All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding

[andreasr]

"All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding"

https://danfabulich.medium.com/all-four ... 42ceb358f1

What are the opportunities now for browser forks and browser development?

[Moonchild]

Maybe they'll stop pushing the already obscenely large web spec into areas they shouldn't, if they lose 80% of their funding.
That might actually be a good thing for forks.

The Sherman Antitrust Act was specifically designed to target “competitors” who form illegal agreements to maintain monopoly power.
It’s obviously illegal for Google to prop up Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari as if they were co-equal competitors to Chrome.

I'm happy to see this being finally addressed. This should have been done a decade ago though, but I guess that is how slow the wheels of justice turn in the States.

[vannilla]

The last paragraph makes it sound like the DoJ is the bad guy.
This move will not destabilize anything.
The UXP team has demonstrated you can develop a "modern" browser with not even 1/10 of the funding MozApl received from Google.
In fact, if development of new features were to slow down it would be easier to work on a browser.

[Moonchild]

The UXP team has demonstrated you can develop a "modern" browser with not even 1/10 of the funding MozApl received from Google.

I wish we got 1/10th of the revenue Mozilla receives. it's more like 1/10,000th... But yeah, if they were to lose 90% of their funding, they could still develop a browser -- but then without trying to add 100s of gadgeteering APIs or constantly refactoring stuff that works perfectly fine as it is.
They don't want to "slow down" though because there's this impression that if they don't constantly change stuff, they aren't developing. It's that whole Agile misconception in software development.

[Night Wing]

I do not see this affecting the Edge and Safari browsers at all. Microsoft and Apple are huge companies and they can easily afford to do their own funding concerning their own browsers without depending on Google's money.

Firefox might have a problem since Mozilla gets a very large portion of their revenue from Google.

[Moonchild]

Firefox might have a problem since Mozilla gets a very large portion of their revenue from Google.

They all do. The difference is that Microsoft and Apple have other large and established income streams; Mozilla not so much, so they'd have to restructure to deal with it.

[Gemmaugr]

With the extracurricular activities and mismanagement of funding (https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539 ... of-mozilla), Mozilla will indeed have to rethink their whole existence, and that's a good thing.

When it comes to google, they sadly won't be affected overly much by this, as they'd still control chromium and hence all other chromium rebuilds and Electron apps and CEF (chromium embedded framework) programs, and QTWeb engine uses and (google) android's webview browsers. Not to mention WHATWG standards and Angular for site frameworks (as well as influence Node.js, React.js, and Next.js with them being dependent on googles V8 javascript engine). Then there's also all the third party site scripts like ads, gstatic, gfonts, tagmanager, etc. Oh, and Web Extensions, Widewine, Web RTC, Safe Browsing, Skia, Geolocation, etc.

Untangling the above monoculture is a start with the current decoupling of google search from being default in browsers and google losing the proprietary chrome (not chromium). It's too little frankly, but maybe not too late.. yet.