Hacker News Reader

You put the blame on Google but isn't it your fault, people who get excited every time a new feature gets added to web standards, and developers who use it? Like CSS masonry, or WebRTC, or web components with shadow DOM? Features like this get lot of upvotes here.

This is the truth of it: if people chose Firefox, or another alternative, over Chrome then Google would have less power to impose its will on the web. This would be a good thing.

Google’s power on the web doesn’t simply come from having lots of money and resources - see, as examples, any of the multitude of Google’s failures and shuttered products - but mostly comes from its reach.

“Everybody” uses Chrome. If that were no longer true, progress on the web could return to a more open an collaborative model.

Anyone can help that happen simply by switching to Firefox, as I did four or five years ago.

I never used Chrome much. I think I jumped from IE5 to Firefox. IE6 only for testing web apps.

Frankly nearly everything has been working well in Firefox for a long time. The only two sources of problems are:

1) Long tail experimental sites that use or want to demonstrate some new technology. I find most of them on the home page of HN.

2) Myself and the security/privacy plugins I use. They break some web pages, especially ecommerce and payment workflows. I either go hunting for the correct combination of permissions in uMatrix (I would become crazy soon if I used uBlock Origin for that) or I use that very site in Chrome and the close it. Major ecommerce sites don't have any problem. The long tail ones are weirder in their choice of third parties. However that's an issue that any browser would have, it's not because of Firefox.

> Can anyone do anything about it?

Yes, Donald Trump can, because these are all American companies. If he pushes the rest of the world hard enough, the amount of will and the amount of resource that will be mobilized to get out from under the thumb of U.S. tech domination will be something none of us has ever seen in their lifetimes.

With the way that AI is unfolding right now, this might be an outdated problem fairly soon. In 2026 if you can just tell your AI to build a new full-featured browser before you go to sleep, you might have something in the morning.

AI might be heading towards a situation where you can "tell it to build a full featured browser".

But this narrative is naive at best, and frankly, getting annoying too. Especially because it gets repeated by people who know even less about "programming" than those who start this idea in the first place.

That AI cannot maintain this browser. It cannot monitor and fix performance issues. It won't be able to refactor stuff when the umpteenth web-api changes or lands. It cannot architecture the modules so that it can actually do this maintainance either.

Generative AI is fantastic at generating stuff. It's terrible at maintaining, changing, tweaking. It's even worse at understanding what you mean with "It must have want a way to disable cookie popups" because that's both ambiguous, and actually the wrong instruction to begin with - for example.

We must stop repeating "AI will be able to program our software for us very soon" because "programming software" is very little about churning out new code. As every programmer with a few years under their belt will know.

What AI is good at, though, is enabling those programmers to be far more effective, efficient. To lower the barrier of entry. etc. But I'm 101% confident that no AI will "write a full-featured browser" that will continue to run for over half a month and/or one OS update.

I mean, the goal is to get it to a state where it can do those things. There are benchmarks for autonomously resolving issues that are being hill-climbed as we speak: https://www.swebench.com/

I don't know how far away it is, but never say never.

What is the fundamental limitation that prevents AI from ever doing the maintenance tasks that you mentioned?

Current AI cannot, of course, but the trajectory seems to be that it will be able to do such things better & faster than any human can.

The trajectory actually seems to be plateauing already. OAI is struggling mightily to improve GPT enough to call it 5.0 and te struggles will only get harder as the number gets higher

I think it will be nice if it does plateau, but one non-hit release from OpenAI is not a plateau on its own.

Two things:

This requires a language that a human can give the specs in. A language that is both precise and unambiguous and understandable by humans. A... programming language?

And it requires AI to understand the effects of changes it makes. On many levels. "If I move this module behind an abstraction, will it make it easier to maintain? Does it touch performance? Would it open security issues?" Generative AI isn't good at reasoning in that way. Maybe other AI, but it seems hardly anyone is pouring substantial funding into areas other than "a bigger and smarter generator than the competition" currently.

As in, the web standards? Why couldn't it just read them online? Any other specs, couldn't it decide them on its own?

From what I've seen, Grok 3 would be quite capable of inferring the effect of any change, at least at a high level. Have you used any of the recent models?

The "weaponization of complexity" as you call it is simply "work is done by those who show up".

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc took the horribly dastardly approach of "participating" and then "doing the work".

The horror.

Microsoft gave up because it wasn't worth it when someone else was willing to do the work. It was not something that was adding value to them by them doing it themselves anymore.

It's hilarious to try to pain this as some evil dastardly thing where they badly tried to keep up and just failed because it's just so hard and costly vs something where it just wasn't worth them paying for because they didn't derive enough value from it.

Remind me which earnings call it was where they were saying "you know, we are going to issue rough q4 guidance because we think it's going to be really hard to implement these next 3 CSS features"

The cost of keeping up for them, even now, if they started again, would be a rounding error in any MS VP's overall equity refresh budget (IE the money they are giving out in stock per year to employees in their org). So please, let's not pretend it's too "hard" or "expensive" for them.

In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.

If you think you can do it better, or that it doesn't need to be this complex, or whatever, awesome. show up and do it, like everyone else did.

The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity".

Calling it that is just plain lazy. Almost all improvements and backwards compatibility shims make it harder for someone else to implement from scratch. That's because the primary goal is usually to help users.

I mean, why stop with the web with this argument?

How come the Go folks weaponized the Go language by adding generics? By making it harder for me to implement my own, they've weaponized it against me!

I can't believe nobody has stopped their dastardly deeds.

This reads like a semi-incoherent essay from someone who doesn't really understand what complexity is and has a chip on their shoulder about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

Yeah and coming from someone with so much experience and industry knowledge as dannybee i find that perspective very puzzling.

Just painting the situation as well google have influence because they work the hardest is just bizare. Having been in some standard / comity meetings. Everyone in those room work very hard... but someone hard work is not enough

The latter is definitely true, and i don't claim otherwise.

But that's not actually the argument really being made here with any evidence. That would be a reasonable argument, but it's also always true - we are human, not robots, that's how humans work in any group setting. So it's not particularly interesting or particular to this that social and other things matter as much as pure technical merit or hard work.

But again, this isn't the argument the post makes. Instead, in this case, the argument being made is (basically) "Nobody in those rooms is operating in good faith, they are instead deliberately trying to make it harder for newcomers. They also only have any power at all through illegitimate means in the first place".

I do not believe any of this to be true.

Cool, want to actually engage, or are you also going to just throw rocks from the sidelines?

Money and resource are not the problem nor the reason microsoft gave up on their own browser engine. Same as why they gave up on mobile.

No reasonable amount of engineering resources would have made a dent in the problem. What OP is calling "weaponization of complexity" is just the asymmetry of effort required between new comers and entrenched players.

You would have to be naive to think that google would just open their arms and kumbaya with microsoft to do the "hard work"

We have seen this played out in any industry in history. Sometime hard work is not enough and it's easy to abuse dominant position to grid lock a market.

The rest of your post frankly sounds like someone who is drunk on the usual company cooliad.

> The end goal is to help user

No. The end goal is to make money. Sometime it requires helping user, other time a bunch of anti competitive ( forcing android oem to prevent meaningful forks)and anti consumer (like playing hard ball with ad blockers) BS.

>The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity

So much wrong with this. And is just a strawman. OP is not saying that it's not hard problem solving. The point is the solution achieved is self serving and sucks for the rest of us.

> In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.

Yeah no. History disagree with you

"No reasonable amount of engineering resources would have made a dent in the problem. What OP is calling "weaponization of complexity" is just the asymmetry of effort required between new comers and entrenched players."

This literally makes no sense. What does it mean to have a high asymmetry but somehow, "no amount" can make a dent in the problem. The claim in the OP is about engineering effort, not about "it's hard to get people to want your product" or whatever.

So what exactly are you trying to say here?

"You would have to be naive to think that google would just open their arms and kumbaya with microsoft to do the "hard work""

I mean, i was there for Google, with plenty of others, and I know what we were thinking, because I was partially in charge of it? Please, tell me more about what I and others were thinking. Were you there? Do you have any data or evidence?

The naive thing is usually thinking people on the internet with no actual knowledge won't make up a history that suits their narrative.

"No. The end goal is to make money. Sometime it requires helping user, other time a bunch of anti competitive ( forcing android oem to prevent meaningful forks)and anti consumer (like playing hard ball with ad blockers) BS."

Again, please produce evidence rather than conjecture. What actual first hand evidence are you presenting here? (IE not opinions of random internet people who were not involved in any way). There actually are some folks involved who have this view, but my experience is they are far outnumbered by those actually trying to help. But you haven't even gone so far as to provide evidence from one of these folks who does disagree with my view!

"So much wrong with this. And is just a strawman. OP is not saying that it's not hard problem solving. The point is the solution achieved is self serving and sucks for the rest of us."

If so much is wrong with it, describe it. You've also now switched arguments from "no amount of engineering will make a dent" to "i don't like the solution they engineered". Which is it, exactly?

"Yeah no. History disagree with you"

Then, again, it should be really easy to produce evidence of this from folks involved. Where is it?

I think the "weaponization of complexity" claim can only be understood in relation to the "gimping browsers to protect the App Store" counter claim.

The situation is far more complex than three browser engines competing on a level playing field. "Showing up" is not even possible on iOS. And Firefox is funded by the maker of Chrome.

I think all of this rhetoric that browser vendors use against each other has to be seen against the backdrop of their respective business models.

How much of Edge switching to Chromium was a way for MS to shoot themselves in the foot and focus monopoly discussions on Google instead of themselves?

Clearly this is a common sentiment, but none of the comments on this post seem to provide any evidence of it. The W3C has hundreds of members. Does Google really sideline them all? Are there specific examples where Google strong-armed the others to develop self serving standards? I'm not talking about Topics API, because that's not a standard. AFAICT all of Google's sketchy chrome features have never affected me as a happy Firefox user.