[zx8080]

Maintaining Chromium takes at least around $1B annually. This involves playing around with all that shiny new standards to pass the unneeded stuff together with needed one to make sure a browser engineering does not need less than that sum. Why? Because if it's cheaper then anyome could make browser. And allow it ignore ads.

DRM (or hardware attestation) is the key to the market now.

It's actually very clever: once banks start blocking non-DRM browsers, that's a game over for all opensource and competing projects. The browser (and therefore the internet for most of the population) will then be controlled by the largest ads corporation in the history.

Sad, but this kind of an entrenching seem to go very quick and very well in the mobile land (see second part of the comment [0]).

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38124214

[skybrian]

I don’t see why you can’t use one browser for banking and another for other things? On mobile, some people even use apps that only interact with one bank. Or an app just for YouTube.

(I don’t use separate browsers, but I gave Facebook its own Chrome profile.)

A new browser would need to do one everyday thing really well to get part-time use. The question is what that is.

[AlotOfReading]

Financial service requirements have a habit of spreading into other websites. Imagine e.g. PayPal blocks their payment widget from working on other browsers. Suddenly shopping might be impossible with that browser. In fact, the current state is that PayPal will always require 2fa if you use Firefox, so this isn't particularly far fetched.

[zx8080]

> I don’t see why you can’t use one browser for banking and another for other things?

Because those banks have recently replaced SMS OTP with mobile app push confirmation dialog. But the bank's app does not want to work when there's any app installed on a smartphone not specifically whitelisted in a bank.

Everyone hates SMS OTP them here at HN, but here's an alternative.