2025-04-24
Chrome and the burden of developing a browser
One part of the news of the time interval is that the US courts may require Google to spin off Chrome (cf). Over on the Fediverse, I felt this wasn't a good thing:
I have to reluctantly agree that separating Chrome from Google would probably go very badly¹. Browsers are very valuable but also very expensive public goods, and our track record of funding and organizing them as such in a way to not wind up captive to something is pretty bad (see: Mozilla, which is at best questionable on this). Google is not ideal but at least Chrome is mostly a sideline, not a main hustle.
One possible reaction to this is that it would be good for everyone if people stopped spending so much money on browsers and so everything involving them slowed down. Unfortunately, I don't think that this would work out the way people want, because popular browsers are costly beasts. To quote what I said on the Fediverse:
I suspect that the cost of simply keeping the lights on in a modern browser is probably on the order of plural millions of dollars a year. This is not implementing new things, this is fixing bugs, keeping up with security issues, monitoring CAs, and keeping the development, CI, testing, and update infrastructure running. This has costs for people, for servers, and for bandwidth.
The reality of the modern Internet is that browsers are load bearing infrastructure; a huge amount of things run through them, including and especially on minority platforms. Among other things, no browser is 'secure' and all of them are constantly under attack. We want browser projects that are used by lots of people to have enough resources (in people, build infrastructure, update servers, and so on) to be able to rapidly push out security updates. All browsers need a security team and any browser with addons (which should be all of them) needs a security team for monitoring and dealing with addons too.
(Browsers are also the people who keep Certificate Authorities honest, and Chrome is very important in this because of how many people use it.)
On the whole, it's a good thing for the web that Chrome is in the hands of an organization that can spend tens of millions of dollars a year on maintaining it without having to directly monetize it in some way. It would be better if we could collectively fund browsers as the public good that they are without having corporations in the way, because Google absolutely corrupts Chrome (also) and Mozilla has stumbled spectacularly (more than once). But we have to deal with the world that we have, not the world that we'd like to have, and in this world no government seems to be interested in seriously funding obvious Internet public goods (not only browsers but also, for example, free TLS Certificate Authorities).
(It's not obvious that a government funded browser would come out better overall, but at least there would be a chance of something different than the narrowing status quo.)
PS: Another reason that spending on browsers might not drop is that Apple (with Safari) and Microsoft (with Edge) are also in the picture. Both of these companies might take the opportunity to slow down, or they might decide that Chrome's potentially weak new position was a good moment to push for greater dominance and maybe lock-in through feature leads.