All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding(danfabulich.medium.com)
8 pointsby dfabulich17 hours ago3 comments
  • ggm17 hours ago
    I wouldn't personally mind if the pace of innovation changed to being far slower, but I would be concerned if the pace of CVE and bug fixing decayed badly.

    I don't think most of the innovation has done very much. I realise this is deprecating the sunk wow factor and deprecating the future wow factor, but in the end, its HTML mostly for me.

    In fact, if the primary function of code work for the next 5-10 years was to remove code, I'd be pretty much in favour.

  • alwillis16 hours ago
    The author doesn't seem to know there's no "Safari" division at Apple. It's not like Apple depends on Google exclusively to fund Safari.

    Apple's revenue last fiscal year was $391 billion dollars; I think they'll be okay without Google's $18 billion.

    It's way more critical for Mozilla—Google's payment is what pays for Firefox.

    • dfabulich15 hours ago
      Author here. I'm well aware that there's no "Safari" financial division. And, yes, Apple will be just fine without Google's $18 billion, but that's because Apple can and will be incentivized to focus their investments on their own proprietary platforms.

      Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make money working on Safari?" the answer is really clear: "Google pays us $18 billion annually."

      After that money is cut off, an executive at Apple has to ask the question: "Why should we keep investing in Safari, instead of SwiftUI and Xcode?"

      I'm sure we'd all love the answer to be, "We have plenty of money, so we should invest heavily in both," but that's not really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This will be one of them.

      • Arnt3 hours ago
        Apple has considered that same question for most other apps. Garage Band, for example, and Apple Mail.

        I don't think you should listen to anyone's ideas about why Apple does what it does. But if you want to hear my unfounded speculation: Apple wants to control the out-of-the-box experience for its shiny hardware and therefore includes a variety of apps that >x% of the customers are presumed to use on the first day they have their new shiny hardware, where x is some number and "day" may mean "week" or… well, really, this is unfounded speculation, it doesn't have to be precise.

    • linguae15 hours ago
      I agree. Safari will be fine, and Microsoft has the resources to devote to browser development.

      I wonder, though, about Firefox and a post-divestiture Chrome. Browsers are labor-intensive to develop due to their complexity, and the Web keeps changing. Moreover, people expect browsers to be free of charge; it’s been a long time since the days when people paid for Netscape Navigator and Opera. Without outright subsidizing development, Web browsers need to be either community-supported, ad-funded, or subscription-based in order to fund development.

    • ThrowawayR216 hours ago
      > "Apple's revenue"

      Revenue != profit. $18 billion for something they have to maintain anyway is 100% profit.

      • 3vidence12 hours ago
        Was going to say this, I can't remember the exact figure but it was something crazy like 20% of net profit was from that deal.

        TODO: find a link to the original article that mentioned it.

  • 15 hours ago
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