Eric Meyer: Hello and welcome to Igalia Chats. I am Eric Meyer, Developer Advocate at Igalia.
Brian Kardell: And I am Brian Kardell, also a Developer Advocate at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: And today, we have a special guest. Why don't you introduce yourself, special guest?
Chris Coyier: Woo. It's me, Chris Coyier. I know both you fellas from the internet and occasionally real life in many years of making websites and talking about websites. So, yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm a listener of the show, of course.
Eric Meyer: Well, as we're listeners of yours. And today, we're going to talk about web browsers.
Chris Coyier: Yeah, web browsers.
Eric Meyer: And people who make web browsers. Chris, you had a blogpost and it got a little bit of a response.
Brian Kardell: Spicy.
Chris Coyier: Yeah, that's a rare thing these days. I don't know. Blogposts don't go as viral as they used to, I suppose. It wasn't like a massive response. But it did hit Hacker News which I was surprised of. And when that happens to me, I hear people out of the woodwork a little bit, like other dads in my kid's school being like, 'You see this?' And I was like, 'Oh.' Your heart sinks a little bit when you see yourself on that site because you're like, 'Oh, no.'
Eric Meyer: Here we go.
Chris Coyier: And we didn't even say on this podcast what it was about, but it was me ... What did I title it? You'd think I'd have the tab open. But it was basically just like Google being forced to sell Chrome would not be a good outcome for the web as a whole was the picture I tried to paint from my limited experience. I'll just want to put a big asterisk at the top of the podcast. I don't work for Google. I don't work for the DOJ. I don't know anything. I don't have any insider information. This is just I don't think this would end well as a general gut check kind of thing. So, that's what the blogpost was about. It's not like it took me weeks of research and journalism to kick that baby out, but here we are.
Eric Meyer: So, for people who haven't read it, what was the basic argument? Why do you feel that it would not be good for the web?'
Chris Coyier: Well, in the circles I run in which probably are different but not terribly far away from the circles you run in, we're watching the web evolve every day. We just see all kinds of stuff happening. We're excited about CSS coming. Didn't you do a bunch of research on JS Temporal, Eric? Or the 20 billion APIs that are coming to date time and stuff? I think of all this interesting stuff that's happening to the web and I see Google employees oftentimes helping out with that, being editors of the specs, being evangelists, writing blogposts, being a part of that. And I don't see them talking about ... I guess they wouldn't tell me if they were, but are they part of secret meetings in grungy basements where they're deciding how to ruin people's lives? No, they're out there trying to help people in their lives. That doesn't mean that they're representative of Google as a whole, but I see so much in my day-to-day life of Google and the employees of Google helping out what's happening at the web. And so, I'm already drawing a little bit of an abstract line, but the news is and the ruling was, whatever it was past September or whatever it was, that there was a judge in a federal case that said Google has acted as a monopoly in their search business. And acted as a monopoly meaning that it's mostly has to do with the default search engine experience. That like, of course, on Google Chrome, if you do a web search from the URL bar, it's not even telling you that it's going to do this, it's just this rounded rectangle in the top of the thing. You type something in there, you go to Google.com to get the results. But that's not just true on Google. They pay Apple to do that. They pay Mozilla to do that. Bing notably has their own thing, but I think they pay Samsung to do it too. They write a lot of checks to make sure that whatever you type into the rounded rectangle goes to Google.com. 'That's monopolistic behavior,' says the judge. So, the ruling is in. But what happens as part of that ruling is unknown still. There's been no penalty assigned to it yet, but there's been groups that have got together that said, 'This is what we want to happen.' What we want to happen is to force Google the company to sell Google Chrome, very specific ask. They say, 'You shouldn't own Chrome anymore. You should be forced to put it up in the market and somebody else should buy it.' So, that's a heck of a ask. There is a possibility as we're talking on this podcast that they will be forced to do that. I can't even speak to the likelihood of that or whatever, but that's a possible outcome. So, the blog post was like, 'Whoa, wouldn't that suck?' And the thrust of my post was, because I've written about a couple of times is, one, who the hell's going to buy it? It's an insane thing to sell. It's like the most valuable thing in the world to Google and the most absolutely not valuable thing, that at least in my armchair of businessing, to anybody else. There's no direct business value in it. This isn't a yoga studio where your chances of running it and my chances of running it are equal. This provides very tangential value to Google that just disappears with a new owner. So, it's very strange. And to me, it was already a fuzzy line between the monopolistic behavior of search, default search to Chrome itself. I was like, 'That doesn't seem one-to-one to me.' What's one-to-one is have the judge say, 'You can't pay anybody to be the default search engine anymore.' That's one-to-one between the monopolistic behavior. I think that's on the table, too. It's just the group asking for the certain behavior didn't ask for that. They asked for Google to sell Chrome. And you're like, 'What is up with that?' I don't understand it. What is the point?' And I thought, if it happens, if it happens that Google's incentive to keep investing in the web, and by investment, I mean all that stuff I'm talking about, having people that work there contributing to specs and improving the browser and writing the documentation and be evangelists and stuff, maybe they'll keep them around or maybe all those people will have to go because they don't even own the browser anymore. So, what are we doing here? Something will change. And my suspicion is that it will change for the worst if they're forced to do that. So, I don't know. That was a long-winded intro, but it was just a guess that the web would suffer for the force of that sale. And of course, when you write about it, then the general sentiment particularly on Google or Hacker News or whatever was the ... I almost said Google News. I wonder if it hit Google News. I don't think so. Was like, 'What is this guy? Is he on the Google payroll?' There's just a lot more kind of anti-Google sentiment that I thought. People weren't just like, 'Yeah, that would be bad for the web.' Almost nobody. Everybody was just like, 'What are you? A paid shill for Google?' And a lot of that, don't you realize that their business is actually just user surveillance? And the reason that they, quote-unquote, invest in the web is just so that they can push APIs through and whatnot that help their surveillance stuff. And you're like, 'I can kind of see what you mean.' I mean, the reason we still have third-party cookies probably is Chrome. It's not like they're this perfect company that only does great stuff. But it's like, I don't know. Okay.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. We talk about a lot of this stuff on our show. So, when we saw you wrote this article, we wanted to have you on to talk about it because it's so much overlap in the stuff that we talk about. So, there's a good question here about what is the monopolistic behavior and why do they make Chrome? Why would somebody want to buy Chrome? Who could buy Chrome? All that kind of stuff. And then what would the impact be, right?
Chris Coyier: Right.
Brian Kardell: Well, the one thing that's really easy is that the actual monopolistic behavior is you can't sell default search is the thing that funds all of the browsers, kind of. So-
Eric Meyer: Yeah. I mean, the judge said, 'Effectively, the default search deals are part of this pattern of monopolistic behavior.' Like you said, Chris. And yeah, as you said in your post, it seems like the thing that you do is just say, 'Well, you can't have default search deals anymore. You're not allowed to pay other browsers to-
Chris Coyier: At least that's the one-to-one line between the ruling's finding and the change in behavior.
Eric Meyer: Sure, but-
Chris Coyier: The three of us certainly realize, 'Ooh, that's going to have a big impact.'
Eric Meyer: Yeah, there's a huge downstream effect there in that Mozilla ... Well, Mozilla's Firefox funding would be cut by 80% or more if that happened. And Apple would no longer be getting a billion or two or 20 or whatever.
Chris Coyier: Yeah, $20 billion.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, $20 billion a year from Google. And so, yeah, the question would be, okay, we're not getting that $20 billion anymore. Of course, for Apple, we have enough money, we could literally fund expeditions to Venus. But-
Chris Coyier: But it doesn't matter for Apple, but it matters a whole bunch for Mozilla. And Mozilla, the last standing browser engines. So, that's a scary prospect.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. But I would say over at Apple, it doesn't matter maybe to Apple's continued existence, but it might matter a whole lot to Apple's decisions as to whether or not they continue to spend money on WebKit engineers.
Chris Coyier: Oh, you think so?
Eric Meyer: It's possible. Like you, I have no inside information. I don't get to sit in the secret rooms. I don't know what the priorities over at Apple are. But the higher-ups at Apple might say, 'Yeah, we're going to maybe not spend as much money as we used to on WebKit because we're not getting $20 billion a year anymore for it.' Even if they could, yes, objectively they could afford it, I don't know what their incentives are. Certainly, Mozilla, huge blow. But it could be a huge blow to the Apple WebKit team as well. Not Apple itself as a company, although I think Brian's going to make a point about what percentage of Apple's-
Brian Kardell: For Apple, it's a choice. Whereas Mozilla, it's not.
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Chris Coyier: Well, I'm going to say that I believe that it works out to be a fifth of Apple's actual profits. And I think that-
Brian Kardell: Is that right? What? That's wild.
Chris Coyier: I know. It's wild, right? It's a lot of money, $20 billion.
Brian Kardell: That's a lot more than I thought it was. I thought it'd be some ... Because I know $20 billion is a lot. But Apple, I don't know. Somehow, they just make infinite money in my mind and it's hard to do math.
Eric Meyer: I mean, if they're making a hundred billion a year in profit, then that's effectively infinite money.
Chris Coyier: That's not how much money they're making. That's how much profit they're making. That's an important distinction.
Eric Meyer: So, if you cut $20 billion like Brian says, that's a 20% cut in their profits. And that's enough for even a company as rich as Apple to go, 'Hmm-
Chris Coyier: Even if it's a 10th or a fifth, if your company loses a 10th of its profit, your investors are like, 'Hey, yo, what the heck?' And there's inevitably going to be some soul searching and questioning. I mean, I'm not saying this will happen, but I definitely can see a straight line to where it's like, 'Well, why do we do this? Why are we were now going to try to compete in this more ... We're going to spend what, maybe $2 billion a year?' Before, it was like, 'Okay. So, we make 20 billion and we spend 1 billion. This is still making us $19 billion in profit.' But now, suddenly, it's like inverted. It's costing us $2 billion a year, a billion or two. So, you could imagine a world where Apple's just like, 'Screw it.' Once in a while, it seems like almost begrudgingly that they even deal with the web at all.
Eric Meyer: This should make the argument. I mean, to a certain extent, you could make that argument about Google. If you come from the point of view that Google only does this in order to capture more information and surveil users more, then it's not like if you have that view, then you would argue Google's not doing this out of love of the web. They're just using the web as a vehicle for doing the stuff that they actually love. And so, I think getting back to your point, if they're forced to sell the browser, then we don't have the browser anymore. Maybe they decide, 'You know what? It's not everything but it's enough.' We have enough of what we want here and we can probably, here and there, make a few changes because all the code is open source, we can contribute some stuff. But we don't really try to push on standards anymore. We just land whatever patches for whatever we want to do and don't really talk about it with other people. That could be a negative effect on the web. And yeah, the question you raise, who's going to buy it? We've wrestled with that before and the only things I could come up with were like, 'Well, the European Union could probably afford to buy it.' And then Brian immediately said, 'Yeah, I can't really see a US judge agreeing to that sale.' It's like, 'Okay, yeah, fair.' And that was last fall under a different administration. So, would the US be willing to let a browser be sold out of the country? But if they're not willing to, then who's going to buy it?
Brian Kardell: Well, on the list of people who could buy it, that's kind of a fun thing to think about. But it is a little immaterial. I don't think the judge does market analysis to figure out if there are potential buyers or not. It's kind of like you got to make the ruling and just see what happens. But the list is preciously small, especially because it rules out all the buyers who would then could also be accused of being monopolistic with their behavior by owning it.
Chris Coyier: Well, not necessarily. So, this is the interesting thing. So, why buy it ties into why does Chrome do it in the first place?
Eric Meyer: You mean why does Google do it in the first place?
Chris Coyier: Yeah, right. So, for example, Microsoft could buy it, they have the money. They have a default search engine. They can make it the default search engine. They have a currently very minor place. Even on Windows, they're not the main browser. But they could be, they could just rebrand it Edge. It could just be Edge and suddenly Edges on everybody's Android devices. And why would they do that? Because, well, then they would steal 80% of the market from Google in one fell swoop. And lots of people are going to just stick with it. Lots of people are going to just stick with it for the same reason. And they don't have to maintain a default search deal because they'll kind of crush it. And I think the same thing holds for a lot of these AI companies that want to do AI-based, agents-based things that are trying to change where-
Brian Kardell: There was some news recently that said OpenAI was dabbling in wanting to have our own browser. It kind of felt to me at the time like, eh, we'll do what so many companies ... It's almost been like a trend lately of picking up an existing browser engine and layering UI interestingness on top of it. That seemed much more like their speed than having the engine. Why bother having an engine if you're open AI? But who knows?
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: Well, I like the Microsoft idea though. You convinced me that that's not a bad outcome here.
Eric Meyer: There's a part of me that would really love that because it would be so full circle. One of the first antitrust rulings that was rooted in web behavior was against Microsoft. And if they came around them buying it, the ironist in me would just find that delicious. I don't know that it would be-
Brian Kardell: Isn't that related in that didn't they essentially ... I hate to say something really stupid here, but they had that ruling against them and then not all that much came of it. Am I right about that? There wasn't major changes that were a result. And this was about Windows, wasn't it? Not the web.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. But it was about the bundling the browser as an internet experience-
Brian Kardell: Of course, it's upon your own operating system to ship with a browser and make that the default. Yup.
Chris Coyier: Oh, I see. I see.
Eric Meyer: So, that's kind of funny.
Brian Kardell: So, they were shipping with the OEM software which is also part of this, a big part of the thing also intertwines their Android. So, it's all tied together. So, they have this Android open source. But if you make a device, you make a phone or a tablet or something, you want it to use that, then inevitably you end up signing this thing that has the Google software package which includes putting Chrome on it and all the Google stuff. And so, it's like all of these things tie together into multiple monopolies that they're arguing and that they sort of all self-reinforce. So, this is a lot like AT&T back in the day sold the long-distance service, but they also sold the regular phone service and they sold the phones and you weren't allowed to buy your own phone or you weren't allowed to put a thing on your phone that increased the volume of it. It was all this self-reinforcing behavior. So, it's related though. It did establish, even though it was not meant to, it did establish that you pretty much ship an operating system with a default browser nowadays. And Google has all of the default deals with everybody except a few Samsung. Samsung is default on Samsung phones, Samsung internet. But it is like you said, just Chromium. And it actually relates to something that you said in your article that I wanted to talk about which is this thing about the Linux Foundation that you were talking about.
Chris Coyier: Yeah. I just saw that news come through because when that news came through, it said, 'Hey, we're making this new group and it's people that are committed to taking care of Chromium long-term or something, and a bunch of companies sign it or whatever. But the implication of reading that news is like, 'That sounds nice.' It also sounds like somebody's worried. It sounds like we need to get our ducks in a row towards a world in which that we need people who have pre-committed to take care Chromium if something bad were to happen to Chromium. That's what it felt like to me.
Brian Kardell: So, I don't think that that's a completely true interpretation. I don't know if you recall, but Igalia tried this thing with collective prioritization. We open prioritization and actually announced it on your show which was cool.
Chris Coyier: Yeah. I remember it was like you vote with your wallet kind of for browser features. And then the winning ones would actually get work done, right? I remember.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, that's right. Yup. Because Igalia, that's what we do. But normally, it's a sponsor. So, maybe it's like Bloomberg Tech pays for us to do CSS grid or IO pays for us to do HaaS, stuff like that. And through this, we had a lot of discussions with people at Google about, 'Well, how does all of this collective ownership work and how does this play out? How do you expect it?' When Microsoft gave up on their own engine and they became Chromium, a lot of people expected, 'Oh my God, this is going to be amazing. You're going to have all of the people from Microsoft and all the people from Google is going to be poof, wow.' But actually, Microsoft laid off a bunch of people from Microsoft and reteamed a bunch of other people. And Microsoft's contributions for the first until last year were smaller than Igalia's contributions to Chrome.
Chris Coyier: That's wild. So, you're a little scrappy company. I know Igalia is not particularly small. You do pretty well. But from Microsoft's, a little different scale.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, right. But it turns out that you can have a browser without that much investment. And lots of these other browsers are relatively small. They don't have that much investment. There's a lot in here that's like, this is the model that we've built with software. And while Google makes a lot, what if you are say Samsung, you can take Android, the operating system, and you can put it on your device and you can make your own browser which is Chromium. So, you don't have to make your own engine. You don't have to maintain your own engine. But then you could sign a default search deal to send traffic to Google and get ... I don't know. I don't know if they have a default search deal or what that's worth, but we got to assume that you're making money. There's nothing saying that you need to put anything back in. And so, it's geared toward taking. And there were discussions about how do we bring awareness to this and not point fingers but try to figure out how can we have more collective responsibility and more collective ownership so that Chromium has a community because it wants to have a community. It doesn't want to be all Google. So, that was inspired. They created this collective. They've been working on it for about two years. It was first talked about at BlinkOn two years ago and then again last year. And it will be as few companies that host it at the Linux Foundation, they'll put in a million, $2 million, whatever, per year and then collectively manage it. And we're going to do a show. I know you say you listen to our show, so you'll hear it with Shruti from Google as soon as we can cover that. But that's what that's about. So, it's not so much a response to this. It's been brewing for a few years.
Chris Coyier: So, let's say that goes really well. It just means that there's people and money and commitment and stuff to Chromium, the open-source project that is not really owned.
Brian Kardell: And it's small.
Chris Coyier: It's mall, yeah.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, it's small. I mean, it's a few million dollars. It's not enough to do big projects and things like that right now. It's going to be I think primarily for pretty targeted sorts of things. We'll find out more when we have this thing with Shruti, but certainly it would take on a lot more importance if it was kind of the, I don't know, the only group that was working on Chromium left, for example. Well, currently, it would have 1/250th of Firefox's budget or something like that. So, it would be like-
Chris Coyier: Okay. I see. So, it's real small.
Brian Kardell: It would be real small. Yeah.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. Even at a few million dollars because if you're thinking in terms of annual salaries for engineers and people who work on browsers are usually pretty capable software engineers, so they can get jobs. In a lot of places, you can maybe get three or four per million, three or four annual salaries per million.
Brian Kardell: Or two.
Eric Meyer: Or possibly two. But let's even say that you could get five, if you've got $5 million per year, that's 25 people per year. Is that enough to maintain something as big and complex as Chromium? I think the answer is pretty much no.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, no. Well, I think there's another whole factor here is that's just Chromium and taking care of the code and stuff and making sure, I don't know, security releases, let's say. Let's say you could stay on top of that. But then you're like, 'I want to evolve it a little bit.' Let's say you just want to change the logo or something. Great. You changed the logo. I guess we're just talking about Chromium, but how many people have Chromium installed? Like none. What matters is Chrome and how that push gets to there. And who owns that is fascinating because the responsibility of Chrome itself is so big. I was talking to somebody over there who shall remain unnamed, but one of the biggest costs was just shipping an update at all. When they ship out an update, the bandwidth cost is just so outrageous. Whatever it is, hundreds of megabytes to hundreds of millions of users or whatever it is. It's like billions. Just the bandwidth alone, you can't. Yeah.
Chris Coyier: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: Who can pay for that? Nobody. Yeah.
Eric Meyer: You're probably talking petabits at a certain point.
Brian Kardell: Yeah.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, exactly. So, if Google is forced to divest and it doesn't get bought by Microsoft or somebody and it ends up being kind of open source, then you start to get into, well, are we going to BitTorrent it? Is that how that's going to work now? Maybe we have to do this distribution and a whole lot of changes. And I'm not saying they're insurmountable, but they're pretty huge. And of course, at the moment, we're talking about how would Chromium survive if it were forced out of Google? And let's say there's this, well, there is, this foundation, Chromium foundation to maybe keep Chromium moving along. What about Gecko back to Mozilla? They're probably not getting any money out of this $5 million a year foundation. Do they need their own five or 10 or whatever million dollar a year foundation? I mean, ideally, it would be a $500 million a year foundation because that's what they were getting from Google. But where's that money going to come from? I mean, you Chris, you have run a site that is funded by people paying money, having memberships and all that sort of thing. What's your perspective of trying to fund a annual budget for a browser by having community memberships?
Chris Coyier: By membership?
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Chris Coyier: Going to be tricky because they're all free now. So, it's a pretty hard business pivot to be like, 'That thing that you're used to for free, we want you to pay for it now.' There's just no doubt in the world that a small percentage of people are going to do that. And it's a bummer that it has to happen to one of the core browsers. We got to all watch the rise of Arc, and I wouldn't say fall yet because it's probably popular, but it's such a weird story that they're not working out. That was a pretty good success story of take a browser, not a new browser engine, but just to take Chromium and slap it in and do really neat stuff. A lot of people loved it. A lot of people thought it was too much or whatever, but it was a pretty good use case of you can make a product a browser. They never just said you have to pay money to use it which would have been a perfect use case for what you're talking about. We could have seen it happen. And I think they could have nailed it. I think they could have crushed it if they just sold it and kept investing in it.
Brian Kardell: It's a great example though because it's one of those ones that it got popular, it had this really fast growth curve and stuff like that. And if you had tested it, let's say that you had been able to sell even a subscription model that was $10 a year, right? It's just like you get all your updates and everything and it costs you $10 a year or something like that and you sell it to 10 million people which is ... I mean, I think Brave has 60 to 80 million or something like that. So-
Chris Coyier: Wow. Really?
Brian Kardell: Yeah. I mean, the thing that's really tricky about all of this is that the numbers are so big that if you could capture 1% of the web, it's a lot. It's a lot of users.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. Considering the number of web users is now estimated to be roughly equivalent to the total global population of people age 15 to 65 in terms of numbers. So, it's like 5 billion people. So, yeah, 1% is 50 million people, I think, unless I slipped zero and it's essentially 500 million.
Chris Coyier: So, if you had sold a subscription and you said it's $10 a year and you sold it to 10 million people, it's $100 million a year. So, the browser could make $100 million a year. And I mean, it doesn't cost them $100 million a year to make the browser. And there's nothing saying that they have to contribute anything back upstream. So, they-
Brian Kardell: Sure. And there's business models to be found in this world.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, sure.
Chris Coyier: Yeah. But I'm saying they could freeride on Chromium or WebKit or Gecko. They could freeride on it basically. And-
Brian Kardell: And then, is your feeling that that's bad news or that's okay or something? I guess if we're trying to paint a picture, is this good for the web or bad for the web, that would be kind of neutral, right? It's just like, I don't know, I guess it's cool that a business exists that's a browser, but it's certain it's not making the web any better.
Chris Coyier: Well, I think the thing that's not great for the web is that there's no connection to funding the engine. There needs to be something to fund the engine. And there's not a lot of argument to fund an engine. We believe that there's usefulness in diversity of engines. But it's possible we could lose Firefox because of this. And I mean, we're probably not going to lose the one that somebody just bought. But like I say, I could see a scenario where Apple says, 'Well, we could also just use that Chromium thing.' Why should we invest in yet another one that is also, they're the only competitor who only competes in their own yard. You know what I mean? They're good at competing in their own yard, but there's no WebKit for Windows really. There's no WebKit for Android. We have experimental WebKit for Android, but there's not a browser for that.
Eric Meyer: I mean, it could go the other way, I suppose, if Google is forced to stop doing search engine deals. Let's just take it that far. And Mozilla basically can't keep Firefox going. Apple might, instead of saying, 'Well, we're not getting this money anymore, why should we pay for funding our own browser engine,' they might say, 'It's only us and Google and Google doesn't have the homefield advantage they used to. Maybe this is when we go all in.' I mean, also a possibility. Again, I don't know what Apple-
Chris Coyier: I like this. I like this. All right. So, absolute worst-case scenario is that they're forced to sell Chrome. I mean, in my opinion. They're forced to sell it. And whoever buys it sucks and it doesn't do anything and it essentially dies. It doesn't mean Chromium dies, but it is a hit for that world certainly. And Mozilla has failed because of this because they're not getting their money. And Apple decides to call it because they're not getting their money either. And we take this massive torpedo to the web. And essentially all of them dying. And you could imagine an apocalyptic scenario for the web.
Brian Kardell: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Chris Coyier: That would be a disaster, right? Then there's the absolute best thing that could happen, again in my opinion or whatever, that the likely one where the judge says like, 'Oh, you really were a monopoly, you bad company. You need to pick up trash on the highway for a year.' Some slap on the wrist thing and then life goes on as normal. I don't know how the law works and stuff, but it does seem likely to me that there's some outcome here that not a hell of a lot happens. And we look back on this podcast and we're like, 'Gosh, we are really worried for nothing there. Not that much happened at all.' And that life goes on as normal. And then there's these other middle ground ones that seem probably the most likely that are unguessable. Like Eric's picture, that was very interesting. One where, sure, actually maybe what happens is the likely scenario in my mind that Google has to stop writing these checks instantly kills Mozilla, but Apple views themselves as in the boxing ring. Just two companies left and they're like, 'We're going to win this thing.' And it turns out Apple's the one who goes absolutely hog wild on the web and takes over. Who knows? You could see it.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it would be kind of funny. Although of course, if that happens, the European Union is already all up in Apple's business about other stuff. They might just extend it and then we come back in five or 10 years and we're having a similar conversation, except what if the EU forces Apple or whatever?
Chris Coyier: Sure. Well, I put that in the post too because remember, in the EU now, you can see these screens that Apple had to ship. When you launch a browser, there's this interstitial that says, 'Well, which browser do you actually want to be your default browser?' And you have to pick. Isn't that in the realm of possibility that we do something like that? Not for browsers, although that would be fine too, but for search engines.
Eric Meyer: Possibly.
Chris Coyier: It could be the ruling that when you open up a browser, it has to ask you which search engine to use. And that's the resolution for this monopolistic behavior is that you can't have a monopoly because people had to pick. Now, will people just pick Google? Probably. But hey, at least they had a choice.
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Chris Coyier: There are some other proposed remedies that are in there that I think also could really help. So, if the thing that you're concerned about is that it's impossible for Bing to compete with Google because it's a matter of scale and it's a matter of all the search index that Google has built over the years. So, there are things in there that force Google to sell the search index so that you would allow somebody like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia or some other search engines.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. To have just as good a search results as Google does? Exactly.
Chris Coyier: Sure, maybe.
Eric Meyer: I mean, ideally better considering what Google search results have been recently because that's been commented on by a lot of people that their search result quality is actually degraded.
Brian Kardell: Explain to me how this works to begin with. If you're DuckDuckGo right now, I always assumed it was powered by Google behind it anyway. They have their own search index.
Chris Coyier: It's powered by Bing, actually.
Brian Kardell: Oh, Bing. Okay. There you go. I do use Arc and I hit command T and Arc and this little command bar comes up and it helps you get to your other tabs and stuff. But it also does a web search. But as you're typing, if I said like, 'How old is Parker Posey,' or something, it's filling with stuff. It seems like I would just assume stuff like that is hitting some Google API or whatever API but-
Chris Coyier: It is, yeah. It is, yeah.
Eric Meyer: In Arc, it is.
Brian Kardell: Okay.
Chris Coyier: Brave has their own search. Ecosia has their own search.
Eric Meyer: What's the search engine that's no ads but you have to ... It's actually membership-funded. You have to subscribe.
Brian Kardell: Does it start with an O or something?
Chris Coyier: Is that Orion?
Eric Meyer: Maybe there's a couple now. No, I'm blanking on the one that it's called. We're probably going to have to-
Chris Coyier: Is it not Orion?
Brian Kardell: And I wanted to subscribe to that. I think I might've foiled us with the O word, but yeah. It looks good though.
Eric Meyer: Kagi. Kagi is the one I'm thinking of. K-A-G-I.
Brian Kardell: That's what I was thinking of too. Yeah.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it's a paid ad-free search engine. Yeah.
Brian Kardell: But isn't that funny though? Because the funny thing is it's this weird illusion. It's like browsers are free except they're not. They're not free. You pay for them with your attention and your attention is really valuable. I mean, it's valuable to the point where Google can pay Apple $20 billion a year. And that's like-
Chris Coyier: And maybe $25 or whatever it is, that's unbelievable to me.
Brian Kardell: And it leaves Google with huge profits. You know what I mean? They wouldn't do it if it was giving away money. So, based on some of the court records and everything, it looks like they're willing to pay Apple specifically because they think that people with Apple devices have the goods with money and all that. They're willing to pay them 50%. So, we can extrapolate from that that those users are actually earning Google 40 billion. But that goes into why you had asked in your article too about why would somebody do it and why does Google do it? And Google does it because they can spend $4 billion, $5 billion, $10 billion a year. It's still better than the $20 billion that they pay Apple and they get all of the traffic. They don't have to ... They don't pay the deal.
Chris Coyier: Do you think it's as simple as we do it because being the default search engine in our own browser is worth a crap load of money?
Brian Kardell: Is worth a crap load of money, yeah. Is worth a crap load of money. And then there's all these knock-ons that happen when you're also the default because in your search results, we can also have the little thing that's like, 'Oh, hey, and Gmail and Docs and shopping. Shopping is huge. What about Google Cloud services? You want to buy some of those. They're doing their own advertising.'
Chris Coyier: Even though they're so big and all that stuff seems okay to me. It seems like you made a search engine, you made Gmail, you made Google Docs, you made all these things, and they're businesses and they run on the web. To me, it's okay to make a web browser for those things to run on. That's just like fine. Now, how that affects other companies, it doesn't mean that I disagree that there's a monopoly here in some regard, but I think they should be able to have a browser. It's weird that they would be forced not to.
Brian Kardell: I agree with you. I like that Google has a browser. Actually, I do also think that there's truth in some of this stuff and that it would be good to engage more competition. But it's not as simple as one thing. It's many things you have to untangle. But isn't it interesting though that you say like, 'Well, would anybody pay for a browser?' No, because currently they're free and, well, we just established they're not free, but they appear to be free. Even if you bought a browser, you need a search engine and the search engine is still going to have ads. So, this is like when you buy cable and then you still have ads, the cable that you paid for, they get double dip on the thing. But we were just talking about what if you could pay for a search engine and you could just buy and there's no ads? I would do that. I would do that. And I would also use that company's browser. And so, wait, did I just buy a browser? What a weird shell game of making you think, what is the thing that you're paying for and who's paying for it?
Chris Coyier: Yeah, I don't know. It's fascinating.
Brian Kardell: It's fun to think about it.
Chris Coyier: I love this topic.
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I'd buy all the browsers.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, exactly. And part of the reason that we love this topic is that to a certain extent, it's a little bit of crying in the wilderness, but it highlights that the ecosystem that's been built around web browsers is mostly illusion. The fact that browsers are free. Well, they're not as Brian just argued. But to the end user, like you say, I didn't pay anything to download Chrome other than the fees to my internet service provider, whatever. But I'm online. I can download Chrome. I can download Safari. I can download Firefox or Brave or Orion. It turns out Orion is the browser that Kagi does, so we were all right about that. Yeah. And I don't exchange any money for that. I don't have to put in my credit card number or whatever. I pay for it in other ways. But almost nobody sees that, right? Because we think about this stuff and working at Agalia, we are much closer to where the sausage is made. We sort of see this and have had this sense for a while that it's not sustainable over long periods of time. It is not long-term sustainable. Something was going to break. This is how it's breaking or might be breaking. Of course, it depends on what the ruling is. The ruling might not break this. But even if the Department of Justice comes back to the judge and says, 'You know what? We've changed our minds. We don't want these things and these things,' and the judge says, 'Okay, here's how I'm going to rule.' And it doesn't really materially change anything. Maybe the judge says there has to be a search engine choice pop-up and 90% of people are like, 'Google's a verb, so clearly it's the best one. I'm just going to pick that.' And so, nothing really changes. At some point, there's still going to be something that breaks the system. And I think maybe part of the pushback that you got, Chris, for your post is that more people I think are realizing that it's an inherently unhealthy ecosystem and they just want it to change. But I think that when you think through this particular remedy, I think you do end up getting ... I think most people end up getting to where you got, Chris, which is, 'You know what? Forcing Google to just divest itself of Chrome is probably not in the short-term interests and possibly the long-term interests of the web.' It could, like you said, put a torpedo in the side of the browser ecosystem.
Chris Coyier: Yeah, it could be a huge disaster. And an interesting aspect is I don't think they know that. I really don't. I don't think that the DOJ or this judge has any idea that what they're doing could have a really crappy impact on the web, which will affect a lot of people's lives.
Brian Kardell: They weren't hearing us.
Eric Meyer: It will affect everybody on earth if that happens, literally everyone on earth. Even the people who aren't actually users of the web, the web is so entwined in modern civilization that no one would escape the downstream effects of massive change to the web.
Chris Coyier: Yeah, they are actually hearing that message. So, hopefully, it all works out. I mean, I hope that this is like we throw every possible charge at you and we hope that we get some to stick kind of thing. But I agree with you, too, that it's like a circuitous thing to get at what are probably the real problems which is, yeah, it's too hard to unwind, and that's one way you could unwind it is by just saying you can't have a browser. But also, it would have a lot of collateral damage. And the thing that we didn't talk about that you talked about a little bit in your post and maybe mentioned at the very beginning of the show is when you look at W3C and stuff like that, they're just littered with Google people. When you think about all of the DevRel people and people who go give talks and people who produce the CSS podcast, there's so many people writing web.dev.
Brian Kardell: Right.
Chris Coyier: They are doing a lot of the stuff that other people aren't doing. And there's more too. I mean, all of the infrastructure that runs on web platform tests and all these behind-the-scenes things that they sponsor and provide, they are doing in a lot of ways, R&D, the R&D of the web. They are burning money with lots more developers than everybody else. Lots more engineers, lots more DevRel people. But there's a flip side of this that I think people get upset about which is also true and part of the thing we need to unwind which is that does give them inordinate amount of power in practical way.
Brian Kardell: In these circles?
Chris Coyier: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: I was going to ask about this too, because I think that the conspiracy theorists or maybe they're onto something, is that Google does all this work and has all those people and contributes, maybe they wrote the whole Temporal thing from scratch. I'm sure you all did that, but whatever, I don't know who did the work. But a bunch of work, whatever it is, just so they get to hold onto third-party cookies. Could you imagine doing an outsized amount of work so you can get one little API, you can hold onto it and nobody can say nothing because you do 10x the work in other ways? I could just see having that be an opinion like, 'Ooh, those cookies are worth a bunch of money.' And if we do ... Yeah, I said my piece there.
Chris Coyier: I mean, there's definitely a lot of people do a lot of criminology. Imagine that there's this grand plan and maybe there are some people who see the broad brush that way. But no, I mean, what I think is more like, so for example, Google properties, if you have Google Maps, you have Google Shopping, you have Google Sheets, Google Docs, these are things that make money for Google. And so, you want to make them more performance. They're your client and you work on these features. You pay the people. People at Google, they have okay ours, right? And they're like, 'I don't want to say I promise I deliver this but if I don't deliver it, then I don't get my raise. I don't get my bonus.'
Eric Meyer: Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of incentives and they don't always align with the web. I know we have a hard stop. So, Chris, any last words you want to say to your fans and detractors?
Chris Coyier: Well, just huge thanks for talking about this. I understand more because you guys have some interesting perspectives on all this and information I don't have. Brian said the word untangle the whole lot which is very apt because, holy crap, is there a lot to untangle here. I think that any of the three of us have the answers on a product and technology that affects, like Eric said, every person on earth. The implications are huge here. And if people are scared, I get it, you should be scared. This is a big deal. I don't want to see a court decision come through that's not ultra well-considered.
Eric Meyer: Fair enough. All right, where can people find you on the interwebs, Chris? Where can people find you?
Chris Coyier: Well, big fan of the internet. Chriscoyier.net is my personal website and portal to all the other things I do, so start there.
Eric Meyer: Cool.
Chris Coyier: Rock and roll.
Eric Meyer: Awesome.
Brian Kardell: ShopTalk.
Chris Coyier: Yeah, there you go. If you like audio stuff which you obviously do, shoptalkshow.com.
Eric Meyer
Brian Kardell
Chris Coyier