A New Browser Vision?

In which I share some thoughts about the state of things, and how maybe we could hope to change them.

Back in 2020, after Microsoft gave up on their own engine, I began writing about a topic I called "Web Ecosystem Health". What ultimately makes a healthy system that will last? Over time I became convinced that it is all much more fragile than we realize. In 2021 I wrote Web Rise beginning to detail some of this.

There have been several more articles and a whole series of at least 20 podcast episodes with guests of all types talking about many, many different aspects of this. But, at the heart of it is really how it is all funded.

The other day I asked on social media "Imagine that one of the big 3 web engine stewards, for some reason, decided they would stop. What do you think would happen? Would someone step in and save the project? Who? Or would it just die?" My colleague Eric Meyer (who is on holiday and had no idea I was posting this, or why) replied

My prediction is that people would step in to save it, but the effort would falter and wane over the next several years as contributors lost momentum and interest until finally shuddering to a halt.

And that's kind of why I asked - because I was landing in a sort of similar situation. I mean, I've said it before, but I think maybe even more radically now, we need to diversify investment. Maybe even diverisfy ownership, somehow in a bigger way.

The Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers (https://socbb.org/ - which I've recently heard pronounced "Sock Baby" and have now latched onto) is an interesting collaborative initiative under the Linux Foundation that some of our discussions helped inspire. Basically, it's a common pool of money that is paid into by Google, Microsoft, Meta and Opera which then tries to fund work and grow contributions from outside those organizations. Together, they decide how the money is spent.

I think it's still "small" though and I wonder how much you could scale it up. I was thinking about this with regard to Servo. Servo is a really interesting project. It gets people excited. It is written in Rust, it's the first one to come without a long history of baggage that it has to deal with. There is so much promise there.

But, it's also not really remotely ready to compete with Blink or WebKit or Gecko, and none of those are standing still. In fact, while Servo can close ground quickly in some cases, there are just far, far fewer people paddling it forward. It takes a leap of faith to believe that we could make it really competitive, and to provide the resources to do it. Again, very few orgs even could carry the load on their own - and it's still kind of fragile if it's just one org too. But what if we could collectively own it. Something more like the Mozilla Foundation, but... better? What if we could get a lot of companies to invest in that dream with the promise that a kind of collective ownership could really change things and that while no one could do it alone, probably we could all bear to take a chance on something with a lot of interesting upside. What makes Servo interesting here is that doens't already have a powerful and weathy steward. Diverisity of ownership it could ensure that the web would remain despite changes to buisness models and so on. It would help give them some kind of a louder voice - but also present really practical compelling reasons for building concensus and compromise -- because no one org is king.

It would be an interesting new challenge in governance and so on, but... It could be really interesting.