All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025
All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding
I know this sounds bad, but maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Necessity is the mother of invention and maybe browser technology should be funded by governments instead of privately owned advertising megacorps?
This is great in my opinion. Web browsers are infernally complicated and need to be simplified. CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess. I would love to see large swathes of both of them eliminated from existence, and maybe the maintenance burden leaves a very small chance that we could start to see some of these technologies starting to get dropped. I personally would love to see web components disappear most of all.
Regardless, Google really fucked over the web when they decided to add all these unnecessary technologies to Chrome. No doubt a EEE strategy to take over all browser development on the web. Something should have been done much earlier about it, but now we'll have to see how this mess gets sorted out.
It's about 100 billion times either to create GUI using Godot than HTML + Javascript + CSS.
CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess.
Why would less money make people do more work to fix this?
Nobody can make a successful browser that is simpler. The moment a user hits a website that no longer works, they are going back to their old browser.
All these new features exist because websites replaced every single program most people used. Web browser now have to be capable of doing anything pretty well. It's not some grand conspiracy to take over the internet, it's providing the features devs want so they can deliver the things they want in the modern multiplatform no-install world.
Of course developers wanted this. They wanted to push all the complexity into the browser so they didn't have to worry about it themselves. Google was happy to provide this because it meant that they could be the only ones that could write a browser. That was the "conspiracy" you're talking about - but it wasn't a conspiracy, it was more of a strategy on behalf of Google, who knew that they were the only ones that could provide this level of support, and so if they did it, nobody else would be able to compete with them. Even Microsoft gave up on their own engine.
But the only reason Google could do this is because they were deriving revenue from their advertising monopoly. If their web browser was honestly funded, many, many of the features that we see in Chrome today would have never existed.
Also, I'm not going to argue that things aren't better for developers today than they were before. Sure, web development is much easier these days. But at the same time, I think web applications are way too overengineered. There are lots of things that could be done in simpler ways - for example, why is it necessary to restyle scrollbars, or reimplement standard components like drop-down menus with reimplementations written entirely in Javascript? Things like this are just stupid and having to drop support for trivial things like this in the name of making browsers simpler is well worth it in my opinion.
Just compile everything to webassembly and ship that,using your preferred language and libraries.
Which means that we will get blobs to interact with, instead of JavaScript code that can be "reviewed" or monkey patched away.
Fun times. Thanks, monopolistic assholes like Goggle, Microsoft and Apple.
This is so wild. I really don't miss Flash, but since Steve killed it with the iPhone, Web development has spent more than 10 years to reinvent the ActionScript3 environment and make the entire web depend on it. And who solely prevented AS3 as a web standard from happening? Chris Wilson, Web Standards Tech Lead at Google, in his former role at browser monopolist Microsoft.
Today, every single piece of the web is designed by Google to further their business. And all these fucking Electron applications...
I wasn't aware of that, but it's crazy. Thanks for sharing it. The sad truth is that there are probably lots of other standards that didn't make it into browsers either because Google refused to adopt them in Chrome (JPEG2000 for example, but that's a complicated ). Google had way too much influence over web standards because they had total control of the web browser.
This is a result of Google most likely losing the anti-monopoly trial that's been underway for a while now, which in my book is a Good Thing.
Focusing on one aspect of it being not so good feels counterproductive to me.
Anyhow, let's see how this plays out first. First of all I want to see the upcoming separations/selling off of Google's tentacles actually happening, and actually resulting in significantly less monopoly for Google/Alphabet.
The skeptic in me says that it won't be quite as glorious as I hope, and funding will just flow differently. Who knows, maybe some other power hungry corp will step up.
OP:
maybe browser technology should be funded by government
Yes, but never directly!
maybe browser technology should be funded by governments
Yeah let's make it even easier for them to implement backdoors
If it's free software (which it should be), then we'd be able to see any backdoors they add.
Oh sweet summer child.
I mean, before DOGE ostensibly took over USDS I was aware of it funding open source projects through normal processes just because their continued improvement helped the government function. Making software good for government agencies was one of their mandates.
If I had full faith in the current Mozilla project like I used to, I'd say they could just accept funding through the nonprofit in a similar setup and just do good things.
My point is there are ways to make it work where there is funding without influence. Just corruption and capitalism are fighting against it.
Oh no, where will Apple and MS find the money to continue development!
Yeah but what about the other one?
The only one with a different web browser engine? The only one that is actural competition?
governments
Be careful what you ask for :(.
South Korea mandated internet explorer for all purchase checkout until relatively recently maybe the last 5 years. They had all these pieces built around it so checking out at a website you would have to prove your identity using national ID and then only IE would work.
Be very careful what you ask for.
This doesn't sound bad at all. This sounds like someone other than Google will be able to have a meaningful affect on web development.
unless, say, OpenAI, or Perplexity, or Microsoft buy it, and then cut Mozilla funding.
If only this could lead to scaling down the scope of web technologies so it’s sustainable to develop a browser without that 80% funding.
Wouldn’t be the first time we dropped an ultra complex technology for something much more simple, e.g. DCOM/CORBA for JSON-based RPC.
Nice. Maybe Mozilla will learn to walk by themselves (spoiler: they won't).
That would require us, the users, to donate more.
No it wouldn't.
Stop being a useful idiot.
We happily would if we knew it was going to devs
Or them to charge for it, or take more money from, say, Alphabet, for services rendered.
Any of those options will get its users on the barricades. FF will always be in the hot chair.
In the end you're right, sufficient donations would be the best way.
(And yeah, they made some really dumb decisions. What about Google, Apple and Microsoft? Do they not pay the wrong people?)
I don't consider that as "walking by themselves". Plus, maybe you aren't aware that FF is managed by Mozilla Corp (not the foundation), which can't legally take donations. Thus. The money you donate doesn't find FF development. Last, I'm not an user and I'm not going to donate. I couldn't care less. Mozilla did this to themselves. They can disappear tomorrow, as far as I am concerned.
Title made me think… Aren’t we end of the Browser development cycle yet? What improvement browsers can benefit from now on? What else on the roadmap?
Probably the most important thing is keeping up with security fixes. I'm not an expert in web security, but my impression is that there's a never-ending cat and mouse game between hackers and browser developers to find or patch exploits. And since browsers play such an important role in the activity of hundreds of millions... billions?.. of consumers, it has the largest possible attack surface for hackers to target.
Then there's things like better support for web assembly (how I would love the web dev world to break the JavaScript hegemony), and the constantly shifting web standards that are meant to make websites more capable, easier to program, and more performant. E.g. things like websockets and WebRTC.
Are we at the end of the operating system development cycle? A browser is an operating system that abstracts away your operating system, at this point.
Anyway, there's a lot of ad tech and tracking stuff to be implemented. You'll love it, Google decided so.
It never ends. The browser as we knew it in the early 2000s has become an all-encompassing engine to run all sorts of - well, apps. Can't really call all of it just websites anymore. Media theaters. Secure banking and shopping. Health provider portals. etc etc etc
It never ends.
And the code base has become so vast, so complex, that you can never be 100% sure that it's "finished". Figuratively, there's always someone who dropped a cigarette in the wet cement some time back. That cement will be ever so slightly weaker than the cement surrounding it and might - or might not - break.
I'm not saying I like this, but it is what it is. The Internet of 2025 has very little in common with the internet of [however far you want to go back].
As long as Google doesn't sell Chrome to OpenAI.
NecessaryNecessity is the mother of invention
Thank you, my spell checker was "helping"...
This is another bullet point on the list of MAGA stopping or confusing the flow and accessibility of information.
We are to know nothing about what they are doing in the world, ideally.
No. This is a thinly veiled pr price supporting Google as a monopoly
this is my most controversial take in computing in general:
i’ve always hated the browser. the reason there are only a few working browser engines is that HTTP and the HTML/CSS/JS tech stack is a gigantic pile of tech debt, and even using Chromium and Firefox you run into edge cases where, for certain edge cases, they don’t always follow the specs as defined in these ancient RFCs. and these specs: why tf are they treated as gospel? which software product specs drafted 50 years ago get this kind of reverence? why is it that other GUIs have had tons of iteration, not just of their spec but their full stack implementation (Wayland, .NET, Kotlin Compose, SwiftUI, etc), but we’re all just fine with this mess of janky boomer protocols cuz it lets startups get to market faster? why is downloading an entire app (less some caching) every time you want to use it feel less cumbersome than installing something native to the runtime environment where the protocols can be tightly controlled by the developer and not subject to whatever security and storage protocols whatever browser implementation decides is good for you? cookies? really? the browser should be reimagined with a tighter set of protocols that allow you to look at brochure sites and download content, ie apps. even the best web apps are a janky mess and have never worked better than properly developed desktop GUI. /rant
I think browsers are unique because it's how laypeople interact with their computer the most.
Well, I do think you're wrong about quite a lot of that. So yeah that is in fact controversial. Upvoted.
But I agree websites are a bloated mess that shouldn't be made on a giant javascript stack of unreadable unmaintainable garbage. It'd be cool if we got something more like applets. But then we'd have to design a framework that operates in a sandbox and is limited to only functions that are safe to perform on your computer without trusting the author and make it easy to write so developers can build it and.... we're back at html+css+javascript.
I think the big thing we need to do is fully replace javascript.
Have a look at Gemini and the Gemini capsules. Seems more like what a browser should be, in my opinion.
i know i’m in the minority here so i’m not going to bury myself in this hole, but i do think those are addressable problems. many of them have been addressed. replacing Javascript is exactly what i’m talking about.
there may be a little angst from reading and rereading the “Max-Age” portion of the cookie RFC that caused this trauma
Sounds wonderful