this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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273
All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025 (danfabulich.medium.com)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
100 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I know this sounds bad, but maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Necessity is the mother of invention and maybe browser technology should be funded by governments instead of privately owned advertising megacorps?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

One browser tab holding a few YouTube visits consumes about 350 MO of memory. I think we have added enough functionality to the browser

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I may be a layman with regards to this, can someone explain to me the thinking behind the DoJ's proposal and why they think it's for the common good.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Monopolies are bad enough by themselves. But with google they own such a large part of the day to day web browsing experience it's amazing it's not worse than it already is.

  • YouTube has documented cases of effectively throttling non-chrome browsers.
  • There is a lot of juicy user behaviour data that can be gathered directly from chrome to support Google's AD network.
  • Google bank roll a lot of the web technologies that run websites, giving chrome an edge to implement new tech earlier and better than the competition.
  • They also own Android, and unlike windows, they don't even give you a pop up in what browser you want to use.
  • They also don't only control Chrome, but they are giving out the chromium (the web engine under the hood). So now they effectively control Brave, Edge, Opera, and any other browser that runs on chromium. And wouldn't you know it, they heavily nerfed ad blockers capabilities in chromium to increase Googles ad revenue.
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Eh, 80% of what this Dan fellow provides can't be all that much...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't want web browsers to be changing all the time forcing me to do updates. Software that is complete doesn't need to be changed just for the sake of change.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That’s not how security development works. New things come up and need to be updated to protect you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The vast majority of it is not "security development". There are just screwing around with perfectly good software, sometimes making it worse, because they have a large staff of developers they are paying a salary to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

That's stuff comes on the regular release cycle. Chrome and Firefox are both on a release every 4 weeks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

So I spent two days hacking together a Gemini client script in tcl/tk. It's near 700 lines already, some of those are dead weight (client certs, stuck cause pki module in tcllib doesn't know of hashing algorithms newer than sha256), but it's usable for reading pages, viewing images, saving either and answering prompts, with basic history. A fully functional client is supposed to be doable in 1-2 days in like 200 lines of code in something. So it's a clumsy mess.

And yes, it feels like it's a lot of what we need web for. Suppose I got client certs working and this were a Gemini service. I'd follow a link saying "post something", I'd type this comment into a prompt and send the request, and on the next update it would be here, right under CN from my client cert used as nickname. One could have such links under every comment. One could build threads.

So maybe yes.

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