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.
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.
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.
Dropping support for that stuff means breaking 95% of the websites people currently use. It’s a non-starter, it cannot ever happen, even if you think it would be for the best.
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.
Google was happy to provide this because it meant that they could be the only ones that could write a browser.
Word. That, and so many other things.
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.
Don’t give them ideas!
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
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?
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.
That sounds like Microsoft bribed the shit out of SK 20 years ago.
But, yeah… Elect monkeys, get circus.
Also: be careful who you vote into office.
Too late
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.
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.
Nice. Maybe Mozilla will learn to walk by themselves (spoiler: they won’t).
That would require us, the users, to donate more.
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.
What DO you use? There’s literally three usable browsers out there, one mismanages its finances, one is Apple and one is responsible for the entire web browsing experience turning to shit because they run the browser that everyone uses so they can just ignore the W3 specs and other browsers get the blame when they don’t adopt Google’s tracking-riddled APIs.
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].
We had Java Web Start decades ago, but we decided to design web apps as stupidly as possible instead.
Can you ELI not a js coder?
Well first of all, Javascript is a shitty, poorly-designed language hacked together in a week by an asshole who went on to be famous for other such ‘great’ things as getting fired from Mozilla for homophobia and founding a crypto scam wrapped in a protection racket (Brave browser).
But that’s not even the whole of it. The entire concept of using scripting to turn a web page into an application is fundamentally flawed from the start, because HTML is a Language designed to Mark up HyperText documents and was never intended to give the
developerweb designer fine-grained control over the rendering at all, let alone consistently across browsers. It was designed for the user to be able to customize the fonts and colors and margins and whatnot so that he could read the document better! So then eventually somebody finally comes up with the bright idea to quit trying to render everything to HTML and just give programmers a fucking rectangle in a VM they can use arbitrary programming languages to draw on instead, and that’s how WebAssembly became a thing.On top of that, even when you do manage to hack together some semblance of a functioning UI library (much like a serial killer crafting a suit made from the skin of his victim), after wasting orders of magnitude extra effort compared with just using an appropriate technology to begin with and while fundamentally breaking the entire design intent of the World Wide Web in the process, you still end up with your shitty UI running inside the page viewport of a web browser with its own UI surrounding it, for no fucking reason. And worse, the elements of that browser UI range from useless to misleading to things that break your app if the user clicks them (e.g. the back button), forcing you to do even more work to break the browser UI so it stops functioning as intended first. So then eventually somebody finally comes up with the bright idea to spend even yet more effort to strip the browser UI out of the browser, and that’s how Electron apps became a thing. But even then, the app still doesn’t match the system’s native UI and has to re-implement shit like dialog boxes because there’s multiple layers of cruft between it and the OS’s actual GUI API.
So anyway, the gist is that “web developers” have spent the last several decades piling shit upon shit upon shit hacking around a design that was fundamentally not fit for purpose (or rather, that I would argue was very fit for purpose but that purpose was not making goddamn applications!), only to finally start to approach some pale imitation of a decent thing now, by ripping out most of what they did before.
Meanwhile, all the way back in 2001, they could’ve just fucking written a Java app, with a Swing UI that had only one layer between it and the OS native GUI API and which would open in its own proper application window (that would have its own icon and minimize to the taskbar properly and act in pretty much all the other ways a first-class native application is supposed to act) and let the user launch it by clicking a hyperlink on a web page, just like a “modern” HTML+JS web app does. In 2001! This whole goddamn shitshow could’ve been avoided, with technology that already existed two and a half decades ago!
So why didn’t that happen instead? Two reasons: one, there was kind of a backlash against Java because of how overhyped it had been and also because it’s a little annoying to program in because of all the verbose boilerplate, and two – and I think more importantly – the entire Java app had to download before it could start running; there was no equivalent to AJAX to allow parts of the application and data to load on the fly. For that, it was deemed slow and unusable and got completely left by the wayside. But that was a huge mistake, because fixing that would’ve been a Hell of a lot less effort than building the entire Javascript ecosystem!
Thanks, that was a fun read.
Preaching to the choir wrt js and how it’s just piling on and on. But then I did say I’m 5.
So WebAssembly could have been a development of Java apps on the web? I vaguely remember that used to be a thing long ago. And Java Web Start is just that? Or is it “to finally start to approach some pale imitation of a decent thing now”?
Basically, we could’ve had more or less what we’re just now getting with WebAssembly two and a half decades ago with Java Web Start. They’re not completely equivalent — WebAssembly can run any(?) language and interacts with the system via browser APIs, whereas Java Web Start could only run JVM languages (which was an even worse limitation back in the day since things like Kotlin and Scala didn’t exist yet) but interacted with the system using the more desktop-application-oriented Java Class Library. I think JWS applications would still have the advantage over Electron/WebAssembly applications in terms of user experience and feeling “native” (especially since a lot of web apps gave up even trying to resemble native UIs), but would probably be clunkier from a developer perspective since whatever solution they came up with instead of AJAX would likely not be as flexible due to nature of Java vs. JavaScript (statically typed and compiled vs. barely typed and interpreted).
Thanks again! I wasn’t sure where the terms belong on the timeline.
If you want to see the future of browsers, just look at vivaldi. Other browsers always get its features 3 or 4 years down the road
Quit it with the Vivaldi ads, it’s closed source and based on chrome. Go away, stop shilling.
Not every mention of something is a fucking ad
Nah, it’s not an ad. It’s just shit.
There are four of them?
Firefox, safari, chrome, edge. Depending on your perspective that’s either 3 or 4.
Edge is Chrome, so three then.
Yep that’s what I meant by the “depending on your perspective” bit
Chrome used to be Safari, so it’s really more like two and a half.
Safari used to be khtml/Konqueror so … I’m not sure how we’re dividing actually.
deleted by creator
As long as Google doesn’t sell Chrome to OpenAI.
NecessaryNecessity is the mother of inventionThank you, my spell checker was “helping”…
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
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.
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.
Isn’t that what wasm kinda is?
not really. using WASM as your full stack for your front end is just adding to the complexity and jank. WASM is there for compute heavy stuff. you can use it that way if you want.
there may be a little angst from reading and rereading the “Max-Age” portion of the cookie RFC that caused this trauma
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
Sounds wonderful
