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All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025
(danfabulich.medium.com)
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Technology
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This is great in my opinion. Web browsers are infernally complicated and need to be simplified. CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess. I would love to see large swathes of both of them eliminated from existence, and maybe the maintenance burden leaves a very small chance that we could start to see some of these technologies starting to get dropped. I personally would love to see web components disappear most of all.
Regardless, Google really fucked over the web when they decided to add all these unnecessary technologies to Chrome. No doubt a EEE strategy to take over all browser development on the web. Something should have been done much earlier about it, but now we'll have to see how this mess gets sorted out.
Nobody can make a successful browser that is simpler. The moment a user hits a website that no longer works, they are going back to their old browser.
All these new features exist because websites replaced every single program most people used. Web browser now have to be capable of doing anything pretty well. It's not some grand conspiracy to take over the internet, it's providing the features devs want so they can deliver the things they want in the modern multiplatform no-install world.
Also, I'm not going to argue that things aren't better for developers today than they were before. Sure, web development is much easier these days. But at the same time, I think web applications are way too overengineered. There are lots of things that could be done in simpler ways - for example, why is it necessary to restyle scrollbars, or reimplement standard components like drop-down menus with reimplementations written entirely in Javascript? Things like this are just stupid and having to drop support for trivial things like this in the name of making browsers simpler is well worth it in my opinion.
Dropping support for that stuff means breaking 95% of the websites people currently use. It's a non-starter, it cannot ever happen, even if you think it would be for the best.
I remember a lot of similar arguments about how ubiquitous Flash was when mobile devices were first taking off. Not saying it will be easy or even likely not saying it will never happen is a bit of an assumption.