Why are we so at the mercy of Google and Mozilla for web browsers?

The scope of what a "web browser" is has been steadily inflating at an insane rate. Not only that, but a lot of features are basically "required" to be able to deal with modern websites.

You would need a team the size of Chrome's to be able to just _keep up the pace_ and never actually close the feature gap. That's a ludicrous amount of money for an incredibly risky project, since users are very complacent and get attached to their browser choice.

In fact, the browser is so multi-featured and has space for so many individual behaviours that users will get used to specific things (shortcuts, menu behaviours, even the sorting of address autocomplete results) that they develop the same (understandable) attachment to the exact way a browser works, just like what happens with operating systems. Then it's not even a rational choice anymore, and only another equally irrational event would cause them to reconsider their choice (either a major fuck-up by the browser they use, or some apparently inconsequential thing about the alternative).

You could make a feature-slim browser, but it would never reach wide adoption, because non-technical people would still need to open one of the big ones to do their online banking, or make video calls, or whatever.

Whenever this question is asked Apple is left out, please remember that all browsers on iOS are effectively Safari.

In my market (mostly in the UK), 54% of transactions happen on a iOS device. Nearly 60% of transactions are using the Apple Webkit engine when you also count Safari on MacOS.

Apple absolutely dominates browser engines, I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with Safari then test in Firefox/Chrome. Seems completely backwards to do your development mostly with Chrome.

The simple answer is, browsers are brutally hard. Browsers have to support an almost infinite amount of instructions, whether it's html, css, js and now wasm, not to mention the insane amounts of apis, protocols and so on. I mean just open the developer tools and think of the insane amount of work that would have to go into developing something like this. Even Microsoft with thousands of developers at their disposal and finances to double them with a snap of a finger, figured that it's not worth developing a browser engine in-house. That alone speaks volumes.

Chrome has such a market dominance that it effectively determines what 'fully featured' means. Regardless of what the specs say, if something works a certain way in Chrome the layman's expectation is that it should work the same way in every other browser.

> What keeps developers from building an open source alternative?

Well I can't speak for all software developers but I can tell you that for me the juice to squeeze ratio isn't in a good place. I already have a job and it takes up most of my time. The open source movement has turned out to be unsustainable in my eyes since its ideological roots are easily subverted by the project sponsors. Meanwhile commercial closed source software is only viable if you can find paying customers. Virtually no one is willing to shell out for a web browser since there are highly useful 'free' alternatives. Certainly I find it troubling that virtually all the data in the world is being collected, collated, and sold. Most folks don't seem to care enough about the privacy concerns to open up their wallets though. Google has effectively 'won' the browser wars barring a government solution. So why should I or any other software engineer enter into a David v. Goliath fight for virtually no pay or appreciation when I could go work on the next big web app and make a small fortune instead?

See: How come an internet browser is millions of code lines?

https://www.quora.com/How-come-an-internet-browser-is-millio...

RedHat still offers Konqueror (Safari's father, and Chrome's grandfather) in their repositories. I think that would likely be a better base to revive a community browser.

After some discussion of suckless.org last week, I decided to load "surf," the suckless webkit browser, on OpenBSD.

The URL appears to be specified only on the command line, not in the GUI (the Ctrl-G sequence in the manual page does not appear to work). I can't get it to accept a self-signed cert (easy in any other browser). No back/forward button in the default GUI, and I can't get them to come up.

Browsers are hard, and they require a funded and dedicated organization to maintain them.

> Why are we at the mercy of …

We aren’t at anyone’s mercy.

Nobody is forcing us to use browsers from google or Mozilla.

We are all free to implement our own UA. The specs are all open standards.

What stops us from writing browsers is the sheer volume of time and effort required - hundreds of thousands of hours of highly skilled work. That is all.

In the absence of such an effort, we would be left high and dry, with no way to experience the web.

Fortunately, that isn’t the case, because some others have done the work and allow us to use their browsers.

For that, we might feel grateful.

We might also be wary, and try to be aware of any adverse consequences of using someone else’s thing. That’s common sense, but it is still not a case of being at someone’s mercy. That situation loomed when one company sought to control the standards for the web as well as the implementation, but what we have today is different to that.

We are at the mercy of Google. Mozilla is a non-entity at this point, getting a fat paycheck from GOOG and spending it on inane initiatives.

It makes sense once you accept that a browser engine is roughly equivalent in scale and goals of the userland for a modern desktop OS.

The complexity equivalent to regulatory capture. I once got banned from /r/firefox for implying intent on googles behalf here. Apparently that is a conspiracy theory.

In the end there are however clear incentives and profiteers of the development. Google has an incentive to keep the web complex enough to the point where they are the monopoly. Same goes for governments and complexity of security mechanisms.

How ever we got here, now google is the internet and security is achieved by things like TLS. Its inefficiencies that are profitable for existing power structures.

Which also makes it a lucky coincidence that mozilla is behaving as user -unfriendly as they do.

The web is too complex, and also a moving target. You don't just write a browser and be done with it.

Are you prepared to devote your entire life to it? Why not?

Developing a modern feature-rich browser is a gargantuan task and you need many skilled (expensive) developers to work on it; easily millions of USD yearly in salaries alone. Some donations here and there won't cut it, you basically need FAANG money to do it. Additionally, at least the last time I checked, Mozilla has made it impossible to donate to Firefox development; donations go to their activism branch, not browser dev [1]. In 2020 they also fired 25% of their work force [2]. They'll probably sunset the product altogether within a few years and that leaves us with an ever-greater market share of Chrome and derivatives, and from here on out it's hard to conceive of a viable strategy to develop an independent browser. Maybe a government or EU could do it, but that comes with its own set of problems.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firef...

It takes a huge, lengthy effort to make a browser that is close enough to standards compliance and performant enough that people would be happy using it.

Even if you do all those things, there's little guarantee that your efforts would be noticed by many people, since you would need to do a LOT of marketing (especially to get your browser installed by default in MS/macOS worlds).

The costs are just not worth the risk-adjusted rewards.

We are not at the mercy of Mozilla

It's Chrome/Chromium-variants vs Safari

Firefox lost the war many years ago

Opera was the best browser imo, i wish it took off, nowadays it's just a chromium variant; wich is sad

> What exactly is keeping developers from making a fully featured open source web browser not at the mercy of Google or the browser's developers?

It is incredibly difficult to build a web browser because of the sheer complexity and scope. You are essentially building an entire platform on the scale of an operating system that must support legacy features and behavior from decades ago. Users expect everything to just work, and if you can't make it work, then they have little incentive to use your product. Just ask Microsoft[0].

[0] https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge/blob/7d69268e85e198c...

Apple's Safari also uses a distinct rendering engine, Webkit. Chrome is based on Blink which was forked from Webkit and the two are quite different now, including in terms of supported features.

Too much barriers to entry, not enough incentives.

Building a Chrome competing browser from scratch is probably as hard as building a production ready GUI OS, maybe harder.

It's hard to get money from it, look at Brave.

Maintaining compatibility in web apps is a problem thats mostly been irradiated since MS finally dropped IE. In terms of architectural decisions you are going to end up very closely tied to Googles design decisions if you want to maintain full compatibility going forward.

Theres really no winning here, FF already has to follow in Chromes footsteps because of how dominant they are in the market. They have all the decision making power on "what the web supports".

The answer to this question is the same answer to: Why did Chrome displace Firefox?

The standards. Google (and the others) have introduced so many that implementing a conforming browser from scratch is basically impossible.

Because we were at the mercy of NCSA Mosaic, Netscape launched as a Mosaic killer. Then as Microsoft awoke in alarm because they were at the mercy of Netscape they launched Internet Explorer, effectively killing Netscape which spun out Firefox in response. Google became alarmed by the prospect of being at the mercy of Microsoft and so launched Chrome.

There's a huge barrier to entry if you start from scratch. You can fork an existing browser of course, but what would you change if you could so?

It seems difficult for a browser to differentiate itself these days, as the existing ones have had the time to build out fairly complete feature sets, and they can just copy each other if there is some big new idea.

You named the closest solution we have to the Chrome hegemony- Firefox. It's a fully-featured browser that's open-source and maintained by a nonprofit organization.

Browsers are complicated. Like, desktop operating system levels of complicated. Think about it- multitasking, resource allocation, I/O management, graphics, file management, networking... these are things your browser does.

If you really want to get into the weeds, check out Surf (http://surf.suckless.org). Its features include "the ability to display websites and follow links."

> What exactly is keeping developers from making a fully featured ... web browser ... ?

I think the biggest issue is the complexity and scope of work. If you want a web browser, I can make you one over the weekend, it just will only work with a tiny subset of pages. To fully handle every website is so hard even Mozilla gave up on their rewrite of their engine, Servo. If it was easy, they probably would have finished.

If you are suggesting, "Why don't we all pay a bunch of progammers to make the world's best browser that is everything I want?", you can try, but everyone has different ideals about what a browser should be.

Just looking at Firefox's docs[0]: "The clone can take from 40 minutes to two hours (depending on your connection) and the repository should be less than 5GB (~ 20GB after the build)."

It would take some time (to say the least) to even start building a new browser capable of what Firefox can do given that size.

[0] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...

While servo shares an ecosystem with Firefox it is far more independent than chromium is so I would suggest it is the most likely emerging alternative browser engine and browsers built on it could become roughly as different from firefox as safari is to chrome.

It's not like other areas are so different, the number of compilers that are keeping up with LLVM and GCC has dwindled to the point that I can't name one without checking if it is EoL.

Shouldn't the title be "Why are we so at the mercy of Google for web browsers?" since Google is the one that financially pays for Mozilla to develop Firefox? If Google were to pull their funding, Firefox would cease to exist.

Or maybe it should really be "Why are we so at the mercy of Google and Apple for web browsers?" Since Safari is really the only other mainstream browser that is not entirely under Google's thumb.

A few thoughts.

I responded to a nested comment elsewhere saying I have seen one Firefox fork in 2021. Replay.io. A neat web debugger featured here.

I was mildly surprised Microsoft went with Chromium. Not forking Gecko or some mix of stuff that are not Blink. Or even Blink itself. I may be incorrect here, and maybe the separation of engine and browser is not as big as I’m thinking, but every major Chromium based browser including Edge are forks of Chromium, not just Blink. I don’t know how big of a difference that is.

I wonder what could have been if Microsoft had moved on from Trident Edge earlier. Say internally two years earlier than our timeline. If they still would have gone the Chromium route. With more time, they could’ve ironed out enough issues like Netflix videos and Firefox. Microsoft may have had enough of being the butt of jokes, especially, by people in tech and geek circles, and wouldn’t want to try anything remotely outside the norm (aka Chromium). Putting aside XUL extensions, the other dismissal by people is Firefox still having far fewer extensions than Chromium. Even with all three major browsers/engines using web extension api now. Msft may have not wanted to deal with the PR of that either.

It would be really nice if Gecko and its future had Microsoft too. I’m sure some would say they’d rather the behemoth that is Microsoft not be allied and working on Gecko/Firefox. Yet It has to be better than the current situation. Unless Microsoft forks Blink and has their own engine in the future.

Apple never putting any effort into the Windows Safari app, no less, an Android version is also a bummer.

The final bummer: Firefox and Mozilla getting so much crap from tech and geek communities. I never looked up how they spend their money, but being so cynically against Firefox’s every minor possible misstep is not helping.

This comment may appear to be an apologist for Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla. It’s not that. Firefox continues to lose market share. Safari is sticking to its 2.5 OSes (if iOS and iPadOS are 1.5) and i believe have a better chance of losing ground unless something like their web extension library quickly grows or is able to use most Chromium extensions. All this to say. My focus is on Chromium not having a 90%+ market share on the three desktop browsers and 95%+ on Android.

And yes Apple not allowing competing browser engines on iOS is lame.

What everyone else has said about why there are so few new cleanroom browsers. If you're looking for one of the few examples that isn't based on Blink, Gecko, or WebKit, it's Flow. https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/

The web browser went from being a way to browse hyperlinked documents to a virtual machine used for application development. The scope for both has ballooned to the point where you would need a large team and some kind of feature to attract enough users to make it worth building something new.

Have you started such a project yourself? Have you joined one that already exists, such as Nyxt?

Oh wee. I knew most of this thread content. And I actually read most of it here already.

For some reason I just downed on me tonight : we ‘re stuck with chrome, Firefox is gonna bail at some point and safari will stay in Apple pocket.

Is that a fair assessment ?

Now that Mozilla isn't working on Servo anymore, does this mean Servo failed?

Did you try making one? Did you try paying somebody else to do one?

We should re-focus the web on html+css and server side stuff and less on JS and other client side crap.

browsers have taken the place of operating systems.

why are we at the mercy of windows and mac os? alternative operating systems exist, just like alternative operating systems exist. but their marketshare is small.

Because writing operating systems is difficult.

Security.

Brave.

Because we stomped on Microsoft for providing a web browser?

Mozilla, lol. been a while since I've seen that installed except for debugging a nasty bug in Chrome