[agent281]

Google funds Chrome. Other browsers use Chrome as a base. The majority of Firefox's funding is from Google. They will suffer as well. MS would need to step back up with browsers and you would also have Safari left over. I think it would be a major shock to the browser ecosystem.

[kelnos]

I really do question how much of Mozilla's financial backing would really be needed to keep Firefox development going. There are plenty of open source projects that are independent and run by foundations, but are funded by various corporations. A browser is certainly a complex piece of software, but I don't see why it couldn't be run the same way.

[justinclift]

The current salary of Mozilla's CEO could certainly fund several full time developers instead. :)

[brendoelfrendo]

Other browsers use the open source Chromium project as their base, not Chrome. If Google killed off Chrome tomorrow, those other browsers could continue using the Chromium codebase, and new maintainers could step up to manage the Chromium project. Nothing needs to change.

[diffeomorphism]

Wishful thinking. It is much too large of a project for "new maintainers could step up" once google jumps off both chrome and chromium. Chromium would either slowly wither away or the new maintainers would be MS Edge or Amazon or some other large company.

[stephenr]

Before the current Chromtastrophe, multiple companies maintained their own, fully independent rendering engines, according to web standards.

Microsoft didn't stop developing EdgeHTML because it's too hard, they stopped because Google kept giving them the fuck around on sites like YouTube.

The whole point of web standards is that you can have multiple implementations for the same thing - there's zero reason that post-Google, Blink needs to be maintained by a single entity.

Microsoft can maintain their own fork of Blink, or bring back Edge, or adopt WebKit, or whatever works for them.

Opera and <insert laundry list of chrome-but-not-chrome browsers> have the same options, sans EdgeHTML.

The whole reason these companies are using Chromium/Blink is that Google has a stranglehold on web standards, and by being a me-too Chrome-alike they get support for Google's half baked ideas for free, to prevent the ever-fickle user base from switching browser because their browser doesn't support the latest half-written web standards draft.

[account42]

Right, making a browser is "too expensive" largely because Google can make it too expensive by dumping tons of money into Chrome.

[davedx]

"Won't somebody please think of the browsers!"

This is not a good reason to break up anti-competitive monopolies: that it would harm the technology their monopoly depends on

[agent281]

I'm not saying that they should stop anti-trust work for browsers. I'm saying that it won't necessarily make things better for the browser ecosystem as things stand. Things would definitely get worse before they got better in browser land.

[stephenr]

> I think it would be a major shock to the browser ecosystem.

To repeat the question from above, where is the downside?

Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge.

At this stage I don't imagine they'd go back (to EdgeHTML as their engine) specifically, but it's not hard to imagine a world where MSFT maintains its own fork of Blink for use in Edge, Opera potentially the same.

As for Firefox: they get money for being the default search engine - if Google is broken up, the search engine company that emerges will have even more reason to want to be the default search engine on as many browsers as possible (and thus incentive to pay money to other browsers).

[agent281]

I was replying the GP:

> So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem

Initially, this won't be true. A lot of the browser ecosystem relies on Google right now. Eventually it would be replaced. I just don't think that it would be immediately true.

[tick_tock_tick]

> Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge.

No they abandoned EdgeHTML because it was shit. Seriously there are plenty of posts right here on hacker news about the internals of that decision. The team and product failed to deliver so badly that it got the axe.

[stephenr]

> there are plenty of posts right here on hacker news about the internals of that decision

There sure are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

> This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.

> Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced - and they're the ones who looked into it personally.

[lolinder]

Frankly, I think the browser ecosystem needs a major shock. There are too many companies invested in the web as a platform for them to collectively allow web browsers to just stop existing, and a few years of discomfort may well be worth it if it shakes up the ecosystem a bit and brings more diversity.

[amy-petrik-214]

Google makes like 30 billion dollar PROFIT per year, and they pay firefox 0.5 billion per year.

Now it seems to me that 0.5 billion is the "cost of not technically being a monopoly" when they are indeed a monopoly, and it's a net win if they're pulling say 10 billion synergistic monopolistic profit from not being broken up into baby googles as a monopoly trust buster case.

I would say this is capitalism in a pure form, the kind the communists rail against, the kind where a monopoly crushes out all the benefits to the people, government corruption, etc. True "for the people" style capitalism would mean two browsers truly competing, ideally more than two (duopolies are monopolies by another name and poison our society broadly). One browser as part of an american zaibatsu, with the zaibatsu punting a little money to save face and claim competition exists - by propping up the competition financially - is absolutely a disgusting thing. To say "oh no, the thing they're propping up will no longer be propped up" is also disgusting and capitalistically twisted.