The sorry state of browsers
Last edited 2026.02.08
The current state of the browser market is a tragedy. The browser that most people use on every platform is owned and controlled by an advertising company that profits off of compiling and selling user data. Its only major competitor is exclusive to a closed platform owned by another tech giant. One browser's engine is a fork of the other's.
Google and Apple effectively own the internet by proxy, since they control the development of the software that almost everyone uses to access it. Should they decide to make significant negative changes to the way their software works, they would face very little resistance. This has already happened. Manifest v3 was created and Manifest v2 was deprecated specifically to make ad-blockers less effective. The internet is objectively less secure and less private because of this change.
Apple has no incentive to improve their browser because they have a captive audience. All iOS users are Safari users, regardless of which browser they use, because all browsers on iOS are required by Apple to be skins of Safari.
This duopoly also means that these companies can ignore standards and processes. Google likes to rush half-baked insecure APIs into their browser to maintain their position by providing developers with the most features. They do this in defiance of standards and the processes that exist to create them. When other browsers refuse to implement these poorly designed and potentially dangerous APIs in the same way, the Chromium team spins the narrative that other browsers are against progress.
All the while, Google does everything they can to prevent new JavaScript language features from being standardized. Recently, they suggested that things like the pipe operator should never be introduced into the language proper, and that build tools like Babel should be responsible for implementing new language features.
Meanwhile, Apple stalls as long as possible on implementing standards, often-times creating basic shell implementations that don't actually do anything. For instance, the fullscreen API that is supported in every other browser on every platform is only available for video elements in Safari on iOS.
Then there's Firefox. Firefox is the only "independent" browser. Unfortunately, Mozilla gets almost all their income from Google as a please don't sue us for monopolistic practices deal. A deal that was very nearly killed because of a lawsuit over Google using monopolistic practices to maintain their position as the top web search engine. Not only that, but Mozilla is chronically mismanaged, with a product graveyard that they seem to optimistically intend to rival Google's own. They also intend to make Firefox into an AI-first browser, and in so doing, seem to have finally entirely given up on their values regarding user privacy and security.
There are a couple in-development independent browser engines. Ladybird is a full browser written from scratch, borrowing no code from existing browsers. It's looking pretty promising, actually, with a 1.0 release slated for late 2026. Unfortunately, the person in charge is a far-right anti-woke moron. There's also Servo, which is just a browser engine (and also one of the aforementioned Mozilla graveyard projects), and much farther from being viable.
Basically, we're kinda fucked. Google and Apple can do whatever they want with no serious opposition.
I intend to expand on this post with more detail at a later date, but for now, this is what I got.