) and then some heavyweight power-user browsers that can WASM to their hearts' content.
Large numbers of users use lots of features. That doesn't change that most of them use none of them. WASM would continue to exist. It just doesn't need to be in every browser.
No, what you mean is 'most greenfield web dev projects don't need...'.
Most people do need those things, because assuming there's no civilisation spanning project to literally rewrite 90% of the web, without them their sites would break.
Sites most people visit do not require backwards compatiblity. And aside from like Google Docs, I doubt most folk are doing anything with WASM (outside plugins).
Look, in a world where Google subsidises browser development, this isn't an issue. We don't need to compromise. But if that funding stream disappears, you do have to compromise. And I'd argue a simple browser doing away with some of the more-complicated stuff would be (a) maintainable and (b) popular enough to pay itself back.
I think it could—it’s sort of the case on mobile—but it’s not a view I hold with the strongest conviction.
People say HTML/CSS/JS/WASM is complex, but the Ladybird team is proving that a very small team can make a working browser in a few years. Thanks to the efforts of dedicated developers behind browsers, most of the web API, including rendering algorithms and such, has been painstakingly written out in detail.
Browser complexity is made more tractable by Wasm, not less. Maybe remove JS now that Wasm exists.
Clearly you’re not doing much front line web development.
Web browsers are incredibly capable and all the features they add are making browsers better and life easier for developers and experience better for users.
This is the sort of comment that back end developers make, who hate front end development.
I will concede the features are very useful for developers to push algorithmic slop and walled gardens onto us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't understand. If Google is paying 80% of Mozilla browser development, how could stopping those payment not affect Mozilla funding decisions?
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.
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.
You want to pay for a skin that’s fine. Doesn’t change the underlying problem.
Of course, people are paying for browsers, even if they don't know they are. WebKit and Edge are maintained by companies in a way similar to how Chrome is maintained by Google. It's just the alternatives to those two that are now in danger, and all of their derivatives (Electron, Tauri, and anything built on top of that).
Ah, but this is something, and therefore, it must be done [1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism
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.
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.
[1] I think Firefox will survive. Orion browser, which has been my main browser for maybe a year now, was developed with far less money than the Firefox budget and something like only two people. Is this a fair comparison? I have no idea.
Is this a serious question? Orion uses WebKit which practically speaking is like 80% of what people know as "a browser" and where an insane amount of the effort and money goes. There are like 30 various WebKit-derived zero-features 1-man browsers out there on GitHub, they even show up here sometimes. Firefox maintains its own entire engine called Gecko, it's completely incomparable. The actual development cost of your browser is subsidized almost entirely by Apple (and Kagi's VC money), make no mistake about it.
So a skin for chrome.
If you are a company that wants to have control over the browser market and ensure that it doesn't get taken away, you should contrive to have the funding depend on you continuing to control it.
The current situation is not an accident.
As one possibility, the remedies could include Google paying reperations to Mozilla for the damage their anti-competitive behavior has done to Firefox, without Mozilla being obligated to use Google as the search engine, to give Mozilla more time to find alternative funding. I'm not sure that is necessarily the best option, but I'm sure they could come up with something that doesn't leave Mozilla high and dry.
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?
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
I agree with him that software engineers should be making the decisions in Mozilla.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
But now, we're stagnating again. So maybe drying up those funds will be part of the cure.
Yes, it definitely took the big slap from Apple to kill Flash once and for all.
That was the final blow, yup. But the web was still a clunky mess of plugins, broken standards, and browser-specific hacks.
Google pushed to make the web better. And through Chrome they helped bring WebKit to multiplatform: I still remember I couldn't even get rounded edges or nice typography support across platforms, only in Safari.
It wasn’t until Chrome took off that the rest started paying attention.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-26-netflix-finally-brings-w... [2] https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-at-netflix-721d1f143...
Also the ActiveX security model was pretty horrific.
It’s basically a statue of liberty made of ductape and chewing gum, then reinforced with formula-1 level engineering and novel materials research.
The building blocks and lessons learned could be used for something novel (nope not gonna happen it’s permanent now). WASM, json, Skia renderer, pretty awesome v8 virtual machine etc etc … all of that are pretty neat.
I guess the key thing is what is the value of browser now?
It’s the ui to bazillion networked business and government systems, productivity tools etc.
I would argue the sticky moat here is not the web interface, though, but the data and the familiar usage patterns. _Theoretically_ the ux is portable to any system with vector graphics renderer and the data itself should be (a long stretch right) independent of the client ui.
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.
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.
[1]: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
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.
It’s all been downhill from there.
To me, it's been downhill pretty much before it got started. I'm always feeling "behind" having missed the fun at any stage.
00-10 had a lot of forums in which I remember being very fun. At the same time it brought in the age of popups and ads everywhere.
10+ brought in the age of large social media and the feeling everything was trying to scam you. A lot of the forums that felt special and interesting started disappearing for multiple reasons, but mostly their userbase had moved to FB or something else huge. Then those large sites started moderating anything interesting away.
In the 80's, telecom operators were complaining that TCP/IP and packet transmission was a regression over circuit commutation.
So it looks like the internet has progressed through perpetual regression.
I'd love to share your optimism that things will keep improving in the long run, but I don't see what you're basing that off.
What you are saying seems much larger than the web itself. I don't think Chromium or for that matter "technology" is responsible for that. I think it has more to do with massive capital in funding technology startups building on every random idea which in turn led to the tremendous demand for platforms with the promise of "shipping fast" at the cost of short sighted technical decisions.
On other platforms it’s still much more the norm to stick to proven tech for anything non-trivial and to only adopt new APIs when there’s high adoption and adequate justification for doing so.
Lots of innovation has happened, don't get me wrong. And maybe the web browser as we know is "mature" and therefore lacking need to evolve.
But I'd argue (as I did in a sibling comment) that maybe this drying up of funds could pave the way for new innovation. The web, the creative parts of the web, and definitely the internet as well, didn't have monster budgets to drive its innovation originally. It had some (DARPA, et al), but not like today.
Sigh, yes, even keeping copy/paste working is problematic for the last several years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40886954
Luckily the top comment in that thread says "this is the process working" so I guess we're good
they should never be disabled. If I want to copy the letters from the OK/Cancel buttons—which you also tried to eliminate—or the keyboard keycaps you are displaying, I should be able to; what's it to you what I want to do?
How much do you love it when you are using a PDF of a scanned ancient text or a cellphone snapshot you just took of a streetsign, and your device lets you copy the text? This is what computers are for, to be our servants, not to be Google's overseer.
step 1: HN, make article titles selectable. wtf!?
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.
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.
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
All of it was ad money, and a lot of these innovations were also targeted at better dealing with ads (Flash died because of how taxing it was, mobile browsers just couldn't do it. JavaScript perf allowed these ads to come back full force)
The net balance of how much web technology advanced vs how much ad ecosystems developed is pretty near 0 to me, if not slightly negative.
Don‘t be evil.
At some point the stopped improving the browser for the users and changed to improving the browser for Google.
That’s what mattered.
Disagree with that. All the privacy issues people have problem with now were already a problem in 2007. But being the media darling along with Submarine PR Google didn't get much bad press.
There were lots of other things too, including their site breaking Firefox as well as Chrome, their promise not to make another browser.
Seems they don’t read to the end.
> Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.
Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.
> V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.
No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
> Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.
That's useful but only because the bloatware above. If you didn't give code running in the browser that much power you wouldn't need sandboxing.
> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.
> SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.
It's also a binary protocol that cannot be debugged/tested via plain telnet, which places a barrier to entry for development. Perhaps enhances Google's market domination by requiring their libraries and via their control of the standard.
>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
So should we not deliver advanced sandboxed cross platform applications for any platform, and instead deliver unsandboxed native code for all possible platforms? ActiveX called, it wants to say thanks for the endorsement and that it told you so.
And no more zoom meetings because somebody's Mac might not go to sleep? I'm with you on that one, brother!
You do not need to "deliver" inside a bloated VM you know.
Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these days.
> And no more zoom meetings
Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.
>Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these days.
Then Java applets? Oops, that's a bloated VM too.
And how is an M4 emulating x86 code or jitting WASM code not also a bloated VM? Bloated VMs are here to stay.
>> And no more zoom meetings
>Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.
Yay, we've found common ground! Want to chat about it on zoom? ;)
> Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.
They were not the only contributor (I was the technical lead for Mozilla's efforts in this space), but they were by far the largest contributor, in both dollars and engineering hours.
Well that's just biased. Saying application is bloated (which is often not true) is the result of an entire ecosystem, has something to do with an interpreter, is ridiculous. Any qualified software engineer can see the fault in such a comment. You probably know that as well.
So I consider your comment trolling.
That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether Chrome has actually steered the browser ecosystem in the wrong direction, while simultaneously eroding a lot of the diversity that once existed.
Honestly I can't believe that anyone who was around when Chrome came out would say this. IE7 was around, and terrible. Firefox was trying hard, as was Opera, but web tech has become infinitely better with Chrome around, and Google funding it. Without Google funding Firefox as well, Firefox would be nowhere near what it is today.
Not really. That was done more by the greed of the MPEG alliance.
Back in the days when <video> was first proposed, VP8 was required to be supported as a codec by all browsers. This was removed as a requirement after Apple stated they were never going to support it, but the other browsers still implemented VP8 because it was codec free. Then Google implemented H.264 in Chrome. Mozilla only implemented H.264 in Firefox after it became clear that Google's announcement that they were going to rip H.264 out of Chrome was a bald-faced lie, making H.264 a de facto codec requirement for web browsers.
Having won, then the MPEG Alliance got greedy with their next version. H.265 upped the prices on its license agreement, and additionally demanded a cut of all streaming revenue. It got worse--the alliance fragment, and so you had to pay multiple consortia the royalties for the codec (although only one of them had the per-video demand).
It was in response to this greed that the Alliance for Open Media was created, which brought us AV1. I don't know how important Google is to the AOM, but I will note that, at launch, it did contain everybody important to the web video space except for Apple (which, as noted earlier, is the entity that previously torpedoed the attempt to mandate royalty-free codecs for web video).
and paved way for Google monopoly. They literally threatened to pull their support from devices if devices don't implement AV1 in hardware.
They are now no different to Microsoft with Windows Media.
Chrome would still have won because it was force pushed by google.com, every google service, every google software nad large part of 3rd party software had it as bundled (checked by default) install.
And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would still be a major player in the browser engine race today. Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser engine did.
Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.
Which incidentally also made it much more complex to implement, giving Google control over the web.
By LOC: Windows 95 is estimated to have 10-15 million LOC, Chrome 30-40 million.
By binary size: Windows 95 took about 50 MB, Chrome 200-300 MB.
By architecture design: the codebase of Windows 95 is fairly shallow and monolithic, while Chrome is very modular (think V8, Blink, WASM, sandboxes...) and uses other dependencies.
It's like saying that a modern car is hitting more than a model T from 100 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It does not. Nothing about Java provides a sandboxed runtime environment.
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.
We simply don't know how browsers would have developed in the past years if Google did not have a monopoly. However, we know that monopolies are almost never good for consumers. Therefore, there is a high chance that in an alternative timeline, where one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world did not have a monopoly on browsers, we as consumers, would have been better off.
Browsers used to try new ideas like RSS, widgets, shared and social browser sessions. Interfaces to facilitate low-friction integration with the rest of your life, and to multiplex data sources so that it's not a hassle to have many providers for [news, entertainment, social] experiences.
Likely no coincidence that this innovation languished once monopolies started pumping money into the ecosystem.
Everything in the early 2000s was insecure and critical.
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.
Such a deeply weird outlook.
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.
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.
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.
Every time they try something, the open source crowd cries out in pain because money isn't going towards their three preferred bugs instead, and the mainstream doesn't care about anything Mozilla does.
They have made stupid decisions to be sure, and the money squandered at the top is definitely infuriating, but no amount of incentives or donations is going to replace the money Google is handing Mozilla to get out of the antitrust laws.
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.
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.