Comment by azinman2

6 days ago

Browsers are complicated enough that I don’t see how a company could do the right thing without it being subsidized by a larger business. I feel like this is paving the ground for a Chinese startup to come take its place.

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azinman2

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asadotzler  5 days ago

Browsers simply require paying a few hundred very in demand engineers, and that's hardly impossible if Mozilla's been doing it for 20 years as a non-profit. How many software shops out there have 500 engineers? I'm guessing literal hundreds US companies have that today and wouldn't be surprised if someone could build something that scale in a couple years with the proper budget and leadership.

But they won't have to build it, they'll just buy a chunk of Google's team with the Chrome trademarks and the chromium infrastructure and then scale back attempts to outpace the few other engine makers by piling on features only useful to an advertising monopoly and instead focus on the core feature set while raking in big bucks selling search and ad distribution to all the search and ad companies not named Google (and perhaps some even from Google too.)

  • azinman2  5 days ago

    Mozilla does it by getting Google to pay them a bunch of money, which itself is the subject of anti-trust investigations. That money could dry up if Google is forced to no longer fund Mozilla, and if that happens, they’re screwed. It’ll also mean others likely won’t be able to pay either, which only leaves either buying software (who will pay for a browser?) or ads.

    Also note that Mozilla has been doing this a long time, and yet they’re effectively irrelevant in market share now. So they’ve done a terrible job.

    Browsers are a specialized technology and skill set that isn’t easily found, nor can you just throw any old SWE at the problem.