Thoughts on Browsers

The internet today is more important than ever. Having access to the internet is a necessity today and your choice of browser is the crucial tool for that. And while there are a number of browser options the web is absolutely dominated by Google at the moment. They’re in the position that Microsoft was in the late 90s with their dominance of the browser market with Internet Explorer and the Trident engine. Instead, we have Chrome, and the dozens of Chromium based browsers.

It’s frustrating and concerning for a free and open web to have some of the largest corporations in the world setting the course for the web through both direct and indirect methods. And while the Chromium project itself is open source it is still largely held to the whims of where Google wants to develop the web by being the largest player. It’s a strange situation where even Microsoft has transitioned to building their own browser to use Chromium as well for the past several years with Edge. Even Opera moved to a Chromium-based engine, as well as some newer browsers like Arc and Vivaldi. Safari is one of the few Webkit-based browsers with any sort of noticeable market share for desktop and obviously is heavily represented in the mobile space. The other holdout is Mozilla’s Firefox and browsers built on its Gecko engine, like Pale Moon and their fork of Gecko called Goanna.

I don’t trust and am joined by many in tech fields as well in their distrust of the overwhelming dominance of Chromium-based browsers in the desktop space. It results in a stagnation of development and an increasingly myopic focus where the entire market is limited by the limitations of that one engine. In particular, it has made the web even more advertisement-focused than it already was. As Google has continued to pull emphasis away from their search products and moved it to advertisement it has made it of paramount importance for them to make online advertisements as pervasive, and as resilient to ad blocking, as possible.

Their latest move to try and gate off YouTube from users with ad blocking enabled is problematic at best and damning to the accessibility of information at worst. It’s a tight line to walk for a platform that is so heavily dependent on advertisement revenue but it’s also a dark reminder for how ad blocking is even forced to be reported by the browsers themselves to websites for what plugins are installed. The line between the client and server analytics has been dramatically eroded over the past several years and it’s a further step in the increasingly heavy-handed push for advertisements and especially the data gathering that is involved with those advertisements.

The increasing concerns for security surrounding online advertising, and especially with Google’s AdSense platform, is coming to a boil with all of these factors. They’ve promoted malware advertisements, wittingly or otherwise, countless times over the years. Even government organisations have recommended all users use ad blockers because of how rampant data mining and malware are spreading via advertisements. It’s not even the sheer obnoxious nature of online advertising that is the biggest reason for using ad blockers, it’s the sheer glut of malicious and outright dangerous software and data mining that are making it such a large security concern.

Ultimately, I’m not really sure where we can go from here. Firefox is the largest open-source non-Chromium-based browser, and it has been slowly losing market share since the mid-2010s with it dropping to below 7% this year. Safari is at roughly 12.5% of the desktop space, meaning that more than 80% of the desktop browser market is Chromium-based, with Chrome itself at over 64%, a number nearly identical in the mobile space at just under 64%. It’s particularly concerning when factoring in that over 90% of internet searches are also conducted via Google Search, with their largest competitor Bing accounting for a tiny fraction of just 3%. It’s even more stark on mobile where it’s nearly 95% of the search market.

I’m not going to get into the decreasing quality of Google search results but that’s been another ballooning concern for the past several years as well, with a larger and larger share of the critical top results being either designated as advertisements or the result of paid placement via Analytics. Getting good results now is harder than it was 20 years ago and that’s honestly frightening when it comes to the implications for access to information, and particularly to accurate information. It’s an absolute mess and I do think that the current investigations into Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft for monopolisation practices as well as investigations into those companies as well as Facebook and Twitter for the rampant misinformation and disinformation that run rampant on their platforms is also of critical importance.

My concern is that this is all moving forward on the back heel, trying to play catch up to what is ultimately a very dangerous blend for the stability of democratic nations. None of this exists in a bubble and with the ubiquitous and ever-present nature of the internet in the lives of literally billions of humans, having such dangerous influences through unscrupulous actors who take advantage of the state of these platforms is alarming. I’m hopeful that we will be able to correct course and to break down these unconscionably powerful corporations from how dangerously powerful they have become. I see some of that in the growing push to open-source software and with the constant march forward for platforms such as Linux and even Firefox, but we still have a long way to go. The next several years will be crucial and it’s my hope that we will see a freer and more open internet once again. But right now? Right now, it is very much in Google’s court, the company that decided that “Don’t be evil” was a quaint and antiquated ideal to strive for.