The Justice Department’s proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.
In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.
The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.
"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”
The thing is it’s never been more expensive and time consuming to write a browser, it’s bigger scope than a kernel in many ways. Stuff like Epiphany isn’t even close, despite relying on Apple’s webkit. Most distros just push people to Firefox now, despite a history of KHTML and all that. We would need something like the Linux Foundation to pick it up (which runs on corporate sponsorship for a shared resource)
Bigger scope than a kernel? That’s a bold statement.
Not sure it’s that bold even. Chrome has approx. 10% more lines of code than Linux, and even for Linux 60% is just drivers.
Flawed metric, sure, but it at least shows that they’re probably similar in complexity.
Not only does it need to do everything from memory management to job scheduling, it also has all of the UI and graphics driver complexity blended in. Usually that’s a different layer that the kernel historically didn’t worry about, it would be as if GTK is part of Linux, along with the programming language. Then there’s shit like WebAssembly and WebGL, databases, sandboxing, permissions, user management… A Brower is like a cross platform OS built to run on another OS
I am absolutely baffled that anybody could think a browser, though absolutely a complex piece of software is even in the same league as a monolithic kernel when it comes to scope and complexity.
Memory management? If you think memory management in browsers is even remotely close the algorithmic density of memory management code by a kernel then your statement makes sense. But that is such a crazy statement that it feels a bit like flat earth.
Graphics complexity? You don’t think the actual writing of the system API’s, that the browsers simply use, to instruct the hardware how to run varying display types is more complex than calling those API’s? I remind that hardware abstraction via drivers is part of the kernel’s scope.
Sandboxing, permissions, and user management? I’m resisting the urge to feel incredulous but this is just beyond the pale.
Yes browsers are huge, powerful, complex beasts, but they aren’t close in scope, complexity, or density to monolithic kernels, and it borders on comical to say they do. There is a reason very very few kernel projects see the light of day; it is about the most complex and high stakes piece of software than can be written.
If Google is the only thing holding up the non-Apple web browsers, maybe then this will lead to scaling down the insane scope of the web standards so it becomes reasonable to implement and maintain a browser for non-megacorps.
Wishful thinking, but hey.