Do you have a favorite web browser? I used to: It was called Mhlambi, I put a lot of emphasis on social media and sharing, and I died in 2011. Nothing I’ve used since then has warmed my heart more.
On Monday, Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen and Josh Sisco reported that the US Department of Justice intends to force Google to sell Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser. This potentially era-changing move could be part of a solution to Google’s dominance in web search (in August, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search).
Although the Bloomberg piece cites an analyst who estimated that Chrome could sell for $15 billion to $20 billion, it’s hard to see why it would be that important to anyone other than Google. The company is capitalizing on its ability to leverage Chrome’s popularity to get ads in front of billions of eyes, which is one of the levers that have made it a major force in the digital advertising industry. That’s a big part of why it’s in trouble with the DOJ in the first place.
Only a few outfits can make the same business model work: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft. Are any of them willing to spend big on Chrome? Or could another company buy a browser and make a deal with one of them, similar to the arrangement that makes Google the default search engine in Safari and leaves Apple rolling in the dough? Given the frenetic pace of major antitrust cases, we may have years to ask such questions before anything happens—assuming Google doesn’t switch to forced sales just yet.
Meanwhile, the prospect of a dramatic turnaround in the browser business at least provides an excuse to show how far we’ve come. Chrome and other major competitors—Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox—are all fine. Just fine. Really! But it’s been years since any of them showed much in the way of innovation—perhaps because Google, Apple, and Microsoft’s browsers are all necessary parts of platforms like Android, iOS, and Windows rather than businesses themselves. They are a means to an end, and that’s about it.
Browsers don’t have to be humdrum, though. In fact, there have been many times over the past thirty years when they have been showcases of fierce competition and radical ideas. There have been three of these times so far, which I think of as Browser Wars 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.
- Browser War 1.0 involved the 1990s competition between Netscape Navigator—the first browser behemoth—and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. That battle became fodder for the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, though Navigator was dead meat by the time the DOJ and Microsoft reached a settlement in 2001.
- Browser War 2.0 compared Internet Explorer with Mozilla’s Firefox, the open source of Netscape that made a big dent in IE’s market share by being the best product. (Firefox turned 20 this month: Here’s to 2004 Good luck an article about its arrival that I share in part because it leads by mentioning . . . me.)
- Browser War 3.0 started when Chrome entered the market in 2008, competing with IE and Firefox and eventually eating their lunch.
In each case, the entire field of competitors improved rapidly. Chrome, for example, brought an emphasis on speed and interface minimalism that was a revelation at the time. It has encouraged other browsers to remove them, to the benefit of all of us. But that was a long time ago. Today’s Chrome no longer feels anywhere near the original, and no major new competitor has emerged to restart the browser wars. Comfort rules the stage.
Except not really. As the big browsers have proliferated, browsers from smaller companies have kept the innovations alive. Last year, I wrote about Arc, a browser full of new touches—though it’s since become controversial over an AI feature that puts together summaries of the content it finds on the web, potentially robbing it of well-deserved clicks. My colleague Jared Newman loves Vivaldi. Maybe you have a favorite underdog browser. If so, drop me a line and tell me about it.
Will forcing Google to sell Chrome open up opportunities for new browsers to gain market share? It would be nice to think so, but it seems like it might be a hindrance to them.
Like Edge, Arc and Vivaldi are both based on Chromium, an open source version of Chrome technology. Google has every reason to invest in this platform, which has greatly helped the development of other browsers. A new Chrome owner may or may not pay much attention to it. Even Firefox, which uses its own rendering engine instead of Chromium, depends on Google’s dominance: Most of Mozilla’s income comes from paying Google to be Firefox’s default search engine, similar to its relationship with Safari. You may not feel sad if the DOJ would prevent Google from signing such deals and Apple would lose billions of easy money in the process, but I personally would hate to see Firefox caught in the blast zone.
Perhaps the forced sale of Chrome could lead to a truly unexpected outcome that would dominate the browser as full intelligence, like OpenAI buying it and turning it into the first AI product. If not—and it seems unlikely—I hope that some development will shake itself out of its difficulties. We do too much to be boring.
Read/Listen/Watch/Try
- Since I wrote last week about abandoning Twitter in favor of a mix of Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, the Bluesky boom has only accelerated: It now has more than 20 million users. Between the many do not explain why it is so hotI especially enjoyed them Blood in the MachineBrian Merchant and Jason Koehler of 404 Media. Also helpful: Tim Bray’s blog post about why he is like this I’m much happier with Mastodon than Bluesky.
- Shameless plug: Fast company‘s The Next Big Things in Tech for 2024 started this week. In this fourth edition of the year, we spent months exploring projects in forward-thinking areas like quantum computing, sustainability tech, robotics, and—yes—AI, and chose 138 to honor.
- If you have three minutes and five seconds, enjoy this 1995 CBS Evening News report to an incredibly frustrating gadget-then less than half of US households-known as a PC.
You were reading Plugged In,Fast companyA weekly tech newsletter from me, global tech editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this issue to you—or if you read it on FastCompany.com—you can check out past issues and sign up to receive it every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Email me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters.
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