[tsimionescu]

The most likely answer is that it will take the Linux model, with a foundation put together to fund Chrome's development. Then all of the parties interested in people having access to the Web, including Google, will have an incentive to fund this without requiring it to push their specific products.

[josephg]

Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does. I struggle to see how they get paid - except again, by charging search engines to be the default browser or something.

[viraptor]

Chrome does a lot of things. I know there are downsides and many people don't agree, but I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.

[jeswin]

> I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.

I wish browsers moved faster so that I don't have to download so many native apps. Native mobile apps are monitoring me continuously, and way more opaquely than web apps. More importantly, they can't be thwarted by plugins. As a mobile Firefox and Desktop Chrome user, I wish browsers (especially FF) moved faster.

So, no - for privacy reasons I don't agree with your view.

[NicuCalcea]

Lots of native apps could be websites right now, it's not a matter of technical limitations.

[viraptor]

I'm not sure browser improvements would help here. App authors need discoverability and a sales channel. Android and iOS could provide that for web apps without wrappers, but they don't. So developers don't have any incentive to go with browsers. This is a business/social issue, not a browser tech one.

[bad_user]

IMO, Chrome does not move fast enough.

The fact of the matter is that the web has been dying because people have moved to mobile devices, where they prefer native apps.

If you're advocating for slower development of browsers, you're also advocating for the death of the open web.

[viraptor]

A significant number of my "native apps" on mobile are just webview wrappers. Some are really fancy and slick, but still. I think the mobile OS handling web apps in a more integrated way would help here more than making browsers more complex.

[troupo]

Almost nothing Google ships at neck-breaking speed makes the web better, or faster, or a better open web.

[bad_user]

All the features that Google ships are necessary for web apps. E.g., open this webpage in different browsers: https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/ — Note that Firefox was once on top of this development, during the days when they also had an interest in developing FirefoxOS. Those days are long gone.

As for what Google has done historically with Chrome, it's trivially easy to point to developments that have improved the web.

You can start with the fact that it's the most secure browser, see for instance: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...

You can also read their original marketing material, in which they describe the isolation of plugins, extensions, or tabs, i.e., a crashing Flash movie or a crashing website no longer crashed the browser — then count the years it took for their competition to catch up: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

On “speed”, not sure what you mean, but Chrome has been demonstrably the fastest browser. It always was, with V8 being the fastest JS engine since launch, but also in benchmarks testing more “real” experiences, like Speedometer 3. The only area where it needs improvement is battery efficiency on macOS machines, where Safari has the lead, but even there it made great strides.

Speaking of PWAs, Chrome was also the first to deliver a good PWA experience on mobile devices and on the desktop. For mobile devices, the first one was Apple's Safari, but then Apple crippled the experience by not implementing much needed functionality, such as notifications. Firefox, BTW, still has unfixed bugs on Android and provides no SSB support for the desktop.

[troupo]

> E.g., open this webpage in different browsers: https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/

... and see a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards

> On “speed”, not sure what you mean, but Chrome has been demonstrably the fastest browser.

Re-read what I wrote. I was talking about the speed of releasing new features and APIs. They ship ~1000 new APIs a year

> Speaking of PWAs, Chrome was also the first to deliver a good PWA experience on mobile devices and on the desktop.

There's no such thing as PWA. It's a marketing term used extremely loosely to prove anything, and nothing. It's a random collection of 20 or so standards, and everyone choses their own favorite subset to say ah yes, this is crucial for PWA support".

---

On the other hand we have documented cases of Google sabotaging competitors (https://archive.is/tgIH9), forcing their tech decisions on competitors under the threat of retaliation (https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...), selling user data to advertisers (from FLOC to current plans to sell first-party cookie data: https://bsky.app/profile/thezedwards.bsky.social/post/3las7o...) and so on

[threatofrain]

JS has been moving at excellent speeds and Google has moved the web to evergreen. If anything I’d argue that without the specter of regulation then we might’ve had Dart or something new in the browser by now.

The biggest existential risk to the web is that it’s not good enough. It’s being threatened by sharp innovation in other spaces - may the Vision Pro never come down in price or improve in UX.

[troupo]

What do regulations have to do with Dart? You got WASM in the browser which is a much better outcome than a language even Google doesn't know what to do with.

The biggest existential risk to the web is Google themselves: it's the world's biggest advertising and user tracking company having outsized influence on where the web is headed, and moulding the web for its own profit.

[orphea]

I, for one, do not prefer native mobile apps, I'd be happy to use web, but companies actively degrade my experience there, and shove their apps in my face because this way they can track me and serve ads.

[jauntywundrkind]

Simpler browsers sound not good to me. It's a bit of a rallying cry on HN it feels like, often in sharper terms.

But computing is so intermediated. There's so many checks to do anything on an iPhone that isn't in the dead code your phone already runs. An Oculus has cool experiences, but we can't shape and share our own easily. There's always someone else's data center between you and your device today.

The web is largely still an experience of data centers too. But it's a neutral platform. Where we can go to any data-center we please. Where anyone can tap the amazing web platform & it's amazing APIs to build all kinds of cool experiences.

In a world where tech defines what the user wants for them, I feel so much like the web & every web platform API is stealing just a little more fire from the gods. It's promethean, giving to humanity prowess & capabilities we wouldn't otherwise have.

The pace is confusing. Sometimes things happen fast. Often they are left sort of unfinished. Fast & slow, fast & slow. I'd love if there was a huge source of funding the societies of the world were putting up to help make this critical human capability, to to fund long careful slow healing and helping as well as fancy new features (es2015/esm modules in the browser tool sooo long & still has so much to fix for example). These things are hard, complicated, and we try so hard to keep going forward without causing too much unfixable undislodgesble bad. But this spirit of bravery is necessary, to keep going. Simpler isn't good. The versatility of the web is too important. There's no other viable substitutes for the capabilities being available on the web, no other paths we have to stealing fire from the gods, no other Promethean dreams. This platform is it, and we need the persistence & drive as a society to keep ourselves improving our shared interactive media form, to keep from being swallowed by the darkness that most computing brings in.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I agree. They jam everything but the kitchen sink into the damn browser these days. Chrome being so well staffed and fast moving means everyone else gets to play catch up and it's bullshit.

[jojobas]

Google can keep engineers working on Chrome employed without having control over Chrome.

[wmf]

But why would they if they're forbidden from getting any benefit from Chrome?

[jauntywundrkind]

Maybe AI changed this, but..

Google is entirely where they are because the web is a powerful capable rich interesting place, that was able to rise & grow & flourish without the typical platform gatekeepers.

In my view, Google's whole reason for making and continuing to fund Chrome have never ever changed: they want a great (and powerful, not small/retrogressive) open web. Because if the web falters, the proprietary platforms from yesterday can come back & reassert their control. Because if the web falters, information will be someplace where a Google can't index and link you to it.

Google's existence depends entirely upon the web being a good place, a place for good sites, that people want to find & go to. The couple hundred million a year Google pays engineers to make the web good is a very affordable existential hedge, upon which the entire company of rests.

A corollary to this is that attempts to tilt the web towards themselves - to take advantage o Chrome - risk poisoning the web & killing the golden goose. Which is why - imo - Google has taken web standards so seriously, and gone to such lengths to create an air of transparency around browser standards, starting the Intent to Ship process.

[ajvs]

A huge amount of their products require browser access, having a good UX to access them off in their best interest.

[jojobas]

Why does everyone contribute to Linux?

[threatofrain]

Linux is foundational to everyone and there isn’t an obvious alternative. What companies care about Safari vs Chrome? From the perspective of other companies, what’s wrong with Safari and Edge taking command?

[jojobas]

For starters, there's no Safari for anything other than Mac OS and iOS, and Edge is Chromium with some cosmetics from Microsoft.

[saati]

They are selling computers, distros, support, etc. built with/for linux.

[graemep]

I am not sure that is a good thing. Do we really need so many people working on it, or adding more and more features?

IMO more engineers = more bloat, rather than more engineers = a better product.

[bjackman]

> Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does.

Are you sure? Do you know how many people work on Chrome? 2,000 people contributed to Linux 6.12. only a small portion of those will be full time but it's still likely many hundred full-time-equivalent engineers.

[josephg]

I think so. About a decade ago I remember hearing that the chrome team had about 1000 full time engineers. I suspect the number has grown over time.

Looking at the number of lines of code, the linux kernel is just barely ahead of chromium now (39m loc vs 36m). But that doesn't include all the proprietary parts of chrome that aren't in chromium - like their binary updating system, h264 decoder, built in google account support, and so on.

https://openhub.net/p/linux/analyses/latest/languages_summar...

https://openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summa...

[tsimionescu]

That may be, but Firefox certainly doesn't, and it's not that far from Chrome in terms of feature set, particularly in terms of supported web standards, or security. So I don't feel that a smaller Chrome team would be a catastrophe for Chrome.

[maeln]

At the same time, if every company that actively make money from the web where to pitch in, we would have the most funded foundation in the world.

[timschmidt]

One minor nit, it will be all parties interested in influence over future web standards and their eventual implementation.

[tsimionescu]

Right, those would have the biggest incentive. But I'm sure good fundraisers will be bale to even get some large companies that aren't engaging in the standards at any level to throw some money to support a standard web browser, if they can convince everyone that without this there won't be a good way for people to access their web sites.

[timschmidt]

I suspect that the leading reason browsers require so much investment and development effort is the ongoing effort to engineer them into heavily surveilled application delivery platforms.

Most of the browsers in this list were developed by the open source community without major funding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers

Though the same browsers tend not to support many of the newer standards.

I kind of miss SGML, myself, and wonder if a slower pace of browser development and associated code churn might actually be more benefit than harm.