Comment by ajross
1 year ago
Almost literally everyone that tried to build a web browser gave up and just reskins Chrome now. Of the two outliers, one exists only because its very successful hardware vendor preloads it and disallows competitors, and the other is mostly funded by Chrome's owner anyway.
Basically: without Chrome, Firefox dies (Mozilla is mostly a zombie now already) and Apple closes up shop on Safari a-la IE6. The end result of an order like this will be the death of the world wide web as a platform for new applications.
Didn't Mozilla make it's money on search? If so, how would Chrome disappearing kill Firefox which is independently developed and funded differently?
On responding Chrome, I'll add that's partly because Google controlled Search and Chrome which helped Chrome get dominant. Then, web site owners made pages good for Chrome by default. Then, it was harder to compete with Chrome since everyone had to imitate it. If it's independent (or even weakened), that might reverse a bit. Might not.
Saying Mozilla made its money on search is misleading. It made money because Google paid to be the default search engine. Without that deal Mozilla would be in a much worse state. It's why Mozilla is scrambling to become an ad company.
I meant that it made it's money off Google Search. A search engine company paid it. I apologize if it was confusing to anyone.
So, the fact that they're paid to support Google Search means Chrome being divested shouldn't hurt them. The only exception I could see is if they had to pay the new owner of Chrome like that, didn't add anything to the budget, and split it between the two. That's pure speculation, though.
Perhaps Mozilla could build an ad-supported search engine, seeing that google appears to be giving up search
It depends on how this is all handled. If Chromium/Blink were handed over to a Blender-style non-profit that were sponsored by the enormous number of companies that depend on it (including several cash-flush multinationals), things would continue more or less as-is, minus inappropriate changes requested by non-Chrome branches of Google.
I think it’s also possible that in a world where Chrome/Blink is no longer guaranteed to dominate there’d be increased interest in contributions to WebKit, which is still quite open and flexible, helping bring it up to par for non-Apple platforms.
> If Chromium/Blink were handed over to a Blender-style non-profit that were sponsored by the enormous number of companies that depend on it (including several cash-flush multinationals),
The "that depend on it" is a past tense analysis. When those "cash-flush multinationals" need to roll out the next version of their product, are they going to continue to bet on a "Blender-style non-profit"?
Or are they just going to ship an iOS app like everyone else since "everyone knows web sucks on Apple now" and "everyone has an iPhone anyway"?
Presumably these companies will continue to want the business of the majority non-iOS-user planet, plus there’s all the companies that have integrated Chromium into their desktop tech stacks by way of Electron and CEF. Most of these companies probably already ship an iOS app anyway.