If you say browser developers need money from the search giant to compete in browser development, you are saying that - right now - you can't compete in browser development without it.
That is a cartel.
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.
I think we're at an awkward place where governments worldwide have been slow to understand the importance of the global infrastructure that has sprouted, largely due to open source software...
Given that browsers are essential to access information, I think they shouldn't be developed behind a business model, but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.
There should be some independence guarantees in order to make that organization not have to bow to pressure from governments to sacrifice privacy due to funding threats.
I agree in ways, but I think a single global fund is a bit far-reaching and over-centralized, thus prone to corruption.
I think it would make sense for, say, the US, EU, and BRICS (with maybe China as a separate entity) to each have open-source funds for OSS digital infrastructure, and cooperate on global web standards. So if one fund goes rogue/corrupt or is crippled by Republican-types, the world still has two (or three) backups.
Having worked in the non-profit space my whole career, I've always thought having government funding for OSS would be a great use of money. It's a really underutilised resource.
States invest in cultural production, e.g. by film grants, software grants would be a great way to attract talent and solve problems.
I would be shocked to learn if it weren't already happening, just frequently through several layers of obfuscation. But also, just generally. The NSA, to their minimal credit, has rather leaned in to making itself part of the OSS community by facilitating the development on a lot of the security and reverse-engineering products they use themselves. Unsurprising, considering the provenance of the internet, computers, and much of the underlying tech is deeply interconnected with the US DoD and NASA.
All that said, I do think a more open-ended "US public endowment for software development" is a great idea.
You don't need a global infrastructure fund. We already know that projects can be run where people and groups come alongside each other in the context of an open source license and work together. Some people will create "releases" of this project, and some of them will become more and less popular over time, but we don't have to have any one global entity blessing any particular team or aspect of development.
Look to how the Linux kernel is developed, and look to its full history, including forks large and small, alternate releases for alternate reasons, alternate releases by different people and teams, and so on. It's not a hypothetical, it's the organization of one of the largest software projects in the world.
And it's a good thing we don't need a global fund, because trying to start at such a high level is basically asking for this to take the next 15 years to even get started. By contrast, anyone can start a new fork of Chromium or Firefox today... which, again, is not just me theorizing, but is a thing that has happened, several times over. Making it so "getting started" is something that can happen in a distributed fashion without having to get some "global" organization to sign off or be created is superior, which is sort of softballing it a bit because it's honestly the difference between possible and impossible.
If someday that develops into a "global organization" or some set of such, hey, that's fine. But trying to get "someone else" to start it at that level... and it has to be "someone else" since none of us could even hardly start doing that ourselves... is impractical to the level of impossible.
There's too much money on the line if there is a lack of standardization and rendering/features are all over the place. I don't think it will turn that way as most users will converge on a small number of browsers.
If there is no global infra fund, there will be some type of ad-hoc board composed of some independent entities, but a lot of entities backed by large businesses. If not US then other countries as in many countries there are large tech companies aligned with government interests.
>but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.
How do you ensure it’s not just laundering money with little or no work into the problem.
I think it’s messed up Google essentially funds all browsers but putting it in the hands of politicians isn’t going to help, would be better to try and have more companies funding it so at least the dependency on Google is less.
The Linux Foundation is funded by a large number of companies for which Linux is very critical to them. These companies themselves have their own developers.
> but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund
Sounds like a backdoor way to add a kill switch or censor filter to browsers from a central, unelected authority that does not respect the sovereignty and speech and media laws of the individual users' home countries.
No thanks, I'll take an open source, corporate controlled browser 10/10 times.
> I'm not exactly sure why I should find a corporate entity any less centralized or unelected or not respectful of rights than a government
Because corporate entities and government entities operate under radically different frameworks.
The domain of government is force. This isn't a bad thing, it is necessary. Government is the recognition that we, as human beings, can interact with each other in two fundamental ways: force or reason/diplomacy. That when reason/diplomacy is chosen life flourishes. People create, produce, trade, freely associate and basically build civilization. When force is chosen you get war, destruction, poverty, misery.
Government's primary role in society, in my opinion, is to remove the element of force from civil existence so that all interpersonal relations are consensual (there are edge cases - the parent/child relationship or the extremely ill etc. but I need to scope cap somewhere).
The concept of rights derives directly from this concept. They are the recognition that rational people can cooexist peacefully if certain aspects of the human experience are recognized and protected. Those aspects being that in order to survive as a human being your tools are reason and action; you need to be able to think freely and you need to be able to act in accordance with your rational judgements. The infringement of a person's rights is fundamentally interference in either the ability to think (freedom of expression / conscience) or the ability to act (freedom to own and acquire property, freedom to travel, freedom of association etc.)
This means that government's entire domain is force. It is the entity that gets to determine the rules around when the application of force is allowed. It is the entity that gets to step in when you and I can't agree on what the definition of "assault" is and one of us calls the cops.
Businesses ought to exist entirely outside of the domain of force. Business is what happens when you remove force from society and people are able to think, create, develop, produce and trade freely without gangs and thieves and thugs interfering.
Where things get blurry is when you marry government and business. But always remember that business operates under the rules that government creates. The more incentive there is for business to care about political policy, the more lobbyists and corporate interest groups you will create but that's the framework you're creating. Government forces it through laws. Business is just playing by the rules that you voted for.
Governments are elected every now and then by large sums of people as a package deal for handling a number of issues, and only one is in place. Products and companies exist in multiples and regardless of how big they are, they're still more targeted, and you the consumer get to choose directly and every day.
> With the Sovereign Tech Fund, we invest globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate.
Not globally funded, but does invest globally.
However, they say:
> The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in open digital base technologies that are vital to the development of other software or enable digital networking. We invest in projects that benefit and strengthen the open source ecosystem. Examples include libraries for programming languages, package managers, open implementations of communication protocols, administration tools for developers, digital encryption technologies, and more. (...) We are currently not looking for user-facing applications, such as messaging apps or file storage services. If this changes, we will announce it here.
So, a browser wouldn't qualify, but an HTTP(S) library does, and perhaps even a browser engine would..?
There are several other programs like STF funded by the EU (often mediated via NLNet), and for example Servo gets some amount of its funding via NGI (an EU Commission initiative): https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/
Be careful, there's some people who actively don't understand what a public good is and are hostile to it very existence, let alone suggesting a government could practically ensure it's viability.
They're also completely blind deaf and dumb to modern society having never had to suffer.
Many believe the market is the best vector to deliver public good. It's not a mystery why this perspective exists, and it's not obviously wrong, and it's ridiculous to think that government is the universal cure-all for suffering when they're the source of so much.
Okay, given your theory that Google control equals government control... Wouldn't the anti trust now be against their interest of controlling the browsers?
I'm not privy to the plan, but what was right at one stage (funding a company to gain a monopoly position on search) need not be right at a later stage. Perhaps now a different strategy is unfolding. Perhaps it is obvious that government and corporations work in tandem, and the optics require that it appears that government acts against monopolists to regain confidence.
Alternatively, maybe there is no master plan by some cabal pulling all the player’s strings. Maybe you have multiple powerful entities acting in their own interest, which can sometimes align and sometimes be at odds. Apple is a good example, as they are cozy with governments on many things, but push back hard against building backdoors into their systems because they know that eventually “bad guys” will figure out the backdoor and that hurts their bottom line.
How can one know what is real and what is choreographed optics?
Maybe there is no master plan, sure. But this is not something you or I will ever know.
We are told that there are secret courts, that produce secret orders.
Trust in government is misplaced, when it is in the design that you will not be told all the information. Alternatively stated, these are lies of omission - you don't know what you don't know. This is part of the design of the system - it's not a quirk or accident.
If the governance system were a person - ie someone you know is a liar but you have no means of ascertaining the truth of what they say - I suspect you would not deal with them. However, when it comes to the governance system, everyone thinks this is normal and acceptable. Everyone is an apologist. Because the other option is unbearable to consider, it seems - that the governance system is not there to help. Even though 'government' the name tells you everything : 'govern minds'.
Its a successful system of control and people love it.
As far as I can see, nobody said anything that could conceivably be interpreted to imply otherwise, so sure?
I am really unsure what your argument even is, gymbeaux - and how it relates to verisimi's previous point. You're not trying to argue that it was Google's masterplan all along to get the anti-trust ruling, right?
This has to be true in any country with anything approaching a free market? Even if it's not blatant and closer to Inversion of Control you see it reflected in national economic policy all the time.
"A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to outlaw cartel practices."
If the article is true, it would be worse than a cartel, it would be effectively a monopoly with a few sockpuppet competitors.
In an actual cartel or oligopoly, you'd expect at least the cartel members be relatively equal in power. But if the article is right, then Google has basically all the power to decide the course of web tech going forward, as the other browsers devs can't meaningfully deviate from whatever vision Google has for the web, without risking their funding.
Of course it’s a cartel. They agree not to compete with each other in online search advertising, one company collects the monopoly profits and then distributes them to the other cartel members.
Google has made sure that _nobody_ can implement a browser with hostile takeovers the "standards" committees and pushing the standards solely in the direction of corporate interests, bypassing consumer interests. The whole point was to make them so complicated it would be impossible for someone without an insane budget to implement one.
Proof of this is the whole advertising sandbox crap... what the hell does an HMTL Client "need" an advert sandbox for?
Breakups are painful. Ultimately they're better for everyone.
I think I share the same opinion: I think this is going to be a very painful break with the previous paradigm, but a much needed one, and that actually this version of the current paradigm is quite bad: browsers only survive when Google pays them money.
Instead this will put all browsers on a much more even playing field, and perhaps it will force governments and citizens to realise that free software takes someone to write it.
I have long thought that it would be nice to have a new Web-alternative based on XHTML. With XHTML you get a clean break from the legacy early HTML cruft and design errors as well as avoiding the corporate browser vendor designed HTML5/HTML Living “standard”. XHTML is essentially the last Web markup standard actually designed (and not rubber stamped) by the W3C and I think it is telling that even today Tim Berners-Lee’s own personal website uses XHTML.
Google thinks - accurately - that the more people use the internet the more money Google makes. It invests a fortune into making the internet more accessible through creating better browsers. There isn't anyone else willing to dump that sort of money into browser development.
It is a bit like calling a supermarket a cartel if it relies on local residents for 80% of its profits. No, the technical term is they are paying customers (although in Google's case it is complex and non-traditional because they are carrying the financial burden on behalf of the people who click on ads and there are a bunch of free riders). The odds are against a bunch of alternative customers hiding in the wings waiting to pop up; if they go away then they are just gone.
Nor does calling browsers dependent on Search funding a cartel.
People expect web browsers to be provided for free, which heavily complicates funding.
There is nothing stopping someone from making a new browser. The base of Chrome is open source, you don't even have to do the hard part. And distribution worldwide is relatively easy, if you can give people a reason to use your browser.
What makes Google a cartel (or rather, monopoly) in this case is that they own > 80% of the browser market. Not that they pay other companies so that they appear as the default search engine.
I think that is a mistaken view, but rather than argue that I'll put a more interesting question. If you believe that there is a cartel here and the result is that we the plebs get high quality products for free, do you think cartels are a bad thing? Because it seems to be all upside for pretty much everyone. If this is a cartel (which, again, I don't see it), we should be looking to get cartels involved in food and housing.
Breaking up this 'cartel' is literally going to mean that the best 4 web browsers won't get quite as much development effort directed towards them. The plan seems to be to choke them of so much development that even dodgy hobbyist projects can complete. That is a low-quality bar.
But we don't get the high quality products for free. Google is using Chrome to strenghten their market dominance in other markets, such as advertising. Furthermore, they are using their market power in browsers to push through standards and protocols that mostly benefit them.
Just ask yourself this: Google is one of the largest and most profitable companies on Earth. They are a for-profit, capitalistic company. Legally, their main duty is to maximize shareholder profit. Why would they give away somehting for free, if in the end, it does not benefit them more than not giving it away for free?
Competition is always better for consumers, unless you believe in a "benevolent dictator" situation (which, as reality shows, also never ends well).
That’s not correct. Google believes the more people use its search engine the more money it makes from ads. That’s correct.
So it monopolizes the distribution platforms for search engines.
The easier analogy here is an oil monopolist paying off all the tanker and rail and pipeline companies so nobody else can get oil to customers, and then splitting the massive profits with the shippers.
By the way this example actually happened and is the origin of the term “antitrust” which is the area of law that Google was found guilty of violating by multiple judges. So the analogy is right on the nose.
At its core, the ideals of the Web as an interoperable, nearly universal platform are extremely promising. I highly doubt people would prefer completely split ecosystems where programs could only be accessed on specific platforms.
I've been using exclusively Linux on the desktop for almost 10 years now. If there was an unblocker, it was wine/Proton, or for laptops, NetworkManager (I remember having a bit of difficulty configuring wpa_supplicant for my university in 2008). I don't even have Chrome/Chromium. Linux on the desktop is enough of a niche/bubble still that it wouldn't surprise me if a large number of other users don't have Chrome either (e.g. I don't use or care about services with DRM, and have it disabled in my browser). Honestly besides flexbox and TLS updates I'm not sure I know of anything useful that's been added to browsers in the last 20 years.
Easily over 99% of what I use a browser for are essentially static pages, so wasm and especially webgpu strike me as extremely niche. Like it's cute that you can run quake in a browser, but I can also just open my start menu and launch quake. For actual web usage (looking up information, shopping, paying my bills, bank transfers, stock trades, etc.), simple, static html is the high performance approach.
In a browser/on the desktop? I would think everyone would use a dedicated application, probably on their phone. For Linux users in particular, I would be unsurprised if they use OsmAnd. Maps also shouldn't require webgpu or wasm. e.g. XForms made something like a scrollable map application trivial to develop years before wasm was a thing[0]. That shows what could have been a browser improvement if W3C standards were still relevant. Google maps of course predates those things by over a decade.
That still sounds relatively niche/doesn't really disagree with my statement that easily over 99% of web usage is not something like that. How often are you finding a new home? Map widgets also shouldn't really be a performance concern; they were doable 15-20 years ago (i.e. with much weaker hardware and no webasm/webgpu).
Something like improved forms with validations and databinding would be useful for actual easier document authoring. Built-in charts (line graphs, pie charts, etc. with baked in support for legends and axes) would also be generically useful in the way that tables were. Flexbox was useful for layouts, but otherwise we instead got pushes for more scripting performance to cover up the impact of mass surveillance and more ways to leak data about the underlying system to conduct that surveillance.
I haven't built a map app and basically never touch frontend stuff, so I vibe-coded one in 20 minutes here[0] following the approach of the video I linked earlier. It's done inside of an SVG to make it so you could add map markers as another layer (and I added a dot to demo). The map marker here doesn't stay in the correct spot after a zoom change, and I didn't bother to do touch events, but that's not really the point and I don't see much purpose in spending more time. The point is smooth panning works just fine with 150 lines of simple javascript. Probably could be done with less if I were more familiar with browsers.
You can sometimes see a flash if you pan quickly and a new tile is loading in, but the embedded Google Maps on Zillow has a (much more obvious/longer) visible delay for new tiles loading in too. And actually the full, real google maps has tons of stuttering/tearing on my computer when panning, so mine seems to perform better on my computer (though to be fair theirs takes more of the screen. Mine seems to do fine when upping the page zoom level to make it bigger though). The big difference though is my (frontend portion of the) widget can be built during a lunch break, and it's easy enough to see what's going on that a high school student could figure it out with view-source.
Note that for real world use cases, it'd probably also make sense to restrict the range that the user is allowed to zoom and pan around anyway (e.g. Zillow or your delivery tracker don't need to let you scroll a world map to look at a neighborhood/get context). For something like a delivery tracker, you might not be allowed to move the map at all, in which case you're pretty much dealing with a static image where you maybe reposition a marker every minute or so. This does not require wasm or webgpu, and it's a poor use of engineering resources to add that kind of complexity.
SVG indeed also has come a long way and also with just using images in the browser you can solve it quite performant, that is right. I have done both (no map service, but having lots of images on the screen). But WebGL is still leagues ahead. And that shows on old smartphones for example. And I regret not having made the switch earlier as more performance gives much more possibilities, than being restricted to what the DOM offers.
And they've been working quite well with not all that much in ways of improvement for years, if not decades. What's the last huge improvement in maps thats been noticeable to users in the last 5 years?
Yeah - I think the big problems are solved, and then you start moving into more and more niche cases. I really love being able to flash firmware on ESP32 devices with webserial!
The use of USB authentication devices (FIDO2) is also interesting.
Uh, Wine showed up in June of 1993[1], a full month before the first official release of Windows NT. Not necessarily in a usable form, mind you, but even now the usability is heavily dependent on what specific software you are trying to emulate.
This is the first time I've heard a dedicated Linux desktop user complaining about the inability to watch paid streaming content. What is the world coming to! \o/
> the technical term is they are paying customers (although in Google's case it is complex and non-traditional because they are carrying the financial burden on behalf of the people who click on ads and there are a bunch of free riders)
Not the fact that Google is the one doing the paying?
The vast majority since according to Wikipedia the first supermarket was in the 1930s, and thus very few were born before that. I know that I personally have never lived someplace where most of my food didn't come from a supermarket.
It's bizarre to suggest this. They don't need Google's money to compete in browser development. The hard part is competing with a free product. If someone comes up with another way to offer the browser for free, or offer features that make someone want to pay, they can compete. Chromium is already open source. Moving Chrome out of Google does nothing that benefits anyone.
I think offering a simple web browser for free isn't that difficult. That was in place since the 20th century. What will be hard is continuing to develop a web browser that matches the feature set of a browser whose advanced functionality is propped up by the most extractive industry in modern times. That industry has a purpose in funding these advanced features, and while it has opened up a lot of power for individuals it has come at a great cost.
Microsoft isn't exactly a garage startup - and they weren't just dethroned by Google, they actively tried to compete and gain back ground afterwards, building an entirely new browser in the process (pre-Chrome Edge) and offering it for free.
All for nothing, in the end even they had to give up and switch to white-label Chromium.
> All for nothing, in the end even they had to give up and switch to white-label Chromium.
How is that a loss? All Microsoft wants is a controlled space to push their own products/services. Google gave them a tool to do just that for free. Microsoft would absolutely be writing its own (probably worse) browser if Google wasn't so generous to give them on without Microsoft having to incur any development cost.
Don't say they were generous, that was a completely strategical move. By having more browser adopt their engine they can have a better control on ads and ensure they keep a way to profile users. Goal obviously shared with microsoft which knows the engine is in the best hands for their needs too.
I am not sure they had to give up, but my initial experiences with Edge weren't great. There are some interesting claims of bad behavior on Google's part, but I wasn't only seeing problems on Google properties. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
> A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with each other[1] in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to outlaw cartel practices.
What you are alleging sounds bad, but it doesn't sound like a particularly good match for the term 'cartel'.
Not all things we dislike are the same. The same in politics: people there often have the tendency to call everyone they dislike either a Nazi or a communist. Totally ignoring that there are many, many different and exciting varieties of bad.
I used to work for Google for a few years for what it's worth.
It's more of an oligopoly than a cartel to be honest. It's more like how the telco industry operates. High barriers to entry with generous subsidies and incentives for the existing few providers.
Anyone remember when you could buy a physical copy of Netscape Navigator off a store shelf? I personally feel in this weird position where I don't want to pay for software and expect it for free but maybe not fully grasping that "free" software (particularly from for-profit companies) still comes at a cost. Trying to make myself more open to paying for good software again. Unfortunately the subscription model everyone is moving to doesn't make that easier.
Say what you want, but I genuinely miss the comfort of working with Flash where you had a single target and you knew that whatever you see on the screen right now will be exactly the same for every single user, ever, despite on whatever device they will be viewing your project.
I earned my first money for "web developement" in '99, and as much I understand underlying dynamics, I - as a user but mostly as a developer - really enjoy the current phase and I really liked that brief period when IE was the browser.
Are mobile apps the equivalent of that experience today? Cross-platform SDKs for mobile devices have been around for awhile. This might be the closest equivalent to a Flash application?
Web developer jobs are not an obligation of natural law.
You all were impressed upon by the cartel you claim to hate to prop them up.
It’s electromagnetic geometry in the machine. Future hardware makers do not have an honorific obligation to validate developer illusions. They’re working on closed ecosystems that self manage their electromagnetic geometry through to the task at hand without the energy wasting ad hoc effort of human programmers.
Your real problem is nVidia and other chip companies who have no obligation to save jobs of American workers who are just going in circles repeating old memes like a fuzzy VHS.
I certainly peacock every time the new latest greatest [thing] is added to the spec, and am certainly not shy about using those features. There is a handful of misses, but it feels a little dishonest to point the finger squarely at Google when HN in particular lights up like a Christmas tree with every new feature.
Want me to link to our discussion(s) about the new browser DateTime library - Temporal? Or what about Streams, Pattern Matching, Subgrid, Container Queries, color-mix, et al. We ask for this stuff, and we're thrilled when it arrives. Seems hypocritical to then turn around and complain that they're making the browsers "too complicated."
Well, HN isn't really of a unified opinion on the matter - you'll find as many people complaining about browser complexity as people who love these features. The thing is, only one choice between having them or not would make it harder to create new browsers.
Blink and v8 are open source. You don't even need to implement the spec yourself. New browsers can piggy back off open source (which is what Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc also did) to help making a browser easier.
They literally giveaway the base of Chrome for free under one of the most permissive licenses out there, a new browser doesn't even have to start from scratch.
The complexity is enormous but isn’t google employees are active on various standards committees? Google benefit from the complexity because it ensures there will be less competing browsers.
I think Google basically _is_ the standards committees, at this point. Not in the sense of having majority control just by themselves, but in the sense of (1) the cartel being argued over here (browsers funded by Google) having that or close to it, and (2) Chrome being the main source of new features getting implemented, so that the job of the standards committees is mostly to play catch-up with Chrome.
It is not necessary a conspiracy. It's just google had (and still has) no incentives to keep web ecosistem simple and accessible to browser developers, while making it harder perfectly aligns with google's interests.
Yeah, I'm not even a web dev, but even I can see that Google wants to make the web stack ever more complicated and is has been good at getting what it wants.
I always thought they do that to make it more expensive for anyone to compete with them. E.g., want to introduce a new operating systems for phones? No one will use it unless it has a web browser. So you have to hire a thousand expensive developers to create and maintain the browser (or maybe somehow induce Mozilla to port Firefox to it, which would probably also be expensive).
I don't think there would be demand for extraneous web APIs if the native ones were a good enough replacement. Kinda feels like the fault of OEMs for driving people to the web for good content.
It has some cartel-like aspects but lacks others, probably because the software industry has a unique structure in which there are nearly no distribution costs.
Cambridge Dictionary: A cartel is a group of similar independent companies or countries that join together to control prices and limit competition. It involves restricting output, controlling prices, and allocating market shares.
Group of similar but independent companies (check) that join together to control prices (no, but they do join together to control the web in other ways), and limit competition (yes, by constantly adding features to HTML whilst market dumping they prevent competitors from arising). It involves restricting output (not in the literal sense, does apply if you consider the synchronized way they implement standards), controlling prices (yes, forcing them to zero instead of the natural market rate), and allocating market shares (yes, if you consider iOS browser restrictions).
I remember that apple, google, ms had some anti-poaching agreements in place, while not directly related it seems that that is also pattern of cartels to have informal agreements that hinders competition.
They all have contracts with Google, work on the same shared specifications and in the case of most browser companies, work on the same shared codebase. That would count as a joining together for the purposes of cartel law.
If you say browser developers need money from the search giant to compete in browser development, you are saying that - right now - you can't compete in browser development without it.
That is a cartel.
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.