All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding

That&#x27;s the point.<p>If you say browser developers need money from the search giant to compete in browser development, you are saying that - <i>right now</i> - you can&#x27;t compete in browser development without it.<p>That is a cartel.<p>We only have four major browsers because only four players can play on a fair playing field. There are people who have been paid millions to create and perpetuate this system. Web developers worrying about feature development without it is their KPI. None of this is a coincidence, none of this is a natural law.

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.<p>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.<p>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 is that a bad thing?<p>Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.<p>And if those cash starved tiny companies that develop Safari and Edge lose their Google bribes, I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll manage alright.<p>By the way who funded KHTML? Before everyone except Firefox took that code to make a browser...

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 <i>requires</i> taking browser money.

I wouldn&#x27;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.<p>I don&#x27;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.<p>In fact, if the primary function of code work for the next 5-10 years was to remove code, I&#x27;d be pretty much in favour.

Does anybody have guesses on what percentage of browser development is for<p>1. New web standards related changes<p>2. shiny new service integration(like AI, vpn etc)<p>3. UI &amp; UX enhancements<p>4. Bug fixes<p>5. Security fixes<p>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 &amp; 4 instead of playing catchup. It might turnout good for the overall browser ecosystem in the long run.

There are two very distinct parts here and the article does a good job of muddying it.<p>Chromium: the base of Chrome, which is opensource - is developed in part by google and many other companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Brave, and dozens of others who depend on the chromium ecosystem. Google is not &quot;financing&quot; these companies, they are contributing to and benefiting from opensource bidirectionally and the ecosystem benefits from compatibility streamlining. 94% of commits to chromium from Google is also cherrypicked, many are automated commits to update libraries and pull in code from other repos and projects, and they do have a google&#x2F;chromium handle on them as reviewers and signoff. It is true that they are the primary stewards and that most code in chromium passes through google hands before arriving there - but a good amount is chromeOS&#x2F;android commits. Most downstream projects prune a ton of this &quot;clank&quot; out - claiming that commits in those directories are supporting 3rd party browsers is bunk. Google’s own docs say any code “that isn’t written by Chromium developers” must live in &#x2F;&#x2F;third_party, this is enormous: v8, Skia, ANGLE, FFMPEG, ICU, OpenSSL - codecs, llvm... keeps on going. When a new upstream tag is imported, the roll commit is stamped with a Google email, throwing off this number considerably. The committer field shows the Google engineer or CQ bot, not necessarily the external engineer who produced the diff.<p>Google Search contracts: it is true that Mozilla and Apple receive large royalties in order to have Google be the default search engine in those browsers - in addition to android vendors and other platform partners. I don&#x27;t think this amounts to 80% of &quot;funding&quot; on those browsers.<p>The second part is far more dangerous than the first - some care needs to be made rolling these claims together.<p>Everyone else could jump on quantum&#x2F;gecko if they really felt like it was critical to their business to not use google-centric codebases.

There seems to me to be a false dichotomy present in a lot of the comments here: either Google funds all web browsers, or all the web browsers will crash and burn and the modern web will die.<p>Linux is a project spanning many decades with thousands of contributors and is not owned by any company. The BSDs are similar. I do not see why something similar cannot be accomplished with the web; a group of FOSS developers, and eventually, perhaps full-time developers at all manner of companies, could support a modern web browser. This seems to work fine for Linux - many companies pay developers to work on Linux because their business depends on it, so it is a good investment for them. The same applies for web browsers - many companies’ businesses depend on it, so funding a browser is the cost of doing business.

This is great news! Browser editors will finally have to consider their users as their customers again, not their product.<p>Mozilla is especially guilty of it, their foundation still doesn’t accept donations for browser development. It’s time that people can pay for their browser if they want to, that’s the only way they’ll get respect.

If Google is forced to stop the funding of competitors, I don’t quite understand why they also have to exit the market&#x2F;stop working on Chromium&#x2F;Chrome?<p>There’s the leveling of the playing field, each competitor has to fund their own products, but then why also do they have to be kicked out of the game?<p>I feel like consumers should ultimately make the decision of who wins and has the better product. The fact Google has found the best way to get value out of “free” browser use, shouldn’t be held against them. If consumers choose to use a browser that’s highly connected to Googles paid services, then perhaps that’s what the consumer wants. I view it as the other competitors job to lure those customers away from Chrome with their own product enhancements.

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&#x27;re the ones harming consumers. Apple&#x27;s likely intentionally doing it too. Pushing users towards apps so they can control discovery and earn commissions.

Let’s be honest: neither Apple needs $18 billion a year, nor does Mozilla need $450 million annually to develop a web browser. Microsoft or Apple could afford 100 lives of browser development without a Google penny. And Mozilla corp was already making millions in “Royalties” 20 years straight.<p>Yes, Mozilla would probably lose those royalties, but at this point browsers are good. Not a single browser needs a billion $ development budget each year to keep working – it is stable, fast, feature-complete. No one’s asking for major changes anymore. Keeping them running doesn’t require billion-dollar budgets, and we can probably use latest Chromium build for free forever even if random asteroid destroyed the whole Google HQ tomorrow.<p>But of course — we are devastated. A few corporate bozos lost billions, others now need to figure out where to burn them next. Very sad. Not a dry eye in the house.

As someone who has used Firefox since 1.0 (~20 years ago), I fully support returning Mozilla&#x27;s sole focus to its users. Huge amounts of &#x27;free&#x27; money has a tendency to de-focus organizations.

I don&#x27;t see what the problem with this ruling or forced divestiture is.<p>Starting a new browser today is a massive, nearly impossible task made harder by the fact that the few browsers we do have continue to push through new specs and features. Sure that&#x27;s good for consumers, but its bad for competition.<p>If those new specs and features are only possible because Google is artificially propping up the few browsers we do have, that reeks of an antitrust violation.<p>We will almost certainly see a slowdown in improvements to the web and browsers if this goes through, but we&#x27;ll also see the door finally open to potential competitors that want to start a new browser engine rather than just put some paint on chromium and call it a browser company.

&gt;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.<p>&gt;The laws intended to foster competition will inadvertently destabilize the foundational tools millions rely on to access the internet<p>It sounds like, if anything, the problem lies in letting this “obviously illegal” setup become the statu quo.

Recently, the browser has become this great unifying environment where we can build complex cross-platform experiences available to anyone on demand and not locked into any walled garden. Just off the top of my head:<p>— WebCodecs. You don’t need ffmpeg; encode in the browser.<p>— Web Audio. An advanced modular synth graph in the browser.<p>— WebRTC. P2P communication between browsers. Calls, collaboration, etc.<p>— WebGPU. Run shaders in the browser.<p>— File System API &amp; File System Access extensions. Read&#x2F;write very large files without having to put the entire contents in RAM.<p>All of this required significant amount of resources to spec and implement. With 80% of funding cut, I struggle to see how it can be maintained. Would be sad to see this rot with bugs.

The irony is that Google pays this money in order to <i>prevent</i> being seen as a (browser) monopoly, but instead it seems the DOJ is using their status as a <i>search</i> monopoly as justification for stopping the funding (and selling Chrome) even though it will just create the same browser monopoly all over again.

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.

These payments were an ugly hack by google to get around monopoly lawsuits anyway.<p>I do want FF to succeed - it’s my main browser - but that whole setup was an artificial unhealthy construct that needs to end even if it is painful<p>Similar the whole chromium situation is problematic too. See google moving android to closed source

I admit I&#x27;ve not been following the Chrome saga, but what does the DoJ mean by Google divesting from Chrome? Will they have to sell the Chrome brand? Will they have to get rid of all Chrome developers? If not, what would prevent Google from keeping all the devs and just rebranding the browser to something else based on Chromium?<p>I truly don&#x27;t understand how you could force someone to divest from an open source project. Why would they not simply prevent Google (or any company) from paying broswers to limit our choice of search engine?

If I were working at Mozilla, I&#x27;d be refreshing my CV right now.<p>The Firefox team is in an unenviable position. They need money to pay their staff, they&#x27;re reliant on a single source that&#x27;s about to dry up, and their userbase is as far as I can tell heavily biased towards techy types who don&#x27;t want integration with Pocket and similar.<p>I&#x27;d personally like to see something like Supermium gain market share, especially for &#x27;techies&#x27; - built on Chromium but (if possible) keeping support for Manifest V2.

Maybe we&#x27;ll be able to pay for our browser again? I used to pay for Opera, and I&#x27;d be happy to pay for a good browser like Firefox, too. Just like I pay for my Kagi search engine. If the browser is worth something to you, then it&#x27;s worth paying for.

The complexity of the web specs is out of control.<p>It is a form of regulatory capture from Google &amp; Apple to prevent new players from entering the space. Just look at the devellopment hell of Servo &amp; Ladybird.<p>Maybe the future is in lighter protocols like Gopher &amp; Gemini.

The whatng cartel has only 3 web engines which can compile with only 2 c++ compilers:<p>The web engines are: - mozilla geeko - apple webkit - gogol blink (fork of webkit)<p>The compilers are: - gcc (MIT) - clang (apple).<p>Providing real-life alternatives to those are close to zero. Namely, the only real alternative is a regulated technical compatibility with orders of magnitude simpler computer languages, file formats and protocols.<p>For instance, for the web, where reasonable, it would mean noscript&#x2F;basic (x)html (basic HTML forms can do wonders with proper HTTP redirects) and if really too alien to noscript&#x2F;basic (x)html, some public web APIs or other protocols (IRC for instance). Secrets&#x2F;keys setup would have to be easily available via some noscript&#x2F;basic (x)html portal or some other easy means of identity verification, could be a very rate limited and constraint anonymous web API.<p>Keep in mind the obvious: most of the work for a service which is public on internet is keeping it safe and available, certainly not the GUI&#x2F;protocol which have to stay minimal in order to maximize technical interoperability anyway and will mechanically easy the tasks to keep it safe and available.

This is so alarmist. Whatever company buys chrome would have incentives to keep investing in it.<p>Similarly if Google can’t bid for search engine placement, someone else will.<p>While Chrome has done great things for the web ecosystem, neither Google or Apple have released a browser that can truly produce apps that rival native experiences. If the keepers of the web didn’t have their own app stores, would that change?

This is a good thing. It&#x27;s time for a big change. Some contenders are:<p>1. A lighter browser that goes back to the early 90s, supporting HTML, forms, sockets, a handful of codecs, and nothing more. The newer modern features have added disproportionate security risk. There are so many exploited zero-days in modern browsers that no modern browser is safe.<p>2. A chat system limiting to what AI can directly infer (in a rendered sense). Usually this content is limited to markdown&#x2F;text&#x2F;HTML and images&#x2F;video, but no scripts. The AI&#x27;s internal representation does not render a script like a browser does. Sockets can be simulated by message updates.

&gt; And the DoJ has also argued that Google should be forced to sell off Chrome, forbidding Google from paying for Chrome and Chromium.<p>Part of the DoJ&#x27;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.<p>They also believe it&#x27;s an attractive business and will be easy to find a buyer for because of this. It&#x27;s worth way more than Google would let you believe. Just look at what they pay Apple to _not_ be in the search market.

I support this. Especially the Google selling Chrome &#x2F; Chromium part. If it&#x27;s so important, then Google should relinquish (cede) control over it to the community, and just keep writing the checks.<p>Honestly, I have no compassion for Apple or Google. I&#x27;d be willing to endure a lot of headaches in the name of costing those two companies influence over our society.

I haven&#x27;t been following Chrome&#x2F;Google news closely, but a few weeks back on HN there was a blog by a prominent Chrome dev who had been suddenly and inexplicably laid off.<p>I wonder if Google have read writing on a wall somewhere and are quietly preparing for large organisational changes (up to complete divestment) for how Chrome is managed.

This article is misleading in three ways. First, it ignores the markets are the cause of this problem. Second, it falsely claims Google is responsible for the development of other companies&#x27; browsers. Third, it treats Google paying for their development as a good thing with antitrust action being evil.<p>There&#x27;s countless companies that depend on web browsers. Most don&#x27;t buy them or contribute to their development. The biggest companies that include browsers in their products or platforms have budgets to build their own browsers, esp starting with existing code. They don&#x27;t purely due to selfishness which, for many, hurts them in the long run as 3rd parties dictate their requirements.<p>That brings us to Apple and Microsoft. These are among the richest companies in existence. Their strategy is to create lock-in to their platforms which heavily use browsers. They have their own browsers. If they don&#x27;t invest in their browsers, whatever happens is <i>their</i> fault alone. Double true since, unlike most alternative browsers, they have the money to sustain the project.<p>Third point is that it&#x27;s good that the business model is to hope Google keeps paying for two of them with their advertising revenue. While it&#x27;s great that they do, let&#x27;s not forget both the dangers of (a) monoculture centered on one, greedy company; and (b) that many of us thing Google&#x27;s advertising practices, especially in search, are so horrible we&#x27;re trying to avoid using Google. I&#x27;d rather the the projects be self-sustaining and independent even if Google is a major customer.<p>Which brings me to a point of agreement where the one, independent project... Firefox... could be really hurt by a loss of Google funding. That&#x27;s a sad reality I&#x27;d like to avoid. Meanwhile, I&#x27;d like to see more non-Google funding for Firefox or products layered on it from Mozilla. There should be a really, strong push to make sure Google isn&#x27;t necessary for their survival. Most of what I see Mozilla promoting isn&#x27;t that.

Google will sell Chrome for 100 billion and fork Chromium to build Grome browser like MySQL and MariaDB. People will stop using chrome when it will start to alter webpage (like edge modify web content if you search chrome) and heavily track user activity to feed LLM (like perplexity&#x27;s browser) to serve Ad.

What&#x27;s going to happen is that we are going to see browser forks from places we never imagined ... like China.

Can we get &quot;HTTP 402 Payment Required&quot; working now?

I don&#x27;t get it. Can someone explain this so a child could understand?<p>I can understand how Google has used their dominant search engine position to push Chrome. A lot has been said about that. Also in the Microsoft case for setting IE as default browser in Windows.<p>But I don&#x27;t understand why it should be forbidden for Google to pay other browser vendors for directing searches to them. That just seems like well functioning market economy.<p>Is it for paying extra to be default? Is that worth 5x the money in the contract? Or is it just that they are paying too much - more than it is worth - to allow the competition to stay, in order to not become a monopoly?

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 :)

Fairly misleading wording with such lines like &quot;Most of the funding for all of the major browsers is going away&quot;... it makes it sound like it goes directly towards the individual browser budgets. That might be true of Mozilla since they don&#x27;t make that many products tbh, but with Apple and Microsoft, there&#x27;s no evidence Google&#x27;s payments don&#x27;t just go straight into a general fund.

Both Chromium (used for chrome, edge, brave, etc.) and Firefox are open source. They can be forked and many people&#x2F;companies do that. And even Safari is based on Webkit (a fork of KHTML). And Webkit continues to be open source and provides a more or less complete browser engine that can be adapted for use in other browsers (and has been). There are a few other browser engines out there but most of them don&#x27;t register in usage statistics as anywhere near significant. Fractions of a percent market share basically. But most of those are also open source. So, the good news is that essentially all browsers are mostly based on open source code bases. Those aren&#x27;t going to go away.<p>The difference between the top three and those other engines: Google funding. Google pays for access to the user via search and advertising. And for influence over standardization. Because you don&#x27;t bite the hand that feeds you.<p>What happens if that flow of money stops is going to be interesting. I think there are probably going to be many companies, users and developers interested in seeing development of the thing they use, depend on, or work on every day continue. And it opens up the doors for other companies with commercial interests on the web to step up and sponsor some of this stuff. Companies paying for developers is how development for a lot of widely used OSS software works after all. I&#x27;m not too worried about all this grinding to a halt just because Google is forced to stop trying to own and control all browser development and related standardization. And people forget that especially Chromium and Mozilla get a lot of external contributions to their source code from developers that aren&#x27;t paid by Google.<p>I think it wouldn&#x27;t be bad for some fresh blood in this space. Including fresh funding from other companies. Apple and MS would probably step up their funding. They have plenty of vested interest and the means to do so. As do many other companies that depend on the web for their revenue. There&#x27;s plenty of money out there that hasn&#x27;t been tapped into simply because Google was paying all the bills. More diverse financing will make the web more robust. It also means a more diverse set of commercial interests. And a more level playing field. Maybe there&#x27;s more than just advertisement driven click bait to be had. Even Mozilla might finally stumble on a more sustainable business model than just taking Google money and wasting it mostly on things that don&#x27;t matter to browser users.

Why do we have Linux but not the browser equivalent? It’s been far more important than an OS for most people for a long time now.

Good, let it crash and burn to the point where chrome&#x2F;chromium is recognized as the monopoly it effectively already is.

<i>Google pays Mozilla and Apple to make Google Search the default search engine for Firefox and Safari. Google pays Apple about $18 billion each year, and pays Mozilla about $450 million each year.<p>“In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue.”</i><p>OP just made one the best arguments in favor of breaking up Google&#x27;s monopoly.

Apparently a controversial take:<p>Government should not tell private business how to run, and let people decide for themselves what they want to use.<p>The horror!

&gt; The laws intended to foster competition will inadvertently destabilize the foundational tools millions rely on to access the internet.<p>So where is the contradiction? Did the author forget that &quot;stabilization&quot; of an anti-competitive market dynamic does <i>not</i> foster competition? And destabilizing anti-competitive is pro-competitive?

Finally, the time for independent browsers has come.<p>I expect rise in Goanna&#x2F;Pale Moon&#x27;s popularity by the end of this year.

The headline could also be that the browser market is finally opening up to competition again.<p>OpenAI would be happy to buy it&#x27;s way into the default search for Firefox and the other browsers.<p>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.

IBM&#x2F;Red Hat has plenty of cash, time for them to step up and support Firefox. IBM hates paying for anything these days.<p>A good example is OpenSSH, that is used by Red Hat and AIX but they give nothing to the OpenBSD Foundation. Even Microsoft sends a decent amount to OpenBSD, IBM, a fat 0.

So, wouldn&#x27;t it be primary goal to aquire a final form? Something lasting , all bugs fixed, no new features . Something that tries to browse any given site with breaking changes in best effort mode?

I hope this encourages more third-party non-tech-giant compitition like the Arc and Brave browser.

I remember paying for Opera 6.11 back in the day. If you can&#x27;t offer a browser for free, charge for it. But as long as google uses its money it extorted from business to offer a browser for free, you can&#x27;t compete with a browser that costs.

Doesn’t seem like competition when the standards are, <i>do what Google says</i>.<p>Some of that funding has been used for DRM, tracking, etc.<p>Some things have turned out good though.<p>Seems like it will be a tough time for browsers to find alternate funding sources.

Does this also mean Google will be forced to provide widevine to competing browsers on fair terms?<p>Widevine is arguably less of monopoly lever than money, still prevents competition from creating any new web browser ecosystem

I think the 80% argument exactly demonstrated why intervention is needed. This is no longer a productive competitive market. It&#x27;s a monopoly with sockpupets propped up as &#x27;competitors&#x27;.

Presuabmly the browsers will still get paid by other search engines to set default? This could ultimately help DuckDuckGo, Bing and Kagi quite a lot. And the revenue won&#x27;t fall completely.

Billions on a web browser. So many billions. I am trying to grasp that.

Maybe it&#x27;s time for ISPs to start endorsing small donations to Mozilla and others, for a good cause. But in the jacked up world we&#x27;re living in, nobody would do this.

Makes me think of the horse browser (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gethorse.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gethorse.com</a>), namely the fact that unlike pretty much all other browsers it&#x27;s a paid, subscription product. You actually have to pay $60 a year in order to use it.<p>Sounds absolutely ridiculous when you consider that you haven&#x27;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&#x27;t particularly like using either, and to be frank the reasons for using an open-source browser besides Firefox or Chrome are largely ideological.<p>It just might be the case where if you want an actually good browser, you&#x27;ll have to start paying for it.

Microsoft and Apple can afford to keep developing a browser. Hopefully FF can get money from another knowledge discovery company e.g. Anthropic? OpenAI?

What I&#x27;m unclear about is whether the remedies would block <i>any</i> payment for search queries, or just the ones tied to default placement.

I&#x27;m just hoping Mozilla&#x2F;Firefox survives this. I&#x27;m not sure that any other mature, non-chromium based web browser exists.

If Google sold search business to private equity, then this problem could be solved.<p>Google could still pay browsers to make Gemini the default AI.

Good. Perfect time for Mozilla to convert into a democratically controlled worker-owned company and cut off the parasite C team.

This will strongly slow down adoption of new rendering standards. I hope we don&#x27;t get another IE6 era.

Why doesn&#x27;t DuckDuckGo fund Firefox? A lot of their missteps stem from trying to diversify revenue.

Next year those pop ups that tell grandma to install an iOS critical update might actually do something!

searching for w3c... zero results.<p>so, people here are too young or forgetful.<p>the whole reason browsers are deemed unsafe was exactly because of google and Microsoft hold on standards. chrome only reason to exist as a cost center on google was to undermine Microsoft on these groups, the same way Microsoft was undermining google there with IE.<p>everyone here is saying how google saved the internet by coopting an existing open source project... and then holding back thinks like cookie isolation for another couple decades. sigh.<p>interesting that google draw the same uncritical fanboyism which used to be reserved for apple.

Edge is not a white label. It has lots if cool features that chrome doesn’t

What are the opportunities now for browser forks and browser development?

I guess let&#x27;s wait for Mozilla Search being a wrapper around Google

The only concern I have with this is how security will be affected.

If everyone was relying on Google, then that should come to an end. Browsers got WAY too bloated anyway, and frankly I think we can dramatically simplify the web too.<p>There should be some kind of open-source consortium that is in control of web standards, and then some open-source kernel for all Web Browsers to share, just like there are independent versions of Linux all sharing a common core.<p>So it&#x27;s a good thing if Google loses control. I&#x27;m all for it. They have too much power.

Good. Browser development should&#x27;ve ended ages ago

Mozilla gets paid half a billion per year and they still can’t produce anything of value?<p>It just shows how easily corruption can take hold of an organisation. The amount of dev time you could buy with half a billion…

Hopefully Google will keep sending half a billion a year to Mozilla (now with no strings attached). It was a good arrangement for everyone, especially for us. (Mozilla&#x27;s not without controversy these days but hey, that&#x27;s not on Google). I don&#x27;t get why so many people are using fancy logic to argue, implicitly, that Firefox would be better with less funding. It won&#x27;t be.<p>But it was very trashy of Apple to rent-seek off of their market power. $20 billion a year, to adopt a search engine that Apple <i>insists</i>, in court, they would have used <i>anyway</i> for free, is pure rent-seeking. Profiting off of the fact that Safari is preinstalled and has a high market-share floor (since other browsers have very limited competitive advantages on iPhone compared to Windows&#x2F;Mac). Companies should be forced to compete for every dollar they earn.

If Google hired a PR firm to lobby and protect their interests with chrome, this is exactly the kind of article they&#x27;d be placing in the media to achieve this aim.

Will there be an appeal? How finalized is this?

Thanks everyone for making ChromeOS a reality, time to update those CVs from Web developer to ChromeOS developer.<p>Google succeeding where Microsoft failed.

Can we get one good one then ?

The author doesn&#x27;t seem to know there&#x27;s no &quot;Safari&quot; division at Apple. It&#x27;s not like Apple depends on Google exclusively to fund Safari.<p>Apple&#x27;s revenue last fiscal year was $391 billion dollars; I think they&#x27;ll be okay without Google&#x27;s $18 billion.<p>It&#x27;s way more critical for Mozilla—Google&#x27;s payment is what pays for Firefox.

I think browsers are in the best state to slow down their development rate. They have come so far, it is the most uniquitous application ecosystem nowadays. Even though there are still great developments currently, they are rather niche and it would be way more damaging if it slowed down 10 years ago. Maybe financial constraints also have a positive side. TL;DR the web ecosystem has matured a lot.

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.

yet another piece of technology we shall cede to china.<p>downvote if you want - if it happens, my prediction will age like fine wine.

Mozilla funneled shit ton of those money into nonsense, now they&#x27;re having their reckoning. Cry me a river.

Fuck it. Burn the boats.

Oh no, what a nightmare if browsers have to stop implementing zany new API-of-the-week and stabilize on a slow-moving web standard.<p>Will we ever get wireless-USB-for-smells?

This is a tragedy.<p>I closely follow browser development and love that the pace of innovation is so fast.<p>How can such an obviously bad decision be made?<p>If the big tech companies are so powerful then why is this happening?

Great news! Mozilla will finally disappear!

This article seems to fundamentally misunderstand how businesses fund development.<p>Google&#x27;s payments to Apple have no direct impact on Safari funding decisions. It&#x27;s just a revenue stream. Similarly for Mozilla. Microsoft... not even sure whether to begin with those claims.<p>I think the article touches upon some important truths about Google&#x27;s code contributions to chromium and financial payments to Mozilla and Apple. But correlating those with product development funding is just entirely plainly wrong.