> So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2 again. Best case. What a situation.
The premise of this article seems completely wrong.
Chromium, Safari, Firefox. And a longtail of half implemented alternatives. But the point is that there are 3 independent browser engines that are fairly widely used. They also have their own indepenedent javascript and WASM implementations. There are a few non browser based WASM implementations in addition to that. As standards go, that's a pretty widely implemented one. There are some people working stubbornly on completely new browser engines even. The standards are in better shape they've ever been since the inception on the web. HTML 5 is way better defined than most of its predecessors.
If everybody was like this, we'd all be using Internet Explorer. Firefox would never have gained any traction. Chrome would have flopped and Google would have killed it. Apple would have given up on Safari. None of those things happened. Because we are not all passively whining on the sidelines about how things used to be better while not lifting a finger to do anything about it.
The "weaponization of complexity" is real—modern web standards are an endless labyrinth of APIs, performance optimizations, and security requirements. Large players like Google have the resources to dictate how the web evolves, while any newcomer faces insurmountable hurdles in achieving compatibility, security, and speed. Even major tech companies have tried and failed (e.g., Microsoft ditching EdgeHTML for Chromium).
Can anyone do anything about it? Google’s control is inevitable. No one can meaningfully compete with Google in the long run. Keeping up with compatibility alone is a full-time job for massive teams—which is why even Microsoft gave up on EdgeHTML and switched to Chromium.
You put the blame on Google but isn't it your fault, people who get excited every time a new feature gets added to web standards, and developers who use it? Like CSS masonry, or WebRTC, or web components with shadow DOM? Features like this get lot of upvotes here.
This is the truth of it: if people chose Firefox, or another alternative, over Chrome then Google would have less power to impose its will on the web. This would be a good thing.
Google’s power on the web doesn’t simply come from having lots of money and resources - see, as examples, any of the multitude of Google’s failures and shuttered products - but mostly comes from its reach.
“Everybody” uses Chrome. If that were no longer true, progress on the web could return to a more open an collaborative model.
Anyone can help that happen simply by switching to Firefox, as I did four or five years ago.
I never used Chrome much. I think I jumped from IE5 to Firefox. IE6 only for testing web apps.
Frankly nearly everything has been working well in Firefox for a long time. The only two sources of problems are:
1) Long tail experimental sites that use or want to demonstrate some new technology. I find most of them on the home page of HN.
2) Myself and the security/privacy plugins I use. They break some web pages, especially ecommerce and payment workflows. I either go hunting for the correct combination of permissions in uMatrix (I would become crazy soon if I used uBlock Origin for that) or I use that very site in Chrome and the close it. Major ecommerce sites don't have any problem. The long tail ones are weirder in their choice of third parties. However that's an issue that any browser would have, it's not because of Firefox.
Clearly this is a common sentiment, but none of the comments on this post seem to provide any evidence of it. The W3C has hundreds of members. Does Google really sideline them all? Are there specific examples where Google strong-armed the others to develop self serving standards? I'm not talking about Topics API, because that's not a standard. AFAICT all of Google's sketchy chrome features have never affected me as a happy Firefox user.
How much of Edge switching to Chromium was a way for MS to shoot themselves in the foot and focus monopoly discussions on Google instead of themselves?
Yes, Donald Trump can, because these are all American companies. If he pushes the rest of the world hard enough, the amount of will and the amount of resource that will be mobilized to get out from under the thumb of U.S. tech domination will be something none of us has ever seen in their lifetimes.
With the way that AI is unfolding right now, this might be an outdated problem fairly soon. In 2026 if you can just tell your AI to build a new full-featured browser before you go to sleep, you might have something in the morning.
AI might be heading towards a situation where you can "tell it to build a full featured browser".
But this narrative is naive at best, and frankly, getting annoying too. Especially because it gets repeated by people who know even less about "programming" than those who start this idea in the first place.
That AI cannot maintain this browser. It cannot monitor and fix performance issues. It won't be able to refactor stuff when the umpteenth web-api changes or lands. It cannot architecture the modules so that it can actually do this maintainance either.
Generative AI is fantastic at generating stuff. It's terrible at maintaining, changing, tweaking. It's even worse at understanding what you mean with "It must have want a way to disable cookie popups" because that's both ambiguous, and actually the wrong instruction to begin with - for example.
We must stop repeating "AI will be able to program our software for us very soon" because "programming software" is very little about churning out new code. As every programmer with a few years under their belt will know.
What AI is good at, though, is enabling those programmers to be far more effective, efficient. To lower the barrier of entry. etc. But I'm 101% confident that no AI will "write a full-featured browser" that will continue to run for over half a month and/or one OS update.
This requires a language that a human can give the specs in. A language that is both precise and unambiguous and understandable by humans. A... programming language?
And it requires AI to understand the effects of changes it makes. On many levels. "If I move this module behind an abstraction, will it make it easier to maintain? Does it touch performance? Would it open security issues?" Generative AI isn't good at reasoning in that way. Maybe other AI, but it seems hardly anyone is pouring substantial funding into areas other than "a bigger and smarter generator than the competition" currently.
The trajectory actually seems to be plateauing already. OAI is struggling mightily to improve GPT enough to call it 5.0 and te struggles will only get harder as the number gets higher
I mean, the goal is to get it to a state where it can do those things. There are benchmarks for autonomously resolving issues that are being hill-climbed as we speak: https://www.swebench.com/
I don't know how far away it is, but never say never.
The "weaponization of complexity" as you call it is simply "work is done by those who show up".
Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc took the horribly dastardly approach of "participating" and then "doing the work".
The horror.
Microsoft gave up because it wasn't worth it when someone else was willing to do the work. It was not something that was adding value to them by them doing it themselves anymore.
It's hilarious to try to pain this as some evil dastardly thing where they badly tried to keep up and just failed because it's just so hard and costly vs something where it just wasn't worth them paying for because they didn't derive enough value from it.
Remind me which earnings call it was where they were saying "you know, we are going to issue rough q4 guidance because we think it's going to be really hard to implement these next 3 CSS features"
The cost of keeping up for them, even now, if they started again, would be a rounding error in any MS VP's overall equity refresh budget (IE the money they are giving out in stock per year to employees in their org). So please, let's not pretend it's too "hard" or "expensive" for them.
In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.
If you think you can do it better, or that it doesn't need to be this complex, or whatever, awesome. show up and do it, like everyone else did.
The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity".
Calling it that is just plain lazy. Almost all improvements and backwards compatibility shims make it harder for someone else to implement from scratch. That's because the primary goal is usually to help users.
I mean, why stop with the web with this argument?
How come the Go folks weaponized the Go language by adding generics? By making it harder for me to implement my own, they've weaponized it against me!
I can't believe nobody has stopped their dastardly deeds.
I think the "weaponization of complexity" claim can only be understood in relation to the "gimping browsers to protect the App Store" counter claim.
The situation is far more complex than three browser engines competing on a level playing field. "Showing up" is not even possible on iOS. And Firefox is funded by the maker of Chrome.
I think all of this rhetoric that browser vendors use against each other has to be seen against the backdrop of their respective business models.
Money and resource are not the problem nor the reason microsoft gave up on their own browser engine. Same as why they gave up on mobile.
No reasonable amount of engineering resources would have made a dent in the problem.
What OP is calling "weaponization of complexity" is just the asymmetry of effort required between new comers and entrenched players.
You would have to be naive to think that google would just open their arms and kumbaya with microsoft to do the "hard work"
We have seen this played out in any industry in history.
Sometime hard work is not enough and it's easy to abuse dominant position to grid lock a market.
The rest of your post frankly sounds like someone who is drunk on the usual company cooliad.
> The end goal is to help user
No. The end goal is to make money. Sometime it requires helping user, other time a bunch of anti competitive ( forcing android oem to prevent meaningful forks)and anti consumer (like playing hard ball with ad blockers) BS.
>The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity
So much wrong with this. And is just a strawman.
OP is not saying that it's not hard problem solving. The point is the solution achieved is self serving and sucks for the rest of us.
> In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.
This reads like a semi-incoherent essay from someone who doesn't really understand what complexity is and has a chip on their shoulder about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
Yeah and coming from someone with so much experience and industry knowledge as dannybee i find that perspective very puzzling.
Just painting the situation as well google have influence because they work the hardest is just bizare. Having been in some standard / comity meetings. Everyone in those room work very hard... but someone hard work is not enough
> Chromium, Safari, Firefox. And a longtail of half implemented alternatives. But the point is that there are 3 independent browser engines that are fairly widely used.
Come on, you can't say that with a straight face.
Safari exists because Apple has a monopoly on iOS traffic, and therefore an financially significant portion of mobile traffic. As soon as their rigid fingers are pried loose of that (which we're seeing the beginnings of), that's gone.
Firefox is great, and I use it, but it has an insignificant market share.
The "longtail of half implemented alternatives" are by definition not alternatives.
Firefox only exists because Google needs an alternative to pretend its not a part of a duopoly. That alternative doesn't have to be Firefox tbh. They could stop sponsoring and choose any of the thousands of alternatives. Similarly Safari exists because Apple has exclusive control of what goes in iPhones. If it is ever forced by legislation to open it up to other browsers, it will lose some of that control. I don't think it will ever be forced to fully open though. I expect apple to make it so only a select number of entities can afford to release a true Safari competitor.
I switched to Safari from Chrome on MacOS and never looked back. Way faster and kinder to battery. Also, it doesn’t push Google or any other login onto me.
Look at the market share. And look at how much breakage report there is with Firefox vs. Chrome or Safari (not to say the return of "this website works better with Chrome" disclaimers, as if we were back to IE6).
There's a lot of websites that break for me on Firefox. Most examples are things like small businesses contact forms... I also had trouble with a kitchen design website. I can't remember what it was, but one just showed me a blank page unless I was on a Chrome-based browser.
half the time it's my choice of security settings and not Firefox. So... IMO %$#^% it - if a site doesn't support firefox I'm strongly disinclined to load up chrome to use it. There are lots of sites and lots of businesses.
The premise of this article seems completely wrong.
Chromium, Safari, Firefox. And a longtail of half implemented alternatives. But the point is that there are 3 independent browser engines that are fairly widely used. They also have their own indepenedent javascript and WASM implementations. There are a few non browser based WASM implementations in addition to that. As standards go, that's a pretty widely implemented one. There are some people working stubbornly on completely new browser engines even. The standards are in better shape they've ever been since the inception on the web. HTML 5 is way better defined than most of its predecessors.
If everybody was like this, we'd all be using Internet Explorer. Firefox would never have gained any traction. Chrome would have flopped and Google would have killed it. Apple would have given up on Safari. None of those things happened. Because we are not all passively whining on the sidelines about how things used to be better while not lifting a finger to do anything about it.