Comment by MichaelCharles
6 days ago
Monopolies are bad. Splitting up monopolies is good for the consumer.
That doesn't mean this makes any sense.
How are they going to separate Chrome from Chromium? If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium? Can Google make another new fork of Chromium and start yet another browser? Or are they now banned from making browsers? What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business? What about ChromeOS? How are they going to handle the extensions store and ecosystem? How is this going to impact web standards?
There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.
in general, I find a little bit distasteful that the only way to build a browser is as a loss leading project for the largest advertising company on the planet
No wonder nobody can compete, loss leaders tend to kill competition as they can be maintained without direct business revenue at all.
The same issue plagues domesticated cats, they don’t need to hunt for food since they have an abundance at home so instead without risk of starvation they are free to hunt all birds in the territory for fun.
There are no browsers left except the artificial ecosystem of Safari. Firefox is not a blip on the radar.
So, everything is chrome and chrome is the web standard. Having a single private company in charge of what is and what is not web standards is a little bit scary, as, like the cat, they don’t really need to see and serve the needs of the environment. They are fed at home.
It is not the only way to build a browser.
It is the only way to build a browser and push adoption.
The problem is not the lack of direct revenues. It is the lack of marketing budget and control of platforms (Chrome dominates on Android for exactly the same reason Safari does on Apple).
Firefox is a perfectly good browser, but has lost its market share because Google has huge marketing advantage.
How much of Mozilla’s budget actually goes to Firefox? Last I checked making a browser wasn’t even on the road map
There's Mozilla Foundation (where making a browser is not on the road map) and Mozilla Corporation (which makes money by making a browser to finance the foundation).
Mozilla Corporation revenue is about half a billion, most of it coming from Google and only 2% (from what I found) going to the foundation. The foundation gets most of its money from Google as well, but separately, and the foundation's revenue is about 10% of Mozilla Corporation's. So overall over 90% of Mozilla's budget goes to software development and to cost centers that are associated to Mozilla Corporation.
That vast majority. And Firefox is massively profitable, too (with a rising share of income not coming from google, up to 15% the last time I looked).
Software development was 220 out of a total 425 M$ of expenses. General and administrative coming in second at 108 M$.
I don't know exactly what comparable software companies invest, but assuming that the 220 is entirely SWE salaries this seems appropriate overhead to my mind.
Edit, all of this is 2022:
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
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I love how this went from "monopolies are bad" to "fuck cats".
Cats have a monopoly on suburban predation in many places. When is the DOJ going to step in?
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and televisions. Now you can't get a television that doesn't spy on you because of unhealthy funding driving the price down.
> loss leaders tend to kill competition as they can be maintained without direct business revenue at all
Ding ding ding. This is a classic monopolist strategy. It poisons the market for any other potential competitors by removing all possibility of profit from the category.
It's kind of eyebrow-raising that more people in this thread don't notice this. And instead just assume of COURSE browsers can't be funded except by a monopolist using it to shore up their surveillance business.
Tangent, but I don't understand this argument at all:
> The same issue plagues domesticated cats, they don’t need to hunt for food since they have an abundance at home so instead without risk of starvation they are free to hunt all birds in the territory for fun.
Please could you help me understand.
- If they don't _need_ to hunt for food, the frequency of hunting birds should go down (even if they still do it for fun sometimes)
- If they don't need to take risks to get food, why would they then take those same risks now for the purpose of entertainment? (That cancels out any meaning of there no longer being any risk in killing birds, so why mention it at all?)
My understanding is that you are implying that cats not having to kill birds out of necessity leading to them now being able to do it for fun is a bad thing. Is that correct? And if so, I don't follow that logic because of my above two points.
The points you raise would make sense if cats were purely logical, unfortunately they're not and a lot of what makes a cat work is instinct.
- Instinctively, cats will hunt.
- Lack of care about food source will make cats outlast prey who have to leave safe areas to find food.
- Lack of care about food availability can (and has been proven to) cause cats to hunt more often, not less- as the "cost" of going for a hunt is basically zero; there's no consequences for failure and even success is met with satisfaction but no "cost".
Anyway,there's better info on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife
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Can you explain the cat thing? Why wouldn't cats who are not fed be forced to kill even more birds?
Is it because they would be focused on more efficient sources of food like mice instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife
Essentially, in the wild, cats would be forced to hunt based on hunger, so they'd have to pick and choose what to hunt.
Since they're never hungry, they do it based on fun, and they can "out-starve" their prey who may be hiding but have a higher need to eat and thus: leave their safety.
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> in general, I find a little bit distasteful that the only way to build a browser is as a loss leading project for the largest advertising company on the planet
Safari came into the world on a similar timeline so this isn't true
If you look at the code size and feature set of Safari 1.0, it’s really a different universe from 2024. Web browsers have become miniature OSes. They contain multiple 3D rendering stacks (WebGL, WebGPU), hardware-accelerated 2D compositors, multiple languages that JIT optimize into native code (JavaScript, WASM), and require passing test suites with millions of cases. The bar has been raised massively since Safari came out, largely to user’s benefit, and honestly we mostly have Chrome to thank for it.
All very good points.
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> A Web browser is on the way to being similar, just a standard tool?
I hope not, because then we get no choices regarding privacy and the most likely dominant player right now cares very much to not give you any privacy.
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> If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium?
I agree, this is a problem, but there should be a trivial solution: Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day. This money should go into paying to maintain it.
Anything else is perpetuating the Trash Web as it's come to be.
The only reason a "web browser" is "free" (as in beer) is because Microsoft in the 90s was (belatedly) very worried about a world where Netscape held a lot of power, and realized making and giving away a slightly better browser would neutralize this upstart. Everything flowed from that one tactical decision by a couple of execs at MS.
I'd argue that a browser should be a part of the OS or be a paid product, but funding it with ad money from under the same corporate umbrella is a gross practice which promotes things like... Google nerfing adblocker plugins, and Google trying to kill cookies in favor of something only they control. (Although on that last one, by some miracle their hand was stayed and they backed down.)
Of course the DOJ can't ban the idea of a browser funded by ad money (and most are) but separating it from the other side of the business which should have zero say in how it's implemented, that's common sense to me.
> The only reason a "web browser" is "free" (as in beer) is because Microsoft in the 90s was (belatedly) very worried about a world where Netscape held a lot of power, and realized making and giving away a slightly better browser would neutralize this upstart. Everything flowed from that one tactical decision by a couple of execs at MS.
There were free as in beer browsers before IE (although many were free for non-commercial use only).
Chromium is a fork (well, a fork of a fork) of a FOSS browser specifically developed to be a FOSS browser for FOSS OSes (primarily Linux).
> Anything else is perpetuating the Trash Web as it's come to be.
unless you ban "Free" products, this is going to keep happening. People seems to think that just because something is "Free" it must therefore cost nothing to make. I mean, downloading Chrome takes 2 minutes max and seems trivial to me? Whats the problem?
People think Youtube should just allow them to watch videos without any ads nor paying any money. Clearly, the consumer is not rational.
Android shares my location more than 14 times a day IIRC. They snoop through every single thing in my life. I can list a bizillion no. Of things. Zero damn given when they are horrible. Let them stop with dark patterns. Then I will start caring.
I pay for all my games, all good services which ainuse. I try and donate to open source project wherever and when I can. But I couldnt care less about FAANG like companies. If they want us to be good to them, let them be good first.
Hell, its just the other day we were talking about Youtube showing ads to paying customers. I really dont care whether a company is big or small. When companies are bad, they just are. That is it. I dont lose sleep over using FreeTube for watching youtube videos for free. Paying will solve issues, yeah right!
Edit: Language
Right but companies are perfectly rational actors /s
> I agree, this is a problem, but there should be a trivial solution: Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day.
If getting people to pay for stuff they use were trivial then advertising wouldn't be as big as it is.
Yeah, OP is naive. Nobody ever paid for browsers, even before IE was a thing (well, nobody I know...).
We also don't pay for open TV which is ad supported.
This isn't a single decision that someone madennn it's actually very natural.
We don't pay for most of the web, not only browsers. Indirect monetization is great because making a consumer open his/her wallet takes a lot, no matter the price.
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Netscape was free for non-business users before Internet Explorer existed. Netscape was competing with Mosaic, which was free, what with being a product of the NCSA (hence “Mozilla = Mosaic Killer”).
Could Chromium be made close source?
It's easy to just say "well, a company should charge money for a browser", but a company is free to write their own browser and charge for it right now. Chromium though, is bound by its open-source license and its copyright is owned by thousands of different contributors.
> Could Chromium be made close source?
Sure, it's BSD licensed, all future development could be done closed-source. Note that the name "Chromium" would need to stay with the open source side of the project, so it would be more like a closed fork than a re-licencing.
99% sure you could just keep using the name "Chrome", though, and stop releasing code into chromium instead.
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> Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day
How do you do this for something that's a basic necessity at this point? There must be a free browser because so many services depend on their user having access to them through one, and browsers aren't in the category of product where you can provide users a basic browser without features and then selling them a better version. If it's not Chrome that's free, any other free issue would inevitably run into the same issue. If not bankrolled by a company, browsers would need to be government funded
> How do you do this for something that's a basic necessity at this point? ... If not bankrolled by a company, browsers would need to be government funded
You mean like government funded food, housing, health care and other basic necessities?
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> How do you do this for something that's a basic necessity at this point?
The response is further in OP’s comment:
> I'd argue that a browser should be a part of the OS or be a paid product
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Would Google still be allowed to fund Mozilla if ad funded browsers are an issue.
> I agree, this is a problem, but there should be a trivial solution: Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day.
What a brain-dead idea. Having to pay for something does not affect the openness of a platform. You just create a de-facto tax that benefits no one at all.
If no one can maintain Chromium, well, that's a pity. On the other hand other projects can catch up then, and maybe the web as a whole can take a breather, without Google pushing more and more "standards". That's actually a good reason to do this. I really couldn't care less about Google's ad business. It is a burden on society.
I think it cannot get much worse than it currently is, with one company dictating the web's future and raking in the money from that. So while there are significant unknowns, probably the result will be something at least a little bit better. I am a little worried about Chrome being only fake sold, to some company that is indirectly controlled by Google again.
> What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business?
As an aside, maybe this is part of the issue. We have been privileged to enjoy some of the most advanced and complex software created for free since basically their inception. Nobody every paid for a web browser.
But then look around the software industry and every software of even remotely similar complexity need to be paid for, or are a kept free due to a convergence of interest of people who can make money out of it (most notably: Linux).
Now, a web browser could be seen exactly the same way Linux is: Many, many, (many!) company makes ton of profit from people have access to a web browser, therefor, they should be fine with paying people to develop it. And in some way, considering that chromium and firefox are open-source, this is what could happen. But it does not really happen. Google is bankrolling both FF and Chromium, and they have basically total control over Chromium development. Who else is even giving remotely even money for 1 FTE for FF or Chromium ? Thing is, no company would do it for Chromium because it is seen as a Google product, so why pay them for something they will do in any case. Company could have financed Firefox, but now that it is the underdog (and that the Mozilla Foundation makes questionable decision), it doesn't seem like a very good investment.
This is in many way crazy to me that almost every tech company heavily really on people having free access to a web browser, yet nobody is really trying to finance one. But I do think it is a political issue, and that, maybe just maybe, separating Chromium from Google would actually give incentive to the rest of the industry to finance the development of a browser that is not directly own by neither of them. Again, some what just like Linux.
Without engaging the broader argument...
> Nobody every paid for a web browser.
Sure we did! Back in the day when the choices were Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Opera, many people -- me included -- paid for Opera. I continued to do so up to version 5 in 2004 or 2006, can't remember, when I noticed that Phoenix aka. Firebird aka. Firefox were good enough for me. Have been a Firefox (and derivatives) user ever since.
There's an implicit assumption embedded in this comment that the Chromium project is indispensable, whereas I'm unconvinced it's even a net positive at all.
Anyone who follows standards discourse would probably appreciate the prospect of this open source codebase having independent stewards much more than any fears over maintenance resources.
Sounds like a Google problem.
The web existed before Chrome, and will continue to exist afterward.
Yes and no. The web may exist, but there is a viable digital alternative to it today, which didn't exist before Chrome - the mobile and app ecosystem. Virtually everybody who uses the web also uses mobile apps, but there are people who only ever use Android or iOS on a handheld device. It is also possible that in losing Chrome, Google will neglect its web properties and focus exclusively on access to services through mobile apps.
(I don't think your analysis makes sense, but...) Hey, if Google loses its advertising cash cow and vacates the web for apps, that'll really open up the web search market too! Great news!
In the broadest sense Android and IOS are similar to browsers: All are platforms that execute code given in a certain format and have APIs for interacting with the device.
(The browser is different in that it doesn't need a separate download to acquire the code and makes partial code downloads easy. And from search to opening an app is a single click and very quick.)
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Likewise we used the Internet before someone CERN came up with HTML render application.
> There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.
That's what happen when you let anomalies like this become the norm. Antitrust actions should have been taken against Google 15 years ago, and at that point it wouldn't have undermined the whole web because back then didn't yet control the entire web (but the trend was clear and that's why action should have been taken).
I guess that's a fair point.
Firefox is massively profitable at a fraction of Chrome's marketshare.
With 81% [1] of their revenue in 2022 provided by Google...
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[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
Yes, but they have successfully been shrinking that down from 94% in 2016.
Long road towards independence, but moving in the right direction at least.
And the default spot in the search bar is valuable to people outside of Google. Even if we assume that Google is overpaying, Mozilla could keep operating as is with another entity paying significantly less...
And Google will pull out of the deal when they are forced to split off chrome
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How much of that money is from Google?
I use Brave which is based off of Chromium just like Chrome, and the experience is great. I’d say I’ve had to go to chrome maybe 3 times in the last year, and it was always for some super complicated SPA.
Whatever decrease we see to our browsing experience will be worth the gains I expect to see from dealing a blow to a monopoly like Google.
The question of who would likely buy it is just as important. I can't help but think that MS would love to have the dominant browser again.
If there's no market for that it will die, simple as.
keeping chrome alive isn't the goal, keeping the web not being at whims of a single company is.