Oh Mo(zilla!)
The web browser scene is simultaneously the most boring it has been for many years, but also the most exciting. That doesn’t make sense, so let me expand.
Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers (such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Samsung Internet, and Opera GX) have between 75% and 80% of the browser marketshare as of March 2025, according to Cloudflare. Only Safari, which is the sole browser core currently allowed on iOS (EU antitrust rulings notwithstanding) puts a dent in Chrome’s numbers. Mozilla Firefox has 4.1% marketshare. Numbers like this are reminiscent of Internet Explorer’s dominance at the turn of the millennium.
The late NintIEs
And as nostalgic for an earlier web as I am, these were not all great times. IE had serious security issues which allowed viruses and spyware to install on your PC. It lagged behind on features like pop-up blockers and tabbed browsing. And most importantly, it deliberately broke web standards to harm competing browsers. Because IE on Windows was so dominant at the time, many web developers only tested their sites on it. These sites would then not work correctly on any other browser, even Internet Explorer on Mac (which was the default Mac browser from ‘97-03, and actually much better than IE on Windows.)
Eventually, however, a change occurred. Mozilla released Firefox (originally Phoenix) which offered so many improvements over IE that people were willing to put up with sometimes needing to open IE for incompatible sites, or use an extension which switched the rendering engine for an individual tab. Mac OS X was also gaining traction as a more advanced and secure platform than Windows so more and more websites needed to be standards-compliant. Chrome later supplanted Firefox due to its speed and marketing.
Tarnished Chrome
Chrome is not the poor-quality product that IE was. It has good performance, frequent updates, and niceties (now necessities) like extensions and synchronization across different machines. It’s free and open source, with many forks or downstream releases. But it is still dominant enough to threaten an open web.
Let’s not forget Chrome’s market position, and why US antitrust courts have ruled that Chrome needs to be divested. Google are an advertising company who (not incidentally) also operate a dominant search engine, video sharing platform, maps and email services, cloud infrastructure, and the world’s most popular mobile operating system, among many more. Where Google is not funded by advertising, it is through subscriptions and “the ecosystem” like a share of Play Store app sales and Google Drive storage buckets. Their business model is based on practices completely at odds with the kind of web the world deserves.
Even if much of the code is made available under FLOSS licenses, Google still dictates the direction of the Chromium project (and Android.) They use this imperative to further their business goals, such as neutering ad blocking extensions (see “Manifest V3”) and locking users into Google services such as their password manager, cloud storage, music streaming, and payment processor. Chrome is slowly moving the web from the platform-agnostic, open space it was always intended to be (though rarely has been) into one corporation’s version of the web which they can manipulate to their benefit. Just as Microsoft had done previously.
Taking a Safari to see Firefoxes
At 18% marketshare, Apple’s Safari is the last holdout too popular for web developers to ignore. But there are issues. Chrome originally used Safari’s WebKit rendering engine before forking it several years later. This left Apple to target only their own Mac and iOS platforms - there are no WebKit browsers on Windows anymore and only niche ones on Linux.
So that leaves Firefox as the only independent, cross platform, general-purpose web browser (shout out to cool projects like NetSurf, Dillo, and Lynx.) And despite the nitpicks of vocal online commentators, it works exceedingly well. Stable, lots of extensions (including full featured ad blockers) and sync to mobile apps.
Yet its marketshare is pitiable, leadership seems to live in a different universe, and the vast majority of funding comes from Google itself to be the default search engine. It has also been theorized that Google’s funding of Mozilla is a pillar against monopoly claims - by funding a competitor to their own browser, Google can claim that their high marketshare is simply what the market wants rather than anything monopolistic. Whether this is their motive or not, that funding is at enormous risk if the anti-trust ruling that Google must divest Chrome stands.
Less “zoo,” more “wildlife sanctuary”
So what is Mozilla to do while they look down the barrel of a funding cutoff?
Hoping for an appeal of the court case or government intervention is not enough. Should a court rule that Google can keep Chrome under its own ownership, they may deduce that funding Mozilla is no longer necessary to keep anti-trust regulators off their back. Or that billions of dollars to be the default search engine on an unpopular browser is superfluous. No matter what, Mozilla can’t depend on the status quo lasting forever - the cracks are already on full display.
What Mozilla needs to do is focus. Not on acquisitions like Pocket and Fakespot (both of which were recently shut down) or activism and outreach, but on expanding their core mission: an independent, standards-compliant, universal stack of browser-related components, of which Firefox is just one implementation.
As it stands right now, Firefox is the only browser using Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine (LibreWolf is a downstream version with some privacy and setting tweaks, and Pale Moon is a small project forked from an earlier version of Firefox.) There are no equivalents to Electron or Qt WebEngine which use Mozilla code rather than Chromium. As web-based app development isn’t going anywhere, Mozilla should offer an implementation of their own, especially if it can address the criticism that Electron apps are bloated and do not integrate well with native applications on any given platform.
Mozilla should correct the mistake of offloading the Servo engine and put efforts into experimental projects which could yield big improvements to a stagnant browser environment. I’d suggest that there is also space for browser rendering tech that doesn’t target general-usage browsing and app development but rather provides a subset of features to be embedded in email clients like Thunderbird and browsers for legacy platforms. See the TenFourFox project to keep a (somewhat) usable browser available for vintage PowerPC Macs for an example of a niche that a passionate group of developers could achieve but a commercial entity likely would not.
The Ladybird in the room
And then there is the new hope; an entirely new browser and engine led by a former Nokia and Apple developer who worked extensively on WebKit. Still far from stable with an ETA in a couple of years, Ladybird has shown amazing progress and plenty interest from both users and donors.
Ladybird is even structured as a charity with board seats or other influence not for sale. It all sounds too good to be true, if not for the results we can already see and the endorsement of some prevalent names in the space (such as Shopify, Proton, JetBrains, and former leaders at Mozilla and GitHub.) This also provides an example for how Mozilla can fund itself in the absence of Google: a much more established charity can garner more donations from more places.
The future is still very uncertain, for Google, for Mozilla, and for Ladybird. And that’s why the web browser space is as exciting as it ever has been, even while 70-80% of people are all using the same Chromium software. While a lot of the decisions made by the courts or corporations are out of our collective hands, there are glimmers of hope and things we can do in the meantime to further an open web: use Firefox as your main browser (despite Mozilla’s numerous missteps), donate to Ladybird and submit code, choose open online services instead of proprietary ones which lock you in, and test your own web sites or apps on Safari and Firefox as well.